I Got 99 Problems But A Front-Runnin' B!#*% Ain't One.

As you know, since surely you've been following my last couple of posts with rapt attention, I've been doing my level best to divorce myself from animosity and moralistic interpretations when it comes to Butler's NCAA games. But then I clicked on a link to the Yahoo college basketball blog and see this -

Yep, that's Shawn Carter, stage name Jay-Z. hanging with the Wildcats after they punched their ticket to Houston. Emphasis on the AFTER.

Now, there are two possible explanations for this. Either Hova is visiting with Coach Cal's Little Urban Achievers because he, as a minority partner in an NBA team might be drafting one or more of them in the upcoming months. Or he is a sports fan similar to his pal LeBron, and simply runs with the squad that is most likely to win each year. Let's not forget that BronBron, native of Ohio, professes to be a Yankee and Cowboy fan.

So Jigga has either committed a flagrant NCAA violation in contacting college players regarding future professional employment in the NBA. Or he has chosen to throw his support behind a team with no geographic relationship to his Brooklyn origins, but who does have the most championships of the four teams left and has, arguably, the greatest wealth of talent.

Would I be as indignant if H-to-the-Izzo had chosen instead to visit the Bulldog's locker room after they defeated Flo-Rida? Probably not. However, Butler doesn't have a coach with a long history of questionable financial scruples. Nor is Butler the Vegas favorite to win the whole thing, as UK now is. Whether those two things smack of illegal contact and front-running, I'll let you decide.


But I do know this, teams from Indiana love it when other teams have New York celebrities sitting courtside, rooting against them.

Up the Beanstalk, Again

The David and Goliath analogies are played out, for several reasons, not the least of which is Butler's next opponent, VCU, is seeded even lower than they are. And while VCU made an impressive run a few years back, they have nowhere near the tournament pedigree that this Butler team has. No, in any standard Israelite v. Phillistine substitutional calculus, Butler is the big hairy giant and VCU has the stone and sling.

I don't think this imagery works though. Perhaps for the small cadre of actual VCU fans--students, faculty, alumni, etc.--Butler can play the role of old Golyat. But for the rest of the country, such a loaded template might be a little ponderous.

With King David's first act of heroism comes all of the historical and theological baggage that the story has carried throughout history. It has variously symbolized the triumph of the Jewish God, the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and at some point I'm sure, the triumph of tha glahrious Bahston Red Sawx ovah the harrible facking New Yark Yankees! YANKEES SACK! YANKEES SACK!

But the most obvious allegorical implications of the nebbish over the mighty is that of the eventual triumph of Good over Evil. And I'm just not willing to make a basketball game matter that much.

Indeed, small, modest David with his leather strap and pebble felling the oncoming Giant is clearly meant to symbolize the idea that virtue will win in the end, that the meek shall inherit the Earth and that big dudes are mean-ass bullies. Goliath's height, by the way, was probably more like six foot-nine. Not even taller than Andrew Smith.

Next Saturday, as Butler begins to warm-up, I will instead be thinking of Jack and his beanstalk. Yes, I know, there is a Giant who lives up there in the clouds. And in the original telling, the Giant killed Jack's dad and took his money. So the Giant is the antagonist, yada yada yada. But the moral of the tale and the morality within, as it has come to be told today, is far more fraught.

It is a tale especially fitting for the post-modern, sports-loving, capitalist society we live in today.
Jack, lazy and a bit dumb, living with his widowed mother and a skinny, dried-up, milk cow, is told to sell the cow for money so he and his mother can buy something to eat. Jack can't even get that right and instead, gets conned into taking five "magic" beans in exchange for the cow. Business deal gone bad. The bean bubble burst. Today, he could just go file for bankruptcy, right Mr. Trump? Jack's mom throws the beans out of the window and tells him he's lucky she's malnourished or she would beat that ass.

But, lo! The next morning a giant beanstalk has grown where his mother threw the beans! Isn't it great being white in America? Organic urban farming is just the coolest. Jack decides to climb up the beanstalk and see if there are any new media ventures he can get in on. Or maybe a green initiative. And whaddya know, there is a castle with a golden harp and a hen that lays goddamned golden eggs! Plastics, Ben. PLASTICS.

