NBAmerica

I love basketball. I’m scared of the NBA.

During David Stern’s tenure as Commissioner, the NBA has made an overt play to take the place baseball once held in America’s culture. No other league has worked so hard on its political personhood, and the NBA is methodically plotting an image that Americans can see and adopt as an image of their national values.

The NBA represents itself as a political force. It prolifically advertises its NBA Cares program, with commercial spots showing NBA stars distributing gifts at Christmas, visiting classrooms, working hard for literacy, and getting their hands dirty in community building. Wherever a politician is, an NBA player should be there too: at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new health clinic, at a disaster relief charity fundraiser, at the inauguration of a handicapped athletic league . . . .

No other league has been so successful in allying itself with disparate, unrelated sectors of mass entertainment. For at least the past three years, the NBA playoffs have ruthlessly Mengeled themselves into the genetic code of summer blockbuster atrocities. This year, Superman (I suppose the jury’s out on this one); last year, Fantastic Four (remember that one, folks!); the year before that, the Incredible Hulk (Aarrrgghhh!). I don’t recall if a similar alliance against the boundaries of form and taste was waged prior to that.

But the Blob of the NBA image strives to be yet more amorphous. To shed vestigial integrity. Only by losing definition can it fuse itself with more advertising opportunities. This year, the anthem of the NBA playoffs was a song by Tom Petty (well, what else says basketball like Tom Petty?) Rather than use production (I’m talking tv production, image production) to concentrate its identity and power by collaborating with rap or hard rock music, thereby giving basketball fans what they actually like, the NBA seeks out more cross-overs than a schizophrenic transvestite. The thinking is that the NBA appeals to some, oh, zero Tom Petty Fans, so by corralling Mr. Petty, they will inevitably snag the less astute of his usually unwitting audience, adding to the heaping, asymmetric storehouse of NBA consumers.

Stern will abide no boundaries. No commissioner has exerted himself so much to make his sport international. The NBA insists on appealing to EVERYONE, from Canada to China. Now, a large fraction of pre-season games occur internationally, and the NBA spends babel-like towers of money on international advertising and television contract negotiations. And again, the All-American businessman Stern has succeeded.

There seems to be no stopping Him, or It. There is a sickening stink of putrefaction that follows the greedy. A mouth half full, but unable to chew because it is always open to receive more – and then a ravenous body that is all belly, like a gulper eel.

The end result is that the NBA has a little something for everybody, and satisfies nobody. The losers are the die-hard basketball fans. They are the only who are refused even a crumb of production. Why would the NBA give anything to those who already like basketball? That’s the one segment of its viewer base it can spare its siren song – they’re gonna tune in anyway.

That’s what makes me angry (oohh, I’m so angry!). I love basketball. But instead of seeing a basketball game, I see a circus, a jumble of blues, rock and dance music, stunts, movie tie-ins, kids in wheelchairs, sequined cheerleaders, and commentators trolled from the very center of American taste. It’s all a scattering, diluting of the supposed essence of the NBA: basketball.

But this isn’t what is truly pernicious. The NBA has gone further and deeper. In its paranoid protection of its All-American For Everyone image, it has imposed more rules than a blind kindergarten teacher. Competitive physical behavior is outlawed, and the athletes are humiliated into being NICE. A good hard foul will result in suspension and a fine (Stackhouse’s foul on Shaq in Game 4 of the NBA finals is just one prominent example). Banging under the boards is more difficult to pull-off than heterosexual sex in prison: a player virtually has to let the ball fall the floor and wait for the ref to determine what player should be given the courtesy of the rebound. Real defense is a distant memory, something passed on in the African-American oral tradition. NBA players must be as obedient, as unobjectionable, and as bland on the court as they are in their NBA: Read to Achieve commercials. This is seriously dangerous -- the NBA is striking at identity, and inasmuch as athletes are role models and kinda gods (and they kinda are), it squeezes that glowing myth-blood-juice out of Americans’ psyche-brain-souls. Tenderizing kids for the hopper. OBEY.

The NBA is the most mediated of the four major sports. The referees play a larger role than the players, and determine, I am now convinced, the majority of close games. Can the post player back in? Can a defense go for blocks? Can an offensive player charge to the hoop where there will be contact? An NBA ref can determine whether a talented aggressive (non jump-shooting) player will score 15 or 35 points, without violating the rulebook.

