Why I Want The Cards to Lose

I've seen a handful of excellent ball games this year.  The Big Ten has been historically good, and Indiana has not only been good, they've been great to watch.  There is ridiculous parity in the game; and while that usually means a lot of mediocre teams, that's not the case right now.  There are a whole lot of good teams, and there have been a lot of good games.  In particular, I think of the Indiana/Wisconsin/Michigan/Michigan State/Ohio State series was phenomenal, and those games rank up with all the classics I grew up on.  But, the one game that really sticks out for me was the first Louisville/Notre Dame game.  It was the most dramatic game I have seen in years, even if it wasn't close to being the best.

For those of you who were tuned in to the game, you were probably reaching for the remote at just about the same time Louisville started to slack off their legendary attack.  They were walking the ball down the court, they were looking up at the clock, they were careful not to foul.  Fans in the arena were digging out their car keys, putting on their coats, looking down the aisle to see if they had to step over people or if everyone else was leaving too.  Those of us who follow such things (I follow both Louisville and Notre Dame) had more or less taken the outcome for granted when Jack "Luke Harangody Jr." Cooley got tagged for foul number five on a horrible call with about seven minutes left.  All in all, it was a customary denouement for a hard-fought game that was all but over.

When the ridiculously improbable comeback started, no one noticed.  With 45 seconds left and Notre Dame down eight, Jerian Grant hurried down the court, hoisted an uncontested three, and canned it for his first field goal of the night.  No big deal, right?  Too little, too late.  Happens all the time in these situations: team way down, hoisting threes, you're going to see a couple go in.  Then after some laxity on the Card's behalf, Grant flies down the court again, cans another three . . . this one contested, but just barely.  A few seconds later, again he's flying down the court; but after two treys in a row, Louisville has started to pay attention.  He's wrapped up (by Siva? I can't remember), runs off an impromptu pick (less a pick and more an obstacle provided by a teammate who wasn't moving at the same speed as Grant), and deposits a third three.

Now, it was a game.

On the next trip up the floor, down three, the Irish put Louisville's Gorgui Deng on the line.  He missed both foul shots, and ND had the ball back with 16 seconds left.

Everyone knew that Jerian Grant was taking the last shot.  Everyone knew it had to be a three.  All Louisville had to do was guard the three-point line, and make sure Russ Smith was all over Grant with one of the bigs running at him when he came off the inevitable pick.  No way anyone drops FOUR STRAIGHT threes in less than a minute, right?

What happened next were two of the most inexplicable mental mistakes I have seen in a long time out of two top-20 college teams: first, down THREE POINTS with almost no time left, Grant knifes down the right side of the lane for a TWO POINT field goal.  Second, instead of employing the "matador defense" and allowing Grant to get the two unscathed, Louisville chose to closely defend him on the drive, and ended up fouling him!  And not a good hard foul, which would have negated the shot and put him on the line for two free throws (thereby still leaving ND one point short with time for only one very brief possession left on the clock), but a contact-in-the-process-of-defending foul, allowing Grant to get up (AND HIT!) the shot, as well as putting him on the line to attempt THE GAME TYING FREE THROW!  Which, of course, he hit.  After that, there was the inevitable Russ Smith brain fart, and the game went into overtime.

From there, the hilarity continued.  At the start of each overtime, Louisville opened a little breathing space, only to be reeled back in by Notre Dame.  Louisville was able to shift back into Full Chaos Mode, but full chaos mode means the maximization of the random, and the random means some breaks go your way, some breaks go the other way . . . and the breaks were going Notre Dame's way.  In the ridiculous scrums that pass for rebounding in U of L games, the ball started to get batted back toward the ND goal.  Louisville would execute their hellish defense for the majority of the shot clock, only to see a desperation lob get tossed across court to an ND player with a wide open shot (wide open mainly because he got totally lost in the chaos, stood still, and watched the defense run away from him).  And, on Louisville's offensive end, there was Russ Smith.

To understand Louisville, all you need to do is watch Russ Smith.  He's fast, he's chaotic, he has a motor like no one else you will ever see.  He is the ultimate disrupter.  On the defensive end, he's always up in your face, on you so hard you can't shake him.  He's fast enough to play the lanes and knock down passes when he's off the ball, and still recover right up in your face when the ball swings back over.  Offensively, he flies around just as much, hurtling at the basket with or without the ball, without a plan, just always flying around.  His outside shots are like Tourette's, more inexplicable mental tic than rational offensive strategy.  He is a Tasmanian Devil, a perpetual motion machine: and usually, at the end of a game, his psychosis has left his opponent on the floor in a heap, with the scoreboard announcing a triumph precipitated by the sheer havoc he has wreaked.