So Jack avoids the giant, steals the hen and descends back down the beanstalk to show his mother how awesome he is.
"We can eat gold omelets now, mom!"
"Or we can sell the gold, you friggin' numbskull. Thank GOD your father is dead."

Eventually, Jack wants to go up the beanstalk again. Probably because he got involved in an illegal cockfighting ring and the hen got killed. So, he heads back up and while the giant is sleeping, he steals his silver and gold. He gives it to his mother, hoping she won't notice the missing hen.
"Here Ma, look at all this scrilla!"
"Great, go put it in the bank."
"Actually, I'm going to invest half in a contruction company that builds over-sized mini-mansions on acres of nutrient-rich farmland. The other half is going straight into Collateralized Debt Obligations. They are asset-backed, so they CAN'T LOSE!"

Well, a few years down the line, Jack's broke and he has to head back up the beanstalk and steal the giant's gold harp. He does and in the only truly intelligent move he makes, he chops down the beanstalk and the giant falls to his death. Jack can no longer plunder the castle of its riches, but now must live within the means that he has on the ground. And he promises his mother he won't be such a douche anymore.

The End.

Now this is by no means a straightforward analogy between Butler and Jack. Nothing about Butler Basketball suggests indolence, hubris, rashness or immaturity. But the notion that in order to finally get somewhere, the goal as it were, we might have to travel down a bumpy road full of potholes and mudpuddles, with funhouse mirrors lining the shoulder, is apt. In this case, the idea that past success can breed new and more difficult challenges is particularly useful.

Jack tastes great success, but also finds himself a victim of his own cravings for more success. He has to finally realize who he is and live within those parameters. He is continuously tempted by the beanstalk and the riches that await him above, but only when he becomes content with life below is the story allowed to end happily.

Matt Howard, who could've gone to IU or Purdue, chose the place he felt most comfortable and did just about as well as anyone could on the floor and in the classroom. THE Academic All-American of 2010-2011. How's things in B-Town, fellers?

Shelvin Mack went to a school where he would be featured and get to play a lot, even if it wasn't quite in the national spotlight. And if he gets a chance to murder the Wildcats, I'm selling every CD I own, plus a few Star Wars figures and putting all them clams on the Dogs.

I'll let you fill in the comparisons between Butler's coaches of the past and one Brad Stevens. Perhaps Brad will end up like Jack, Barry, Thad, and Todd and decide that magic beans are pretty cool and that Beanstalkland sounds pretty bitchin'. But I hope, mainly as a selfish fan, that he cuts down the beanstalk.

The NCAA tourney itself is a lumbering giant. One that seems to favor the big-money conferences in the face of damning evidence that the overall caliber of mid-level college programs has improved. Jay Bilas believes that the top-level college teams have actually gotten worse this year. He's a respected analyst (Dickie V. *eardrumsbleed* thinks Mr. Bilas should be the Tourney "Commissioner") and I'm sure one could juggle statistics to show that he's right. Hey, not a single number one seed advanced to the Final Four! Doesn't that mean that the #1's weren't all that good?

I think this might be an Ockham's moment, where we all say, "No, everybody else has just gotten better."

Kids are bigger, faster, stronger, better-trained and coached, across the board. The elite players, though amazingly talented, still have a ceiling. But the decent players, the top quartile, have gotten immensely better. And on days when the elites aren't pitch-perfect, the teams right below them will cut the beanstalk right out from under them. It's time for somebody to prove that point. I hope that those Bulldogs over on 49th Street are the tricky little sons of bitches who do it.

Elite Hate - Bulter v. Florida 2011

This time it's personal. Third time is a charm. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

I'm going for something else, something more visceral and full of bile. I want a triumph that is merciless, a victory achieved by the letting of blood. As Dolph Lundgren once said about the former champ Apollo Creed, "If he dies, he dies." At the end of tonight's game, if Billy Donovan's bunch is weeping on the court, so be it. Matt Howard should come out steely-eyed and say, "I must break you." I want Florida to suffer.

Of course, Drago loses, and the Russkies wind up chanting "Rocky, Rocky,"  so using the villain from Rocky IV as an examplar is a wee bit flawed.

