You write. Your friends say, “I liked it.” They say, “You’re really a good writer,” like it still comes as a surprise. You don’t blame them. If everyone could say something memorable, everyone would be Oscar Wilde.

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The author gave this commencement address at the School of Visual Arts on 19 May 2013.

I’m not here today to offer advice or even encouragement. I’m here to talk about art and audience, about art and the people it reaches—and what happens when it does.

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The wiz behind the Gramsci Monument erected this summer—and now disassembled—in the center of a South Bronx Housing Project is no Oz. Thomas Hirschhorn is sincere about “doing art in a public space.” He was a presence at his creation, which was open every day this summer. The artist meant to stretch himself before and after his opening, living in the hood, hanging out at his Monument.

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I. Tim’s Late Spring

A summer’s worth of blockbuster trades has radically shifted the traditional power axes in the NBA, as franchises move either to rebuild (Lakers and Celtics) or to weld together groups of superstars, some of them aging (New Jersey’s Nets, the LA Clippers) to challenge the budding Miami Heat dynasty. It could be a time of upheaval, with outgoing NBA Commissioner David Stern preparing to ride into the sunset in darkest February, after his thirty year reign—wearing a baseball cap, of course, and smiling, of course. With the smell of beer suds now washed from living room rugs after the thrilling Miami-San Antonio Finals, it’s an apt time to look at the state of the league, now LeBron’s League, it appears; inevitably, inexorably, but how justifiably?

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I. Season Over, Suddenly

“Knickerbocker basketball is on the air.” That old phrase kept recurring to me whenever I got home early to watch a playoff game at 4 or 5 PM (as needed) this year, for this Knick team, warts and flaws notwithstanding, was always worth the watch. The reason for the early start is that I now live in San Francisco, have for nearly thirty years, but the Knicks in the last two years have captivated me in a way that goes way beyond geographical boundaries.

Despite having loved Carmelo Anthony’s play at Syracuse – where he stayed only one year, but brought lifer Coach Jim Boeheim his only NCAA championship – I had written him off as a selfish one-dimensional player while he was with the Denver Nuggets. That impression was confirmed in his early days with the Knicks, when he seemed to tarnish – even ruin – Amar’e Stoudemire, along with the chemistry that had fuelled Linsanity.

Yet I have now come to love watching Anthony play nearly as much as I do LeBron James; maybe more, due to the added suspense of an uncertain outcome, which brings me to another wonder: what an incredible assortment of individuals comprised the Knick team that Coach Mike Woodson took such a long way before getting derailed by a formidable Indiana team that Charles Barkley was telling us early on would defeat New York, and prevent the long-anticipated matchup with LeBron’s defending champion Miami Heat.

With that match-up no longer possible, the playoffs – especially with Golden State also being eliminated (by San Antonio) – suddenly lost their interest for me. I was certain that soon, after I briefly mourned, LeBron would bring them alive again, but there would never emerge that classic confrontation of James and Anthony.
II. Artists in Different Keys: Carmelo and LeBron

LeBron James is universally known for his inhuman physical gifts, from size and strength equal to the league’s most athletic giants, to speed and agility characteristic of the best guards. All these traits enable him, uniquely, to guard any player at any position. Yet reporters routinely remark that it is his mental equipment – his ability to read, change, and react to the constant flow of a game – that distinguishes the mature James as much as his physical prowess. He is, simply put, a basketball genius.

Whereas Carmelo, his close friend, is the consummate scorer, reminiscent even of Bernard King. Unlike James, Anthony rarely takes in all aspects of a game, but rules it through his scoring. Yet this domination is only achieved when he is able to blend some judicious passing into his game. And that of course depends on team-mates being able to make shots, to take some of the load off his shoulders, thus allowing him to play within himself, and overcome his natural instinct to score at all times.

I think of Anthony as a prince of hard bop. Solid definition characterizes his game at every move. By contrast, LeBron’s fluidity and ability to morph himself into the very action that he is enveloping and encompassing echoes Monk and Mingus, with a supreme overriding Coltrane flavor. He can make any melody work; forces nothing. Not so for Melo, whose clarity and often-astonishing precision in movement harkens back to Oscar Robertson. I sometimes think of him as a spoiled, petulant Oscar; a bit of Earl Monroe too, it could be argued.

