KNICKS NOWHERE, IMPROV EVERYWHERE AND SOME STUFF THAT'S NEITHER HERE NOR THERE


KNICKS COMMENT OF THE DAY:

Gonna keep it brief cause it's all so sordid and painful. But, the only reasons to watch over the last few weeks (aside from general schadenfreude) has been to see the emergence of Wilson Chandler as a legitimate NBA player. In fact, if I were Donnie Walsh, I would consider David Lee and Wilson Changler as the only untouchables on the team. (With Jamal Crawford and Nate Robinson as the two largely desirables and either Curry or Zach the necessary evil.)

Isiah has choreographed one of the biggest disasters in NBA history. Not just a bad season. But a truly, historically awful one. Both in terms of his failure to realize whatever potential was there. And in terms of having accumulated a largely redundant and incomplete collection of pieces.

I can't imagine Walsh keeping Isiah on as coach no matter how many "serious basketball discussions" they have. The guy's single greatest accomplishment is, at some point in the season, confusing and alienating every single person on his roster--including the overpriced talents he'd welcomed as saviors (Curry, Zach, Starbury) and embraced as favored sons (Starbury) and whoring buddies (Starbury). The man has proved himself every bit as dazzlingly incapable of acknowledging mistakes and accepting responsibility as George W. Bush. That he wants to be judged not on his job as Knicks' coach but rather on his "entire body of work" is almost funny. A bit like OJ saying "Why do all you people always focus on my (allegedly) kiling my wife? What about all those rushing yards and TDs and those really fun Hertz commercials?"

METS NOTE OF THE DAY:

Santana allows three HRs and falls to 1-2. A cautionary tale against believing in saviors. (Attention Obama fans.)

MASTERS COMMENT OF THE DAY:

As the leaders suffered a series of bad drives, lipped out putts and unfortunate bounces, I started feeling really uncomfortable—sort of like I was watching the women’s ice skating at the Olympics (where I always feel anxious that they are going to fall)—except without quite the degree of protective concern and anxiety because after all, they are all freaking multi-millionaires and they are guys. So, you know what. Fuck ‘em. In retrospect, I enjoyed it.

ODDLY RIVETTING SORT OF SPORTS-RELATED CARWRECK OF THE DAY:

Listening to Jonathan Schwartz wax characteristically rhapsodic (if whisperingly, simperingly and less than articulately so) about the (long-delayed) confrontation between Jonathan Papelbon and A-Rod in last night's Yankee-Red Sox game.

LFAQs OF THE DAY:

That Memphis guard Douglass Roberts tattoo: A sonnet or an "I will not" list on a teacher's blackboard.

Egg white omelet with a vanilla milkshake. Schizophrenic or balanced?

Sean and Robin Wright Penn call off their divorce. Should that be called getting cold feet or getting warm feet?

Is it horrible to point out that Annie Frank was hot? If so, what is the creepiest part about it? The implied pedophilia or the fact that it subordinates the horror of the holocaust to your aesthetic appreciation?

PEEVES OF THE DAY:

a)

The undignfified and unsatisfying options you are faced with in the fantasy rotisserie finals. Either you churn and stream players to maximize the number of games played—artlessly and callously tossing your season long stalwarts to the waiver wire and win. Or you stick with the guys that took you to the dance and watch them accumulate random end-of-season or pre-playoff DNPs and lose. Dignity or victory. Pick one.

b)

Hearing Hubie Brown and co. keep telling me that this team really knows how to “Score the ball.” How about just score. What else can you score in basketball besides the ball? A cheerleader? (Actually, I’d like to see the stats on that.). Reminds me a bit of when they say that was just a really fine baseball play. As if we could have mistaken it for any other kind of a play.

c)

At having cancelled the shoot for my Obama commercial because of the weather reports and hence missed the deadline for the moveon.org competition and then had that day turn out to be the prettiest day of the year.

FUNNY EXPERIENCE OF THE DAY:

The other night I saw a guy in uniform in front of a hotel with an apparently injured foot hopping vigorously to hail a cab for a guest. Then it hit me that that I was witnessing a rare cosmic visual joke: A bell hop who actually hopped! It was like the universe was a pantomime being directed by a prankster God.

CONFESSION OF THE DAY: (Confessions of a recovering Francophile).

After being something of a Francophile as a young man, I have become rather disenchanted with the Gallic people. But I am a bit ambivalent about acknowledging my distaste for the French lest I encourage those Americans whose knee jerk hatred of the French makes me dislike them perhaps even more than I dislike the French.

Their anti-French sentiment is crass and knee jerk where mine is highly cultivated and well earned. Wait: That sounds curiously French!

NOTE TO SELF OF THE DAY:

Remember to write something about the Denis Johnson Book "Tree of Smoke."

And also an elegy for my long saved and inadvertently erased voicemails.

EXCHANGES OF THE DAY:

-Do you still have various people sort of looking for an apartment for you?
-Well let's say they are looking in a manner commensurate with my degree of responsiveness to their looking.

--

-Do you do fantasy football?
-No. It doesn’t meet my stringent time wasting standards.

COOLEST THING EVER OF THE DAY:

50 people spontaneously freeze for 5 minutes during rush hour in Grand Central Station--and then resume their activities as if nothing had happened. It's not just an interesting thought experiment. It's the work of Improv Everywhere (go to youtube.com and do a search for them)--a public performance art collective. Their carefully conceived and expertly executed interruptions of the ordinary are really inspired--ranging from 80 men and women showing up at a Best Buy in blue shits and khakis (the store worker uniform) and hence making it impossible to distinguish the employees from the customers to a musical about napkins that spontaneously breaks out in a food court to a 1 minute sequence of carefully choreographed events that loops for 5 minutes inside a Starbucks. Of course, the best part of the spectacles is the reaction of the onlookers--as they slowly adjust to this abrupt and extended undermining of their expectations--the emotions of perplexity, frustration, concern and delight legible on their faces. The performances range from the prankish to the poetic and I am personally more compelled by the ones (like the frozen people in GCT or the Groundhog's Day looping of events inside the Starbucks) that are less committed to the merely comedic than to the strangely beautiful or the metaphysically evocative.

VERNAL MEDITATION OF THE DAY:

The smell of memory rearising from the thawing earth. Or actually not so much memory as time itself--the pure form of possibility that subtends memory and is not reduceable to it. Yes, the smell of time--of human time--before it becomes filled with the stuff of experience--its contingent smattering of particulars; its elaboration into a personal history. Yes, this is what i am smelling now. Not memory but time. Human time. With the longing --the immemorial longing...always already at the heart of it.

MUSICAL NOTE OF THE DAY:

Really love this Nicole Atkins song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE5hK6eLkYI So much beautiful melancholy trapped in the space of sound.

RANDOM SINGLE SENTENCE PORTRAIT OF THE DAY:

He had simultaneously totally wasted his life and overachieved.

SIGN OFF FROM A MAN WITH A BROKEN THUMB OF THE DAY:

Big one handed manly hug --and i don’t mean a reacharound.