Indeed, this kind of unchecked hatred from a fan is hardly healthy or helpful. The most rabid and over-zealous fanbases are usually the ones who find themselves suffering at the end of the contest, victims of their own irrational vicarious experience. Think of fans in Philadelphia, only recently finding a salve in the Phillies world series triumph, Boston morons who still claim to be "tahrchared" despite having four of the best franchises in spahrts over the last decade, the Duke fans after Arizona came out and assassinated them on Friday.

The foam-at-the-mouth exuberance of these fans, so perturbing to the rest of us, is also the fuel for schadenfreude when their teams fail. 18-1 in 2007? Helmet catch? Sweet ambrosia to everyone not living in the Upper Northeast.

Likewise, I imagine that harboring such unabated animus for years is probably not healthy for a basketball program. Though many personnel in the Butler program were around for Butler's wrenching losses to Florida in 2000 and 2007, the institutional philosophy of Butler basketball would seem to suggest that using bloodthirsty revenge as motivation to win is not exactly part of the Hinkle tradition. And while my gut tells me that "The Butler Way" is just a little bit prissy and ivory towerish, my brain tells my guts, "Just look at the scoreboard, dumbass."

And truly, I should know better. Because though I grew up watching an endless number of IU games, and the 1987 NCAA championship is still one of the more lasting memories of my childhood, I have seen far more Butler games in person. And over the last decade I have watched and listened to fivefold more Butler games than IU. I loved IU's 1992 & 2002 NCAA runs, tournament runs that ended in heartbreak of their own, but Butler's two losses to Florida were even more anguishing. Those losses, the first on a last second shot by Mike Miller, the second in a game defined by the referees' refusal to call a foul on the Florida big men, left a taste in my mouth that was even more acrid and full of lasting bitterness than last year's Duke game. At least in the Duke game, Butler had a chance. They were inches away from winning on a last-second prayer; they didn't get jobbed by the refs or stomach-punched by lady luck like in the Florida games.

Despite real or perceived imbalances in officiating and weighted scales of fate, Butler trudged on, racking up wins, playing full-throttle defense, and doing it despite lacking the bloated coffers of BCS schools. And the progress of the Butler program has not been predicated on quick-fixes or pandering to fans and alumni with glamorous recruits.

Instead, it has been achieved by hiring people and coaches who are exceptional basketball strategists, able to create situations that allow good players to achieve great things. "The Butler Way," however dorky and corporate-sales-goal-oriented it may sound, works. It gets players to know and understand their roles and to value team success above all. A.J. Graves and Mike Green graduated and took with them a wealth of experience and a truckload of moxy. Butler just got better. They lost Gordon Hayward to the down-side of high achievement. Still, they continued to win. Without bluster, without spouting the bullshit platitudes of athletes worldwide-- "Nobody believed in us," "We just wanted it more"-- and the other mindless palaver that issues from the mouths of big-time sports stars.

So I will find moderation in my anger. I will not hate. I will cheer for Butler's success and that alone. The opponent does not matter. The only thing I will think of is my hope that the team from down the street gets to play next weekend. In the end, the scoreboard will be the ultimate arbiter and none of my rancor and enmity will do the slightest bit of good...

Al Horford though, and pardon my French, he can fuck off.

Butler v. Florida 2007 - Horford "backs down" Crone.

Aussie Aussie Aussie

Of the four majors, the Aussie Open is the one I pay the least attention to. The reasons are numerous. It comes on the heels of the holiday season, the French is still months away, and most of the action happens during the middle of the night. This year, however, with ESPN3 streaming and bit of insomnia, I've seen quite a few matches. Another reason my interest is peaked is because this year's tourney has some major storylines. Rafa could win the Serena Slam, and I don't care how good Laver was, holding all four trophies in this day and age would be an unbelievable achievement, perhaps on par with Roger's career titles record. Couple that with Rafa's streak at the French and I believe he has cemented himself in the top five all-time already, and he's only 24. I could go on and on, but instead I'll list my preferences for who I want to win. This list might include people already eliminated.