Watching tapes of Knick playoff games, you can see him making decisions, all of which a discerning viewer (no genius required) can fully viscerally understand. One can feel as if he/she were Carmelo for that moment, that play, that superb effort leading to a score. With Melo, the flow is not continuous, certainly never infinite; there are discrete options: two horns; he’s playing them both; only question is which one. Whereas for James, his acts and the game’s flow somehow merge and echo one another. Melo fashions his games, sculpts; James is too caught up in motion to sculpt. But both are true artists. I will miss Carmelo’s special exuberant moments. I have saved three of his best games on my DVR; he is a joy to watch.

But beyond Carmelo and his personal battles with James, this year’s Knick squad – in both in its joyous abandon and its periodic dysfunction – had captured my imagination. How and why would I so miss them? It isn’t about home-town chauvinism for me: growing up in New York as an adolescent, with the Knicks slipping into mediocrity (often comic mediocrity), I became a St. Louis Hawks fan. I took the struggling Knicks totally for granted, all the while giving thanks for the first games of Garden double-headers; many times, my friends and I left after only a half of the “second game.” Eschewing regional loyalties, once my hero Bob Pettit retired, I came to be a fan of teams that played the game beautifully well, as long as they didn’t wear Celtic green.

Walt Frazier’s Knicks, under Red Holzman, won two titles, and fit that bill perfectly. So did Bill Walton’s Portland Trail Blazers. Both teams became icons of perfectly played team basketball. Their smooth unselfishness was a joy to watch for fans of all stripes, from all locations. They came to define both chemistry and legitimacy. You didn’t have to be a Knick fan to embrace that Knick team, any more than you had to live in Portland to love those Trail Blazers.

But there have been many other, less aesthetically pleasing iterations of the Knicks, including Pat Riley’s Thug Squads of the Michael Jordan Era, extending through the years of mismanagement under Isiah Thomas, and the reconstruction orchestrated by Donnie Walsh. Last year’s season had the dramatic structure of a five act farce, with plot reversals and climaxes galore. Perhaps it’s having to finesse change through obtuse owner James Dolan that makes it all seem so precarious.

What made this such a special group (even though they fell short of their high expectations)? Was it simply that they were representing the Knicks? Look, L.A. is still the transplanted Minneapolis Lakers, the Knicks’ tormentors when I was first starting out. And Phil Jackson came up as a gangly rhythm-disrupting Knick sub, a pup at Red Holzman’s tit, while Don Nelson was nursing at the other Red’s inflated one in Boston. Besides, Auerbach was from Brooklyn, you know. Jack Nicholson is a great actor and man about town, but Woody Allen and Spike Lee grew up in the cheap seats after a subway ride in from (where else?) Brooklyn.

The Knicks, who were the first team to sport a black-only roster, have had more than their share of bad black dudes: from Spencer Haywood, though the ultimate 1970’s backcourt of Micheal Ray Richardson and Ray Williams. So there is plenty of precedent for Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith, and Iman Shumpert! As there should be in New York. The most Jewish of cities, it led the basketball world in great Jewish players, who dominated the game for many years.

This year’s cast of characters, as assembled and blended by Coach Mike Woodson, suggested to me a kind of a re-working of Robert Downey’s classic film Putney Swope, in which the inmates run the asylum with perfect cover from the titular boss. It’s an admittedly loose analogy, but how else to categorize the colorful cast of Shumpert, Smith, Raymond Felton, Chris Copeland, joining the near-geriatric cohort of Rasheed Wallace, Jason Kidd, Marcus Camby, Kurt Thomas, and Kenyon Martin, and former European star Pablo Prigioni?