As a result of the symphony of whistles, players have stopped trying to compete with one another each other directly (with immediacy), which is the essence of sport. Rather, they act through the refs. It is more common to see a defender rush to a “spot” and stop moving his feet, thereby establishing position and drawing a charge, than it is to see a defender try to actually stop the attacker. Likewise, offensive players work as hard to draw fouls as they do to score. The game is no longer a game of bodies, but of rules, and the players employ the rules and refs as a technology that mediates all their interaction. It resembles a bureaucracy more than a sport. Submissions, suits, appeals, pleas, petitions. . . all at the mercy of the Kafkaesque refs, the powers that be. The old white men.

I won’t even mention other well-publicized moves by the league to curb their players’ individuality, like the dress code and the forthcoming ban on tights. All players must comply: they are cogs in the machine, and are expendable. Just like you. And remember, the NBA represents America, or all that’s good in America. Remember that commercial of Dikembe Mutombo distributing clothes and medicine in Zaire you just saw?

No, there’s no doubt. Stern has won. NBA basketball is America’s Game.

The value of mystery

Jordan Davis has brought up the value of a poet's persona-aura. He is originally responding to this post. And follows by dissenting with the idea that:

poets can't risk appearing... less than exceptional.

He goes on to say:

I think about this a lot, as someone who gives not a single crumble of manure about posting every last scribble. In the near term, this is certainly reducing the aura of mystery about my work. That's fine; I hate the aura of mystery. The little canon of books I go back and back and back to: I am trying to break down their secrets.

and then:

Serious value. (Meaning as value.)

My protestant prejudice: Value created through mystery is spurious.

Corollary for poets: The value or meaning created by cultivating an aura of mystery is not lasting, does not generally obtain to the poet or the poetry -- it devolves to the meaning-seeking activity. (A trader eating a ham sandwich calls out "Yeats!")

There's not enough mercury in my veins to steal Mr. Davis' thunder, but as his blog doesn't accommodate comments, I would like to invite a conversation here.

And Jordan, if you would like to expatiate on your notes here, please do.

A few things I'd like to bring up are:

"Is poetry fiction or non-fiction? to what degree are poems the extension of the poet, and where, between fictional persona and historical person, does that leave the poet and his or her Voice?" (let's speak under the assumption we all know that historcial persons are themselves fictions, etc. What is important here is the way we/other people incorporate these various fictions into mindscapes (which is itelf an interesting subject i.e. does a historical "it happened and so can happen again" fiction provide a stronger role model than a fiction fiction, like an X-man? or does the mythological quality of an X-man actually exert a stronger influence on a person?) (I'm going parenthesis crazy - must slow down)

What role does mystery play in the creation of a poet's aura? What other lights compose it?


These questions seem to lead to literature's possibilities. The persona attending a Blake poem charges that poem with the life the imagination bestows on what one thinks of as history, i.e. not merely a pretty rhyme, but, to appropriate Whalen, the graph of a genius moving: a historical event, worthy of not only critical but scientific/psychological study. In short, poems can be more than literature, they can be historical documents --if their authors are worthy of history.

The persona can also be distracting.

If I freestyle a list poets who come to my mind as having a demiurgic presence in the pantheon of my plentitudinist imagination I get: Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Johnson, Catullus, Sappho, Dickinson, Poe, Pound, Dali.

Looking at this stream, I don't necessarily see my favorite poets. I see poets who have a voice so strong it maintains a kind of eternal theater (Whitman, Catullus, Mayakovsky) or poets whose craft/intelligence astounds me as almost super-human (Shakespeare, Johnson, Pound) or poets with flagrant biographies (Rimbaud, Baudelaire) or some combination (though many cited are also combos).

Mystery plays a large part in all of it. A part of a poet's power (over me) comes from this feeling that they possess some secret. This secret gives me something to live for/life after. It is a secret which promises.

These too are only notes. But as with Jordan, this subject is very important to me. I would appreciate thoughts.

Armantrout, Browne, Welish

The Belladonna Season Finale last night showed my tired two eyes two things.

First, a conventional reading (introductions, a quietly seated audience, non-theatrical performances etc) is still a decent event when the poets are genial intellects and practiced craftsmen. Here, and especially in the case of Rae Armantrout, the poems performed. The readers simply knew the work well enough to stay out of its way. Perhaps this is the ideal manner to out-experience pure poetry (poetry in the substrate as poetry, as Kocik would have it; page poetry, as Thurston puts it).

A problem arises in some of what is called experimental poetry, when the writer imaginatively integrates experimental elements (a non-language performance)into the text, and fails to embody those elements when the mic turns on.

Too often, a poet imagines his language doing things which it doesn't do, and is an experimental poet who, sadly, doesn't know it. Such a failed writer, however, can redeem the work by performing what isn't there on the page. In such a way, may even learn to translate what is missing into words, if desired.