Men's Draw:

1. Andy Roddick - He's getting pretty old in tennis years and he still hasn't developed the third shot in his game to make him a Slam winner again. His serve still makes him capable of beating anyone on a given day, but the holes in his game are only going to get more glaring as his foot speed wanes. Now is the time for Andy if he wants another major title.
   I wasn't a fan of his in the early 2000's. He seemed as if he didn't want to win, but rather crush his opponent and rub it in. Whereas, Federer never cared  who he beat, he was only interested in winning. but then Andy ran into the Fed Ceiling for 7 years and somehow turned into the loveable underdog. Not to mention that he held it down for American men in tennis when there was literally NO ONE else doing anything significant.  I love Jimmy Blake and Mardy Fish, Dent and Gimmelstob but those guys just never threatened the top tier at all.
    We've seen Querrey and Isner come along and make some noise the past couple seasons, but from 2005-2008 Andy was the Lone Ranger. And he never quit and seemed to work harder than almost anyone on tour. Despite not being as quick or having some of the shot-making abilities of Fed, Rafa, Murray or Djokovic, Andy is always knocking on the door of a major final. And in 2009 he gave us the greatest Wimbledon final ever. I don't care what people say about 2008 Rafa/Fed, Andy holding serve for 14 games against the greatest all-around player ever was unparalleled. Isner/Mahut was the greatest match of all time for reasons other than their actual tennis-playing. Roddick and Roger played the best tennis I have ever witnessed in that final. No one will convince me of anything to the contrary
    He's married to one of the prettiest girls on the planet, but seems to realize he hit the pulchritude jackpot unlike a certain football QB from new England. He's frequently a prick in interviews, but he's always funny, and just self-deprecating enough to let everyone know that he's only playing the heel. If I were him, I'd rather be hanging with Brooklyn Decker than trying to explain to reporters that, "Yes I'm a damn good player, but Roger Federer is simply the best. Stop asking me about it."
    So I want Andy to win. If he doesn't, I'll still be rooting for him until he hangs up his Babolat. Which I'm guessing won't be too long from now.

2. Andy Murray - Great competitor. Needs a slam title to shut the British Press up and to make the two at the top play even harder.

3. Roger Federer - Roger will hit the invisible wall this year. He will turn 30 and play in his 43-47 grand slam tournament. As far as I can tell, no men's player has won a title after their fiftieth slam appearance. Stop with the Martina jokes.
  Fed is arguably the greatest of all-time, and his five years from 2003-2008 are unparalleled. I want to see him get at least one more.

4. Rafael Nadal - There may be a day when we say Rafa was as good as Roger. Right now, I can't say that. But if he gets the ConsecuSlam, or Serena Slam or whatever you want to call it, he will leap-frog Bjorn into #4 behind Roger, Pete, and Laver. If he could follow it with the French and win five in a row? It's just him and Roger.
     I'm ambivalent. While I love when athletes break records, particularly guys like Nadal who are hyper-competitive, but also fun and nice, I don't necessarily want to see the era of Federer ushered out just yet. When sports dynasties end, it is a bit sad, even if they are extinguished by the rise of another dynasty.

At any rate, this is one of the greatest times in Men's tennis in quite awhile.

The women's draw isn't quite as lively, but I do have a few horses I'd like to see win.

1. Kim Clijsters - Like Roddick, I didn't really have much of a feeling for her early in her career. But after her hiatus to get married and have a baby, she's come on like lighting. She's far more confident and waaaay more interesting of a person that she was as a slightly timid teenager, as we all are.
  
2. Venus Williams - She's already retired due to injury, and with Serena out indefinitely there is no Williams left. And majors are always better when one of the sisters is playing. Much like Roddick, Venus and Serena have held it down for the USA when virtually no other ladies have done squat.
 Plus Venus has the crazy sexualized outfit/Jehovah's Witness dichotomy going on. Man that family is crazy. Crazy GOOD.

3. Maria Sharapova - Mascha hasn't won a major in awhile and if she wants to secure any kind of legacy she needs a couple more. Plus she's easy on the eyes. If her serve doesn't kill her, she has a chance. Her forehand is the only one that has compared to Venus and Serena in the last five years.

4. Sveta Kuznetsova - She's just fun to watch play because she looks like she should be playing in a USTA league in municipal park, but somehow she's won two majors and is never an easy out. And she looks like Ashton Kutcher, not necessarily in a good way.

