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I never understood all those metaphors about faces melting and brains collapsing until now.

Oh, and CHECK OUT THIS POST FROM EARLIER!

Racial Semiotics Pt. 24116

Today, the all-seeing eye of Bethlehem Shoals put this gem "on blast" (to use a phrase from the younger generation) over at The Baseline. Because this moment is vintage FD "racial semiotics," it requires a full reprinting here, and a close reading:

Wizards swingman Mike Miller wore James' Nike shoes to practice and was told by teammate DeShawn Stevenson, "We don't wear these around here."

James said he didn't care. "Mike is a good friend of mine," he said. "He named his son after my best friend, Maverick (Carter). We have a good history."

James said Miller should lace up his sneakers, though. "For an unathletic white guy, these are the best shoes to wear," James said.

A few things of note:

(1) Mike Miller and LeBron James are very good friends. This is strange. Hardly as strange as, say, the Tyronn Lue-Kevin Garnett bond of brothers, but it is strange in a "how the f did they meet in the first place" way (Team USA, presumably). This also leads one to wonder the mechanism by which a friendship gave birth Miller's famous profession (via Twitter) of a man-crush on LeBron back in May.

(2) Mike Miller named his child after his friend's best friend/business manager, which is equally strange. This gesture suggests one of three possible types of intended closeness (a) a respectful distance--like, "Yo dawg don't worry, I'm not gonna name my son 'LeBron Miller,' but I will name him Maverick Miller," (b) sniveling brown-noser status, as in, "Hey LeBron, guess what cool I thing *I* did." (c) stalker-level fatal attraction obsessional closeness, as in, "If it was a girl, we were going to name it Gloria."

(3) Typically LeBron is not humorous. Here he deadpans a perfect "white people drive like this" joke, and just prior makes a crack about the Braylon Edwards situation, stating, "You guys haven't asked me before about any other trades in the NFL."

(4) LeBron's shoes are ugly as sin, and wearing someone else's shoes (EXCEPT JORDANS) is almost as bad as Iverson (or was it Sheed) wearing another team's throwback to the game, in the pre-dress-code days. Who else wears these in the NBA?

(5) Mike Miller is getting twice sonned here, once by DeShawn Stevenson for laying down the law, and once by Bron for seemingly giving Miller "permission" to wear the shoes.
























(6) An MJ moment? Brown Recluse, Esq. wondered whether this is LeBron's take on MJ's famous, "Republicans buy shoes, too" aphorism, given that, in the Recluse's words, "most Republicans tend to be unathletic white people" (No Schwarzenego).

(7) STEREOTYPES ARE FUNNY. Even though LeBron's air-tight personal PR game slipped, in this instance, we like him all the more for it. This comment--small as it is--redeems something I've always loved about the NBA in particular (see John Kruk's "Lady, I'm not an athlete..." for the counter)--that athletic guys beat nonathletic guys in everything including cool points (no racial subtext), and they can joke about it and be technically racist but in a non-offensive way, and we chortle back and then a moment like this lights up the internet like fireworks on Guy Fawkes day.

BONUS SHOALS ACTION: An open letter to Ron Artest

A Significant Bullet

When we found out that Elton Brand produced Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, it seemed like an amazing convergence of basketball and one of the most influential figures for this site. Then it turned out the relationship was pretty basic -- at a Q&A I went to almost two years ago, Herzog said he knew little about Brand's athletic career, met him through a mutual business associate, and found him to be an all-together pleasant individual. (The major revelation of the story was that said associate is a 300-lb ex-truck driver/nightclub owner.) An interesting moment, to be sure, but not a mind-breaking collision of worlds.

But now there's this, from a recent interview with Herzog in Vice:

La Soufrière is a good example of one of your many films where athleticism, or at least enduring very harsh and inhospitable conditions, was essential to the making of it. Are you worried about aging to the point where taking these types of risks and putting your body through these intense experiences are no longer possible?
No, I don’t really care about that. The connection between athleticism and cinema is in part, of course, metaphoric. It’s about the understanding of movement in space. That’s why I admire NBA players so much—how they move and how they understand space is just phenomenal. Besides, it is a statistical fact that a good amount of filmmakers have been quite athletic people. You don’t see that among painters or among musicians. I have never met a composer who was an athlete.