Others don't know how to get out of the way of their poems (which can mean not shouting when the poems want to shout, etc). Whether clumsiness comes from timidity or from nescience is an important question. If timidity, the poet is not doing the work justice. If nescience, the poem was either composed in a fit of indecripherable inspiration, or, more likely, composed dishonestly.


Second, the fierce emotionality of the intellect. Marjorie Welish's reading of her non-confessional, non-narrative, impersonal, and very intellectual poetry stirred my soul. Armantrout's as well. Both of the very cerebral poets inflamed my emotions more than Laynie Browne and her more metaphorical, imagistic, voice-heavy poetry, which, I should add, was often delightful.

Browne's imagination seemed more whimsical than rigorous, and more romantic. Certainly more kin to my earliest notions of poetry. Her calm grace of voice and movement (as though she may possess some secret) reflected the poems: leisurely observation (oft of seashore and sea) that tends to birth fancy. Sweet melancholy, and a love of light. I remember one passage about the colorless ocean reflecting the sky, inside the nave of a cathedral a body of light, but she is in a dim hallway, painting, where light floods the canvas.

I enjoyed the reading too much to take good notes.

Thurston Moore vs. Jewel

Thurston Moore

Last night, Thurston Moore (scroll down a bit in the link) hosted a reading at the Poetry Project’s Parish Hall to promote his stapled zine Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal. Readers included rock writer Byron Coley, Christina Carter, poet Charles Plymell, Mr. Moore himself, musician Alissa Ambrosia, and Richard Hell. I was in attendance.

I can’t summon the energies to critique poetry of those who make no great pretensions to contribute to poetry through their own writings. This event (to promote a magazine) rather contributed to poetry by sharing the mythology which has grown up around the semi-legendary readers with the contemporary poets, whose mythological horns are stubbs at best.

Mr. Moore has long been a friend to the Project, and is still enthusiastic about this friendship. As his introduction and his own poetry made clear, he continues to feel the intoxication that overcomes many young poets when they first pick up editions of the Beats, or histories of the St. Marks scene in the late 60’s and early 70’s. And he breathes his inspiration into a new generation (for once on a Wednesday night, the crowd was young). He told stories of writing a letter to Richard Hell on a brown paper lunch bag in the school cafeteria, of a romantic drive into the Lower East Side from his family’s home in Connecticut, of getting lost then spotting Joey Ramone walking on the sidewalk, asking him for directions to C.B.G.B.’s, and, when he said “follow me,” of driving at 4 mph behind him.

Moore’s own poetry was more beat than the Beats. His first piece, which whether lineated or not came out as prose, was written in present tense, and spoke of how he can’t afford a prostitute on Bleeker Street. One can only guess at Mr. Moore’s financial situation, but is left doubting the synchrony between his words and his present bankbook.

Many poems listed images of penury and bohemian living, written in an uneven staccato, like a drunken Ango-Saxon sans caesura. I copied some lines down at random: “dripping building/the game-washed hand/the dad will pull through/ . . .heavy men piss with splashing oneness/ . . .shattered normalcy/come on sunship/ . . .sumptuous clerk/new mother. Though written with little overt reference to the past, this is poetry hankering after a lost era.

Much more interesting would have been poetry about his fame and wealth. For how many poets get to sing about their fans, glossy limos? for that we resort to the circumscribed expression of rappers. Not only would such poetic exploration have been interesting, it would have been eminently useful.

The artists to whom he pays homage did not live for the sake of indigence, but for the sake of odyssey.

As many have observed, a way to write a good story is to begin by cutting the hero free through whatever device: a family stipend to leisurely study the bond business for a summer in East Egg; a week to float in an elite Japanese hotel while shooting a commercial; a virtually unlimited government budget with no supervisory strings attached to solve a murder in a peaceful town in the Pacific Northwest, and so on.

The scene around the St. Marks Church in the good ol’ days has turned into a story, or many stories. The artists’ penurious way of life was their method of cutting free from those diurnal constraints which make for repetition and little narrative romance (I was going to say narrative potential, but Beckett’s ghost held me).

At present, their method seems exhausted, at least in New York. It is no longer economically possible, and the hyper-awareness of what was makes emulation psychically problematic, as it feels more like imitation than invention. And though one may feel liberty even while following footsteps of contemporaries, the footsteps of generations past are too deep to step in and out of with agility.

Mr. Moore, has, through his own genius, found another way to cut free. If his poetry were as generous in revealing the ways to his freedom as his heroes’ poetry was in revealing theirs, the listeners might be richly rewarded.