I Just Killed a Mouse

       John Wilkes Booth was very handsome. His father and brother were the most famous actors in the country up to that point in American history. Abraham Lincoln was as midwest ugly as they come. I don't think that mattered when the trigger was pulled in Ford's Theater. I do think that J.W. Booth was emblematic of the personality type observed time and again in political assassins: Intelligent enough to identify the seat of power and plan a way to get to the seat-holder and murder them, crazy enough to think that their own politics trump the will of millions of voters. Mental health services could have been useful to any one of the people in history who've pointed a gun at the President and pulled the trigger.

      I don't purport to know how to best identify people who are on the brink of committing gun violence. All I know is that I had to smash a small mouse to put him out of his misery this evening and it made me sad and proud of myself and disappointed in humanity. The proud of myself is because, over the years, I've developed a rather intense phobia for rodents. Not just that I dislike them and wish them to be elsewhere, especially out of my house, no, something more.
       It derives from experiences with half-dead rats and numerous squirrels and chipmunks killed by my grandparents' cat, the bodies of which I'd discover underfoot while mowing the grass. the sensation of squishy squirrel beneath your Adidas is...unpleasant. Nowadays, my adrenal glands start firing like mad when I see a mouse. When I had to clean up a dead and putrifying opossum in my back yard, I nearly hyper-ventilated and a minute after I disposed of the bloated body, running away from a stench that verged on vomit-inducing, I was so jacked on fear hormones I bashed my shovel into the ground a dozen times, finally breaking the handle.
       So tonight, when confronted by a mouse that found its way into our house, I set to work. I reset our spin-traps. I baited them with new peanut butter and waited to hear one of the traps snap. These traps hide the smashed mouse body in a larger housing, so that I don't have to see the little sucker after the kill. Very civilized, indeed. Hoping to take care of the problem quickly I set-up surveillance by the kitchen door. I waited and waited, and still no telltale snap.
       Instead, as I surveyed the online clips of commentary and journalism regarding the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six other living souls, I heard a little scratching in my cabinets. Sure enough, my beady eyed tormentor reappeared. He carefully avoided the traps I set, running back and forth between the toe-kicks in my kitchen. Not willing to spend the night with a Beatrix Potter Character, I broke out the big guns. Glue-traps. They are hardly humane, no matter how much anesthetic they might have in the glue. But I did not care.
      And just like that, the little feller ran right into the sticky-icky. I peeked my head out and hoped he would expire quickly. He did not. He wriggled and writhed for a minute and I could stand it no more. I got my shoes on, picked up a dust pan, and scooped up Stuart Little in his gluey infernal device.
      We went outside, Stu and I, and I apologized to him and told him I was sorry if he had suffered. And then I set him in the snow and dropped a large flagstone on him. I am not proud of killing the mouse, I would have rathered he just left on his own. My pride comes from the fact that I didn't leave him to pull his own arms off and suffer through the night, and I'm glad I put aside my own phobia to do so.

         And I thought about this awful, tortured person named Jared Loughner. And I thought about how I'd like to smash him under a rock. Not because I want to exact violence upon him. I do not. My desire to snuff him out under a large piece of limestone stems from a similar place as my desire to keep the mouse from suffering for eight hours instead an eighth of a second. This poor fuck is disturbed.
         He is no Booth, a racist, politically-savvy narcissist, no Guiteau, a campier Booth. Nor is he a bi-polar Communist like Oswald and Czolgosz. He is a paranoid-schizophrenic and he had guns and the internet. Gabby Giffords was the target he picked to try to silence his paranoia. And along the way, nobody figured out how to save this guy from himself and get him some help.
       Sometimes getting help for the mentally ill is impossible. I have neither the time or will-power to spend hours writing about why and how mental health services need to paid for by the public at large. Why it's an issue of public safety and homeland security. Why our taxes must be used to fund health-care for everyone. All I can say is, humans shouldn't end up on glue traps. They shouldn't be left to pull their own arms off and take their perceived enemies with them on their way to oblivion. Disturbed people can be treated. They can be ushered into the proper programs and facilities before they get stuck in the gooey mind-traps that encircle modern American society. They can and must, for the love of humanity, be kept away from guns.  I don't want to feel like we need to put our countrymen out of their own misery before they start killing people. Because that is almost as disturbing as the thing itself.
        The poor little mouse is dead, and I'm glad it went quick. This awful affair with Mr. Loughner will not go quick, I'm afraid. But I am most fearful of the idea that, at the end of it all, nothing will have changed.