Rick Pitino loves Russ Smith.  He has a whole team comprised mostly of Russ Smith variations: the same hyper-athletic quickness, the same perpetual motion, the same indomitable motor.  The same dedication to Full Chaos.

A descendant of Nolan Richardson's "40 Minutes of Hell", Full Chaos has little to do with the fundamentals: Full Chaos means Louisville's rebounding proficiency has less to do with blocking out, and more to do with everyone charging the basket every time a shot goes up.  Louisville's defensive proficiency has less to do with rotation and position and more to do with overwhelming pressure (Louisville never runs a full court press just to make the guards work harder; they always press to steal the ball).  Louisville's offense has nothing to do with spacing, position, or shooting: it's simply about the sheer number of times they heave the ball at the basket because they are moving so much faster than the other team, and therefore get more opportunities.  Ultimately, like 40 Minutes of Hell, the Full Chaos mode is about making the other team play your way.

And therein lies my problem with the University of Louisville Cardinals, as currently constituted: "playing their way" means totally disrupting the game of basketball as I love it.  Pitino and The Cardinals are successful to the degree that they can turn the game into shit.

I don't blame The Rick for this approach.  His job is to WIN GAMES, period.  Well, that and graduate the minimum number of players necessary to keep the NCAA off his ass.  And keep his players out of jail . . . all of which he has managed to do.  On top of that, he generally has guys that are committed to him and to each other, and try their best to be reasonable representatives of the University.  Anyway, the true beauty of the Full Chaos approach is that he doesn't really need to have top-notch basketball players, he just has to have top notch athletes, which are much more common these days.  He doesn't have to worry about developing his two's mid-range game, he just needs to get him in better shape than the players he will be facing.  He doesn't have to worry about his five's back-to-the-basket game, he just has to make sure he can be more of a dervish than any other five in the nation.  He doesn't really have to teach them too much of anything: most of the core work for the current iteration of The Cards is done by running stairs.  Of course he always has to stockpile a shooter or two to give his offense a little bit of a wrinkle, and having a decent point guard makes his life a whole lot easier.  But, make no mistake: given the choice between a top-notch point that can't play at his speed (say, Trey Burke) over a warp speed point good for one seriously knuckleheaded play every five times down the court (say, Peyton Siva), warp speed wins ten times out of ten.  Again, I don't blame Pitino for taking this approach . . . I mean, look at the guy's record.  It speaks for itself.

I don't root against The Cards because they are lazy or undeserving; on the contrary, they're one of the hardest working teams in the nation.  I don't root against them because of some sort of negative social code that they subliminally radiate: again, all the guys on the team seem like decent enough folk (although The Rick himself is a bit of a skeez), and rewarding hard work is something that we can all get behind.  I don't even root against all Rick Pitino/U of L teams: the 2005 Cards with Francisco Garcia and Taquan Dean was one of my favorites.  No, it's just this current style of Louisville team: I root against them because they destroy all that is beautiful about the game.


And it's not that I don't like defense: I am a Big Ten/Big East fan, after all.  I was raised on Bobby Knight and Gene Keady.  One of my favorite teams to watch is Wisconsin: Bo Ryan's defensive schemes have a brutal efficiency and logic, and are often as beautiful as they are brutal.  I tend to like free flowing games better, but "free flowing" doesn't mean the same as "no defense".


It just so happens that I love the game of basketball.  I love its motion, I love its flow, I love its strategy.  It is a cliche at this point to compare basketball to jazz, but there you have it: there's improvisation, there's discipline, there's melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, syncopation.  Like jazz, there's a lot of ways to do it, and a lot of ways to do it wrong.  As cavalier as I may be in my attitudes toward music, I am a basketball purist: show me complexity, show me motion, show me shapes and designs that I can get inside and marvel at.  But whatever you do, don't turn my game to shit.

Chris Paul is a beautiful player: he moves into zones, sees the shapes of the court before they even materialize, and gets the ball just where it needs to go.  Steve Nash does the same, with an even more eccentric language than Paul.  Larry Bird and Magic Johnson moved in dimensions that others didn't even see.  But Derrick Rose, good as he may be, is nothing more than a human missile as far as I'm concerned.  Alan Iverson was a cannonball.  Kevin Durant?  Breathtaking.  LeBron James?  A dull bully.  I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I don't care whether my team wins or loses, but I will tell you that one of the five best college basketball games I have ever seen is a game that my team lost.