Tyson Chandler’s inability to make even the simplest shots (despite his ridiculously high shooting percentage) rendered him a sadly comic figure when things started to go wrong against Indiana. But what else went so awry in destroying the chemistry and flair that characterized the Knicks when all cylinders were clicking was the astonishing demise of J.R. Smith, who had become that second scorer that great stars need in order to release pressure. Though not exactly Dwyane Wade, Smith had scoring sprees that were often prodigious. His ability to make long and difficult shots – and exciting ones – had given the Knicks a spark, and allowed Anthony moments of rest on the court, as well as vicarious excitement, as Smith’s scoring feats seemed so fashioned upon Anthony’s as to make him seem a perfect sidekick, at times almost a clone.

But with the Knicks up 3-0 against the Boston Celtic, Smith, who had gone from being a multi-talented head case to the deserving winner of the NBA Sixth Man Award, reverted to his old immature ways, threw an unnecessary and wildly self-indulgent elbow, and drew a one game suspension from which neither he nor the Knicks ever recovered. Adding the conflagration that would consume the Knicks, the insouciant Smith was seen out late “clubbing” with celebrities.
III. Dirge

Anthony had been brilliant against Boston for the first three games and much of the fourth, but thereafter was never consistently himself, only in spurts, and Smith, that unabashed great gunner, could no longer shoot. The pattern and the cohesion had been destroyed. The other saxophone in Melo’s band had been muted; his solos alone had to supply the band’s energy.

They still got by Boston, but Indiana was too strong. It would take LeBron’s genius – and his buddies – to stop them.[1]

Melo’s lack of Jamesian comprehension and intelligence was evident in his oddly skewed pre-game conceptualization of “whatever it takes.” Note the confusion of “I” and “we”: “It’s do whatever it takes, even if that’s 60 points and 20 rebounds; whatever it takes, I have to do it, we have to do it, as a team.”[2]

In the final loss to the Pacers, Anthony’s twenty point first half was off-set by Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School product Lance Stephenson’s sixteen points and eight rebounds (on his way to 25 and ten). Stevenson brought a special intensity that was obvious from his wildly focused eyes to his pounding style, as befits a four year state champion in New York and the highest scorer in New York State history.

Anthony had been carrying the team by himself but could not keep pace; he labored mightily to try to ignite a sputtering offense. In Game Five, when he somehow led the Knick offense briefly back into a high enough gear to catch up, you could see him having to struggle extra hard.

In Game Six, the effort seemed to be all there again but it just wasn’t happening. Then, in a sudden turnaround by his cold-shooting team-mates, four threes in 100 seconds (the first three by Shumpert) turned a budding 72-60 rout into a 72-72 tie. The Knicks led 92-90 when Anthony attacked the rim, but was met there by Indiana’s massive center Roy Hibbert, who spectacularly rejected the shot, and took the life out of New York’s comeback, igniting a 9-0 Pacer run. Carmelo, exhausted, was futile thereafter: frustration, an ankle turn, three fourth-quarter turnovers. Out: 106-99.[3]

Ironically, just a day before they were eliminated, in the process of clearing out miscellaneous papers over-crowding my desk, I came across a poem I had written in 2010 entitled “Death and the Knicks.” It was not about playoff elimination; it was a dirge prompted by the death of 1950’s Knick guard Dick McGuire. It brought back memories of the lovable but less than championship caliber Knicks that I grew up watching at the old Garden.

The 2013 Knicks have now died as well. They will not soon again be significant, despite their wildly exciting run. This was their best chance, in an increasingly powerful Eastern Conference, where several stars (Derrick Rose, Danny Granger, Rajon Rondo) of already contending teams are expected back from injuries. The Knicks can only contend if Shumpert, only 23 now, quickly blossoms into a star.[4] No-one else on the roster has much of what everyone now calls “upside.”

Though we come to praise Anthony, we must bury him as well. Going forward, as people like to say, it appears to be LeBron’s league now, but NBA eras overlap. Was there a Duncan era? If so, is it over? This is Tim’s seventeenth year, yielding four titles, though never two in a row.

LeBron’s first trip to the Finals, for Cleveland in 2007, was thwarted by the Spurs in just four games. They may meet again in June. Closure, along with poetic justice, would so demand. But were the decision to be made on the basis of poetry alone, Carmelo would be there too.
Notes

1 A perfect example of LeBron’s genius came in Game One against Indiana: down one point with 2.2 seconds remaining, the shot James got for himself was a point blank lay-up.