Underrated K Cont'd. - Kill your speakers with razor blades.

So,  my Computer killed itself a few times but I resurrected that poor sucker likesome kind of silicon Lazarus. But my underrated list was stricken from the Itunes record. I'm sure I can recreate most of it, but as you can tell, I'm not rushing things. Winter break will be a time of great writing productivity. And as you can tell by the title of this post, we've got some Kinks to talk about. Ray and Dave, better than John and Paul? No. More important to the overall progress of rock and roll? Maybe.

Underrated K - Knowledge Reigns Supreme?

LaLa died, and with it, much of the fun streaming music I had embedded on this little blog here. So maybe I'll get to creating DivShare players for all the songs I've jabbered about previously. Until then, I hope to get through letter R and post a few chapters of a little project I've been working on by the end of the month.

KRS-ONE & Boogie Down Productions - "My Philosophy," By All Means Necessary.

You could make the argument that KRS and Scott LaRock, as the two primaries of Boogie Down Productions, are responsible for introducing gun violence to hip-hop, creating rap original sin. They certainly weren't the first to inject the gun/gang/gangster trope into hip-hop songs. Schooly D's "P.S.K. What Does it Mean?", with it's overt drug and gun lyrics, as well as it's veiled reference to Philadelphia gangs in the song title, predates BDP's "Criminal Minded." They were not responsible for the idea or language of guns in rap songs (though "9mm" was a rather on-the-nose song title). Rather, KRS and BDP created Hip-Hop's first martyr when Scott LaRock was killed after trying to mediate/intimidate in a fight between D-Nice, a young BDP crew-member, and another kid from the South Bronx. He died only months after the release of their first album, Criminal Minded.

BDP's 1987 Criminal Minded was widely and wildly influential. And while the group initially became famous for their dis tracks and rap battles with Marley Marl and MC Shan, this album paved the way for mainstream hip-hop to expose, embrace, and exploit the violence of the late 20th Century ghetto. The art-form that began as a live-performance experience in city parks and dance clubs transitioned quickly into a highly lucrative niche in the record industry. By 1988 Ice-T had recorded Rhyme Pays and West-Coast gangster rap began in earnest. N.W.A had already released N.W.A and the Posse and were in the process of recording Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It. BDP's last album in 1992, before KRS-ONE went solo, was titled Sex and Violence, an obvious commentary on the two most surefire ways to sell records. Eazy-E, Biggie Smalls, and Tupac would be dead less than ten years after Criminal Minded was released.

After the death of their musical leader, LaRock, BDP followed up with By All Means Necessary. KRS-ONE, still a young man of 23, matured quickly while processing the loss of his best friend. As evidenced on the album cover imitating Malcom X, KRS did not immediately distance himself from the idea of ghetto violence. Instead, he became possessed by the belief that hip-hop must address the problems in the poor black neighborhoods, as it was one of the few popular art forms that was explicitly poor and black in its content (as opposed to Jazz, Blues, and Rock which were poor and black in genesis, but were often marginalized when themes of the African-American experience were introduced.) The idea of the white performer as invader or cultural pilferer was far more entrenched in hip-hop as a result of this. Although, D-Nice helped introduce the world to Kid-Rock, so go figure. But that is a story for another thesis project.

"My Philosophy," while perhaps not as dense with poetic devices as a Rakim or B.I.G. track, is lyrically as strong as nearly anything being released today. Sure their are plenty of colloquialisms that sound dated in the minuscule geologic time of hip-hop. But some of his phrases are still quoted and sampled. "It's not about a salary, it's all about reality," ring any bells? "When some clown jumps up to get beat down?" Brand Nubian made a career off that line.

While it took time for KRS to reconcile some of the troublesome dichotomies of conscious rap--strains of misogyny, the idea of solving violence with more violence--he matured much faster than the rest of hip-hop and the world at large. He's still recording regularly and touring, but like many trailblazing artists, his newer recordings can't ever achieve the monumental, sea-change impact of his first two albums.

And not to be an old fogey, but the whippersnappers of today could use a dose of KRS, who has quickly gone from a recognized and respected progenitor to a grossly underrated influence on one of the few genres still actually selling records.

Listen to it Here: "My Philosophy"