Surely a film about Ron-Ron bringing Asian pop music to the the ends of the world cannot be far off.

BONUS QUOTATION! -- From the press kit for Herzog's new film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: "I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers."

Playing With House Pancakes

You want to know why I didn't flinch when Shaqobronix, or whatever it's called, came to pass? Why I was lukewarm on the Celtics, and to this day think my premonition was right? It's because this is what a real meeting of the minds should feel like.

Let's stop momentarily and honor Trevor Ariza, who will have a bright career elsewhere, starting with Houston, where he will either make okay to like Shane Battier, displace him the way we thought James White might do Bowen, or both. I know how important he was to that championship run. But that's in the past. They got the ring; these things are filled with singularities, contingencies, and rarely start-to-finish mandates. He was part of one crazy summer, and now instead, Ron Artest will be a Laker.

What makes Artest such a magical beast is that he's exactly the opposite of a championship. That place in history was a flux that ends in certainty. Artest is forever bold statements and stands, all adding up to bouquet of question marks. He can do nothing to surprise is, partly due to our numbness, but also because of how damn earnest he is about everything. It's a testament to Ron Ron that he can fall back on the force of his spoken and implicit convictions, no matter how ever-shifting and contradictory they may be. Artest will always have, for lack of a better word, his realness. Not his authenticity—he's not the only athlete from the projects who's seen shit—but the ability to make us watch not out of horror or honor, but from a place of love.

Like it or not, there is something admirable about Artest. Otherwise, he'd be a garden-variety sociopath. He's no longer a symbol of instability or risk, but of the enduring quality that could redeem such a blood-blender of a career: the fact that, at the time, he sure did mean it.



You might also say he's the opposite of Kobe Bryant, who by the least charitable reading, is the form of conviction without any of its substance. That would of course be totally wrong and unfair (though I expect to hear it echoed in the comments section), and yet it gets at something of Kobe's, well, dullness. Artest is complicated in the literal sense, of things fucking each other up and getting in each other's way. Kobe's complicated like a watch or schematic, and it's only us on the outside who don't see the internal logic. Ron Artest is inconvenienced by logic, Kobe redeemed by it. That's partly why you never hear "why doesn't Ron Artest win a championship?" It just doesn't seem right to bring him into the world of criteria. He has one of those careers that, when it's over, we'll all know whether it left a mark or not.

That's why it's so perfectly glib, and hilarious, that he's being attached to a team looking for a second championship. I caught some criticism for suggesting that, even if the Shaq-jection was successful, LeBron would only have one ring. I know that city and franchise can't like that, and noted as much, but James needs to be thinking dynasty. It's in his nature, the scope of what he does in the sport. Kobe, on the other hand, needed that single Shaq-less ring. Right, there's the three-peat, and the dynasty he got to help author. This last one, though, was all about the technicality. Ironic as all get-out, then, that this kind of thinking barely enters Artest's mind, or those who would judge him. Sometimes you wonder if he even thinks in terms of seasons, or even final scores. Each nanosecond is a war.

Ron Artest doesn't need a ring. Kobe doesn't anymore, either. There's zero pathos or desperation to this, not even with Lamar Odom presumably back on board (more on that in a second). I'm not saying the Lakers won't have desire, just that there won't be pressure beyond the pressure to play basketball. LA is great at disappearing; I think that having no weight on their shoulders will make for less, not more, of that. Artest, paradoxical as this may sound, will also only heighten this new outlook.

To close out this journey to the heavens and back again, the reason I am bouncing off the walls tonight is because of the Artest/Odom reunion. I know people have a problem with Knicks exceptionalism, and maybe even New York exceptionalism. But fuck it: I am sick of Mark Jackson having a monopoly on the New York Basketball brand. How long has it been since we heard any other announcer describe a player as NY, except in passing? Do not so quickly forget what our Attorney General said at his Senate confirmation hearings! Not bullshit street ball, these two; they're the stuff lore is made of. Artest is all grit and aggression, Odom beauty and otherworldliness. Sometimes I don't know who between them has more anguish in their game; they probably share a sack. However, as much as it will sicken some to hear this, seeing the two of them on one team is, in a sense, a triumph for whatever it is that city means to the sport.