It is entirely likely that Pitino will someday stumble on just the right point guard, a guy that can play at Full Chaos tempo but actually make plays instead of chaos (I think Indiana's Yogi Ferrell could have been that point guard).  If he does, he'll pick up a few other parts, and maybe build a team that is as beautiful as it is fast.  When that day comes, I'll don the red and black and cheer my lungs out.  Until then, I will smile and raise a glass to toast the Cards victories, but I certainly won't get excited about that team.

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Louisville, of course, ended up losing the epic 5 OT war against Notre Dame.  There were several opportunities to win it, but Louisville never put the Irish away.  Or, rather, Russ Smith never put the Irish away.  I have never seen more appalling guard play by a good team in a crucial situation.  Smith was mind-bogglingly bad at the worst time.  Time freezes when the game is on the line, and that's precisely when just running around doesn't work.  You have to make a play.

Louisville has not lost since that game.  For good measure, they beat Notre Dame twice, both by double digits.  They stormed back against a flawed Syracuse team to win the final Big East tournament, and rolled into the NCAAs as the number one overall seed, a ranking that they deserved as much as two of the other three no. 1's, Kansas and Indiana.  They are the most popular pick to win it all, and it's hard to argue that: at this point, it really looks like they could turn any game they play into a steaming pile of shit.  Just don't expect me to like it.

from The Ethics: the Original Edition

This is the original text from my latest poetry project, The Ethics.  This poem is handwritten over a text of Spinoza's Ethics.  This original is meant to be approached as an object, like a picture or a drawing, and owes a major debt to Tony Woollard's work.  The poem itself is something separate, though inextricably linked to the process that created the object.  The final poem may differ somewhat from what is written in the object, though I don't know for sure.  It is only fair to expect it to take on a life of its own separate of the original text.  As it currently stands, you can see that the poem actually follows the text from the object quite closely.

See the text version here.

from The Ethics

The Ethics[1]

[2]

I can no longer be concerned with god.

If there is a point, it has long since faded

into the nothing of an[3] infinite violation

of boundary logic.  So I, unlike Spinoza,

conjure an ethics sans god. [4]  [5]  [6]

This ethics is a world of vapor,

a world of smoke, of arcane legerdemain

half hidden under a veil,

this ethics is a punch[7] [8] [9] in the head to dark purpose,

a deck of pornographic trading cards,

a blue hope,[10] [11]

that thing you forgot, remembered, forgot

again, then forgot you forgot.[12] [13] [14] [15] [16]

I scratch out an ethics in fine point against type,

a frail bulwark against onrushing words

like waves, words drifting[17] [18] [19] like ashy snow

that never melts, the snow falling

on the living and the dead, burying[20] ciphers

[empty] like[21] acorns forgotten by squirrels,

words torn loose and herded by green capital

into holding pens on vast[22] ranches deep in Texas,

words that accumulate to words

like capital accumulates to capital,[23]

with no regard to anything

beyond accumulation and attraction,[24] [25] [26] [27] [28]

with emptiness at the very core.[29] [30] [31]

It is the mission of this ethics to

1. have no fear of emptiness at the core of words.[32]

It is the mission of this ethics

to kick words into forbidden trajectories

to split them like atoms

to create blinding white light.

It is the mission of this ethics

to liberate words from meaning,

but not meanings.

It is the mission of this ethics

to liberate meaning from capital,

from ranches of privilege and tradition.[33]

I am inadequate for the task,

but I am what is left.[34]

---

[1] for Tony Woollard

[2] CONCERNING GOD – or not

[3] infinite

[4] effect

[5] knowledge

[6] nothing

[7] ignorant

[8] true causes

[9] confusion - think

[10] only truth

[11] external to the intellect

[12] If anyone now ask, by what sign shall he be able to distinguish different substances, let him

[13] show that

[14] the universe

[15] infinite

[16] would be sought in vain

[17] no cause or reason can be given

[18] which destroys

[19] existence

[20] absurd

[21] nature of

[22] God

[23] nothing which is in itself

[24] this is exactly

[25] the weapon

[26] aimed at us

[27] reality recoiled

[28] conclusion that extended substance must be finite, they will in good sooth be acting like a man who asserts that circles have the properties of squares, and, thereby finding himself landed in absurdities, proceeds to deny that circles have any center, from which all lines drawn to circumference are equal

[29] substance could be so divided that its parts

[30] admit of being destroyed

[31] as to leave no vacuum?