Richard Hell

Richard Hell shares Mr. Moore’s passion for the New York that was in the 60’s and 70’s. Unlike his fellow poet/musician, Mr. Hell was not then coming of age, but was very much of the age, maturing with it -- one would think he’d be more prone to nostalgia than romanticizing. Yet I detect no sentimentality in the man. Artists who become myths are themselves mythologizing personalities. Myth is not nostalgia. Hell and Moore are both in love with their destinies, destinies which they trace through the lifelines of those whom they choose as heroes. They possess a strong imagination and interpret history myth logically, imbuing their own lives with a meaning that runs through it and courses through the weavings which bind all lives.

Mr. Hell has long practiced as a poet and editor, and is no less a friend to the Poetry Project than Mr. Moore. But other than one collaboration with David Shapiro, he did not read poems, but an essay instead. The essay, written for a catalogue of an art show whose theme was sadness (Hell quipped about the unfortunate condition wherein curators need themes), was more an anthology of quotes and thoughts about sadness. Thinking of an anthology as an arrangement of flowers, he chose very beautiful flowers, but lacked the harmonizing principle to give the arrangement unity. But he was so humble (“Lately, I’m trying to be an intellectual. I’m working under the old idea that if you pretend to be something long enough, you can become it. So I wrote this essay. It really is intellectual, actually”) and so boyishly charming with his distinctive voice that sounds like a little kid with a fortuitous speech impediment, that any faults were easily forgiven. Above all, he demonstrated that an essay could be recited, and enjoyed; I for one was uncertain it was possible.

A brief 'festo

I do not read critical writing much differently than I read journalism, advertising, fiction, or anything else.

I do not stake claims that one type of writing is more truthful than another type.

In fact, I tend to find those forms of writing which claim to be most truthful, such as newspaper writing, to be the least accurate representation of any experience I know.

Whether the methodology of newspaper writing minimizes subjectivity, or merely dissembles it, is less interesting to me than the epistemology of journalism.

Simply stated, a newspaper, which aims to convey unbiased truth, proposes an absolute reality,=perhaps composed by the coalesced reportings of an infinity of perspectives. As an infinity of reporters is neither an economic nor a physical possibility, journalism strives for the simulation of infinity by zero. The non-reporter is everywhere and nowhere (like the infinite God of Spinoza) and understands people as names, places as names, and time as numbers. The non-reporter exists in a perfectly objective world which consists of nouns and strives for the ideal world composed purely by proper nouns. The adjective is abomination. The adjective-as-used is a tag (like a "terrible" wildfire, or "gruesome" violence) in a classification system that is assumed to be universal: the hypothetical infinity of perspectives concur.

I'm not qualified to trace this culmination of philosophy-in-reporting to its origins, which I imagine to be pre-Aristotelian. Even a layman as myself can see the, dare I say palimpsest? of empirical science's development within any newspaper article.

(I am, by the way, curious for students of philosophy to illuminate this subject for me: I'm really ignorant of this history.)

I am not no-one, despite my pretensions. I worship Omniform and Protomorph. But, no matter how often I shapeshift, no matter how I exert my negative capability, I don't manage pure protean being.

What gives my intelligence form is emotion.

It is emotion that provokes my questions. And questions are the test of my intelligence.

If all traditional criticism is founded on comparison and analysis, my memory is deficient to excel in the former, and my linguistic skills fail me in perfecting the latter.

I'm left, alas, with emotion. And a bit of imagination.

Whatever reality comes to me is transformed by imagination and emotion into my experience. I can't shut them off these faculties more than I can selectively shut down my nervous system, so I can't achieve objectivity.

When one reads or writes of an experience, even in a critical way, it might be worthwhile to this into account. In my case, I unabashedly recognize it; I further recognize my strong imagination will bend things perhaps a bit more than expected. Whether this blatant subjectivity is at odds with truth or not, seems to be a rather complicated philosphical question, perhaps a religious question. I will not essay its answer here, or anywhere. Whether this blatant subjectivity makes the writing more relevant to subjective readers, is to be answered in the writing itself.


Are these somewhat haphazard jottings an attempt to absolve me of responsibility for what I write? No. I take full responsibility for my being, for my emotion, and for my imagination. I take full responsibility for the writing: and if a sentence is badly written, it indicates bad thinking: substandard synthesis of what I perceive. And though I disown it as an answer to any deep epistemological riddle, I suspect that a well written sentence will have some truth in it.

Upcoming:

A statement of purpose.

Impressions of Stefan Jackiw and the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra at the Skirball Center, performed 4/29

A review of The Hystery of Heat, presented by the Performance Thanatology Research Society at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, performed 4/30