It may be Los Angeles hanging a banner in a year, but if you want to talk style and stories, you couldn't make a team more New York if you wanted to. Just from these two.

If You Don't Look Good, I Don't Look Good

This morning, my distinguished colleague twitted the following about everyone's favorite char-broiled NBA lightning rod, and sub-rosa racial interloper:

lingering thought-did kobe really say "i'm an 80s baby" when asked about the artest foul? what type of bs cred is he trying to buy? (and, my standard qualification: i still LOVE kobe...it's just...what a nerd)

Now, without taking anything away from Dr. LIC's intuition—yes, this sounded contrived, and almost made you think that Kobe had planned out a semi-youthful, semi-traditionalist way of framing the situation in advance. But whatever persistent reason you may have settled on for mocking Bryant (his fake-ness, his cultural uncomfortable-ness, his personality, his self-consciousness), we're all assuming that Kobe doesn't understand where Jay-Z stands these days. It's entirely conceivable that Bryant knows that, these days, Jay is pop culture detritus, not the lingua franca of street cred. The remark was fun, flippant, and knowing, an admittedly nerdy way of evoking Jay-Z as both foundational and cliched. Being goofy with hip-hop is dangerous territory, especially for Bryant, but does the alternative—that he cluelessly tried to channel the streetz and fell flat—is to give the guy way too little credit. The only thing worse than caricaturing players is caricaturing ourselves as fans.

This feeds into what might be the most compelling mano y mano rivalry of the playoffs. No, it's not Kobe/Bron; that 1 point/minute average for James has him in a stratosphere all his own for now, especially given how easy it's looked for him. It's this Kobe/Ron Ron binary that's emerged not so much on the court (all elbows aside), but in the imagination of the public. If Bryant's slammed for tip-toeing around hip-hop, Artest is lionized as a man who walks with a cloud of Mobb Deep samples over his head whether or not he ever explicitly makes the connection. If he did an entire post-game interview with Kool G Rap quotes, bloggers would faint from glee. Never mind for a second that if you want to get aesthetic about it, Artest's hip-hop analogue is M.O.P., while Kobe can tap into a far more substantial lineage of self-serious, style-laden masters. Or that Artest is going out of his way to repaint himself as a tough player, not a hood one, going so far as to suggest that there's no essential connection between the two.

And then you have Artest faintly conspired against by the league, and Kobe riding a wave of whispers about a rigged Lakers/Cavs Finals. Not to say this has turned into a study in racial or cultural contrasts—or that it should be either—but once again, Kobe's being cast in, pardon my pun, a black/white situation. Maybe Kobe isn't as "real" as Artest, but is Artest a player driven solely by what he learned from Kool G Rap fantasies? Isn't Artest way more Bad Boys than Kobe? If all this boils down to is "Artest saw friends die on the basketball court and Kobe grew up rich," then we might as well ignore everything they've accomplished, and asserted, as professional athletes—and admittedly convoluted adults.

Do that, then you can start arguing about who belongs to hip-hop, or who hip-hop belongs to, in the NBA.

Can He Get a Witness?

Right before the regular season ends, FreeDarko pays cloth-y tribute to Kevin Durant's mammoth sophomore campaign . . . and the relative obscurity he's toiled in. Maybe if we move enough of these, he'll get on national television for 2009-10.

Some other store news: Based on popular demand, we've done up limited prints of a few more portraits from the book: Kevin Garnett, Lamar Odom, Ron Artest, and Joe Johnson. We're offering two special deals with these: if you buy two, you get a third free. Or, for those with an excess of wall space or love for the NBA, there's the option of all nine portrait prints for $250.

Be sure to weigh in on the latest version of the Z-graph, and tune in Thursday for another episode of our brand news joint venture podcast. I feel like a fucking octopus right about now.