[32] God is free cause

[33] Conceive, if possible

[34] idea of God does not naturally follow

from The Vision and Second Coming: William Butler Yeats Mashup by Jerome Rothenberg

At the birth of Christ religious life becomes primary, secular life antithetical - man gives to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.  A primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards transcendent power is dogmatic, leveling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys immanent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical.  The approaching antithetical influx and that particular antithetical dispensation for which the intellectual preparation has begun will reach its complete systematisation at the moment when, as I have already shown, the Great Year comes to its intellectual climax.  Something of what I have said it must be, the myth declares, for it must reverse our era and resume past eras in itself; what else it must be no man can say, for always at the critical moment the Thirteenth Cone, the sphere, the unique intervenes.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. 

 Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

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Commentary to follow.

Greetings From a Schnitzelburg Basement

Hello friends.  February passed without a post, though I just deleted (an almost alarming!) four drafts from my posts queue that I have no intention of finishing.

Most of my short form blogging is done at notes for everything, and I haven't had the attention span for long form blogging lately.  Various factors involved (tl;dr), but suffice to say there has been a flux in production here at the homestead.

Before the end of March I should have a completely spiffy post for y'all.  At this point I am guessing it will either be a postmodernist-tinted look at the novels of Patricia Highsmith, or another goddamn basketball post.  Actually, I can pretty much guarantee you basketball posts over the next few months, but I would really like to finish that Patricia Highsmith one as well.

In the meantime, if you are somewhat new to this here writing ranch, please click on the "Thoreau" tag.  Right now, I'm favoring this over most of what I've done on this blog.

While you're at it, if you are a fan of acoustic Americana noir, I have a project that you may enjoy.  I listened tonight to some Hoosier Pete recordings for the first time in a long time, and I really liked them to a degree that is a bit unusual for me.  You may like them too: you can find them at the Hoosier Pete site at Indiana Musical Family Tree.

And for the noise mavens among you, there's always Black Kaspar.  Fair warning: a new cassette (wherein I connect with my inner Jimmy Page) is coming soon.

That is all for now.  I think I'll post my favorite W. B. Yeats poem here just for the hell of it.

The Trace of Jon Rans, and the Defiance We Owe Him

Jon Rans passed away November 18th, 2012.  Of course, I meant to do this much closer to the event, but when do I ever finish anything in a timely manner?

Before the interwebs, there used to be bulletin boards (at the dawn of the interwebs, they initially referred to online message board sites as bulletin boards).  When I think of bulletin boards, I think specifically of ride board in the student union (pick yr school), with thousands of tattered flyers with tear-off phone numbers, scribbled notes, maps and pins, etc.  Those huge bulletin boards were always a nexus point, an intersection where traces of passages where left, and to where trace vortices pointed to all different points of the compass & forward and backward in time.  Those bulletin boards were coded portals to elsewhere, even if your elsewhere was as prosaic as a ride home for the break.

Lately, the bookshelf stereo in my kitchen has functioned like one of those bulletin board nexus points.  I spend a fair amount of time in my kitchen at home, and the stereo is always booming away as I work.  Stacks of CDs and cassettes have sprouted up around it, always in constant rotation, always spilling all over the place.  In early March of 2010, downloaded copies of 70's Alex Chilton albums burned to CD made it to the stack of burned CDs by the stereo, along with my cassette of an '84 show he did in Bloomington.  Then, in the midst of my Chilton binge, I received news that Chilton had died.  I got a little chill, like someone walked over my own grave . . . those CDs, that tape, became the tattered trace of someone moving on.

In December of 2010, Don Vliet, a.k.a Captain Beefheart, passed away.  Of course there was a Beefheart CD in the player when I heard, but I always have Beefheart in rotation, so I didn't make the connection there.

Last April, Paul's Boutique and a handful of Beastie Boys singles from the Check Your Head era found their way into the cassette stacks for the first time in years; and (you guessed it) Adam Yauch passed about a week later.

This past November, while doing something resembling deep cleaning on the kitchen (really all that means is that I did the windows), Latent Chaos tapes showed up in the stacks.  And then, I found out about the death of Jon Rans.

Another trace left on the board.

In a related note, Dan Willems has expressly forbid me from playing Sick City Four in the kitchen anymore.

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We are always so quick to name ourselves, sometimes more out of a sense of preservation than anything else.  We want to identify with a group, we want the protection of a clique.  So people ask us: what are you?  And we always seem to have an answer.

I don't know how Jon answered that question, but he could have answered it many ways.  He owned a record store (Repeat Performance) and co-owned a club (along with Jeff Weiss, the No Bar and Grill) that was the center of a small but very vital Muncie scene in the 80's.  He was a booker and a promoter.  He was a drummer for garage revivalists The Mystic Groovies and Hoosier avant krautrock noise pioneers Latent Chaos.  He played drums for anyone around who needed a drummer.  He made money restoring and writing about pottery.  He was a father, husband, and probably many other things in a private live I never accessed.  He was so many different things . . . if I had to guess, his answer to the question was "Whatever the fuck I want to be", because that pretty much sums it up.

I met Jon Rans through Tony Woollard.  Tony and I were both from the Muncie area (Anderson for me, New Castle for Tony), but the Muncie scene hadn't started to bubble up when I left Anderson in '79.  Tony and I were in Bloomington and in a band together in '86, and I met Jon when we went up to play the No Bar.

The No Bar was home for a bunch of artistic misfits, and the personality of the place was largely Jon Rans's personality: a sort of base-level, no-shit attitude about doing something to escape the gray oppression of the Midwestern American landscape.  They weren't a pretentious bunch, but neither did they make the mistake of avoiding anything for fear of being called pretentious.  Eccentricity was not a lifestyle choice, but rather a response to a situation, and it was never held against anybody.  They took you as you were, not as they thought you should be.  If you were ever at the No Bar and saw (what you considered to be) an uncool or bullshit band/act up on the stage, you best keep it to yourself, because the first snide comment you dared utter, about five No Bar regulars would turn on you in unison and shout you down: "Well, at least they're up there fucking doing something.  What's your excuse?"  That was the voice of Jon Rans, no matter who was mouthing the words.  That was the ethos of the place: do something.  Take control.  Break through the oppression of the normal.  And that, too, is the legacy of Jon Rans.

There are a lot of people who figure into a musician's deal: there are the artists you idolize up from afar, the musicians you get to know and admire up close.  There are the scene masters, the people who create an atmosphere to do your thing.  There is the audience (who are treated not as "fans", but as a peer group, again per the No Bar ethos), the people around to give you feedback, the people who test your ideas.  There are the people who help you get your deal to a larger world, either by booking/managing your band or releasing your music to the world at large.  Jon Rans (again, along with Jeff Weiss) was all of these things to me.  I started out as a Latent Chaos fan when those avant-weirdos seemed distant to me, I stayed a Latent Chaos fan when I stood in an audience with a handful of people mere feet away from them.  I got to go onstage with them at the No Bar to lay down sheets of guitar noise for an unruly version of "Golden Moments", a memory I find touching to this day.  And beyond all that, there were the (all too rare!) times when Tony and I showed up at the shop, or hung out with him at Second Story at a Mystic Groovies gig, just to shoot the shit.

I'm not going to pretend that I knew Jon well, because I didn't.  That perhaps makes it all the more remarkable that I always felt like I did know him well whenever I was around him.  He was that type of guy.

I'm not going to be the one that tells you stories about Jon being in a better place, or Jon looking down beatifically upon those of us left behind.  I'm not going to tell you that Jon is still with us like some ethereal phantom that wafts in and out of the physical world.  I don't have time for such fairy tales.  But before he gets lost in the cultural detritus, before he descends into the scrap heap of history, I will tell you that he lives.  He lives in those who bought into his ethos, he lives for those who modeled parts of their lives around his example.  He lives for those of us left who refuse to knuckle under to the narratives presented to us for our lives, who continue to fly in the face of whatever odds there are to do what it is we do, to do SOMETHING.  Jon Rans lives through me, and everyone else who he touched . . . and he will continue to live at least until they pry my guitar from my cold, dead hands.  It is that defiance, in the end, that I feel I owe Jon.

Untitled

Black as - what they say, ink? -
late.  I take a little detour
windows down, top open,
roll up on The Captain's Locker,
pay too much for booze after two a.m.

I miss the turn the first time;
it's been awhile.
I'm surprised at all the cars,
then remember I was always surprised
  by all the cars,
  a parking lot jammed and stretched back
  winding along Hillside, a little up and down
for its twist.

I have a bottle beside me on the seat.
A small one.  We're older now.
I caught your porch out of the corner
    of my eye
I had to turn around butt first
in the last drive and cruise it again.
You weren't out there.  Of course you weren't.
You don't smoke anymore.