2 I’m reminded of Tim Hardaway’s misconception that unselfishness meant working to boost one’s assists per game average.

3 Anthony’s 35 in three quarters, with only four in the fourth quarter, recalled Roger Brown’s 1960 39 point game for Wingate against Boys High with Connie Hawkins.

4 Looking like he stepped out of the ’50s to sing lead for The Platters, he certainly has the requisite bearing and charisma.

From June, 2013

McKenzie Wark’s latest dip into Debordiana, The Spectacle of Disintegration, focuses on Guy Debord’s comrades as well as on the Situationists’ bibulous prince. He gives Sit’-for-a-season T.J. Clark the most ink, though Clark’s early and late works of Art History are too rich for any bite-sized summary. But other, lesser figures in Debord’s orbit are ripe for Wark’s approach.

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We are entering a time when words must be backed up by actions.

1.

In May of 2013, Dominique Venner, the former OAS terrorist turned semi-respectable historian and paladin of the French New Right (although there’s nothing new about it, really, it’s the same old Action française Catholic-monarchist bullshit, the same pompous argot of bourgeois murderers, the same hybrid of decadent rationalism and plagiarized German Romanticism, a style some say was inaugurated by Charles Maurras but may actually extend back to Ernest Renan or even Descartes), walked up to the altar of the Notre-Dame Cathedral and shot himself. He left a suicide note, and, in case the note was lost to the depredations of chance or the iconoclasms of the police, he left a blog post.

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I. The Game…What Game?

Everyone agrees basketball has changed dramatically over the decades since the NBA began in the 1940’s, but just how do we measure, mark, and comprehend the shock of the new game? Some markers are intrinsic (size, shape of court, basket height, rules to prevent outright domination by the tallest and most athletic), others extrinsic (length of shorts, salary, philosophy, place in American and world culture) to the game itself.

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The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. University of California Press. 678 pp. $49.95. January 2011.

Robert Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1959 and finished it except for embellishments in 1961; yet only now, half a century later, has it reached book form. A prose masterwork that begins with the story of Duncan’s initiation as a poet, over the course of its 646 pages it morphs into a visionary meditation in which H.D., the American poet born Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), remains the thematic touchstone. In The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004), Duncan writes to Levertov as he undertakes the book that he needs to guard against letting his distress over dismissive reviews of H.D.’s work by Randall Jarrell and others deflect him from his deeper purpose. Exploring the generative resources and implications of H.D.’s work, he was surely aware too that he was also setting the course and realizing perhaps the fullest expression of his major phase as a poet. The irony is that half a century later one must guard against allowing the analogous treatment of this book to deflect attention from what is here at last.

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“Sorrentinian anecdotes: 1. A friend once told me that he got a blowjob while watching Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which seems like the perfect antidote to Haneke’s gloomy Austrian National Socialist moralism, his sanctimonious pornography of violence. 2. Another friend, or the same friend, I can’t remember, who occasionally suffered from psychogenic impotence, said that a girl once quoted Prufrock to him when he couldn’t get it up, which was such a wickedly tender thing to do (such a relief compared to all the put-on politically correct anti-phallodeterministic caritas he was used to in those situations) that he remembers it as one of the most intimate experiences of his life. 3. I told him, as if to reciprocate his self-mortifying candor, that an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was a crypto-Catholic depressive, used to read Ash Wednesday whenever she wanted to avoid having sex with me. We agreed on the superiority of early Eliot…”

David Golding explains (along the way) how/why he couldn’t resist the “mimetic bug” in this meditation on Gilbert Sorrentino…

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New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, known as one of David Foster Wallace’s most prominent detractors while he was alive, had — almost — only nice things to say about his latest posthumously published book, Both Flesh and Not.

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Celine’s pessimism—his hatred, even—is diagnostic, neutral, as humanitarian in its own way as the advances in antiseptic medicine made by his idol and the subject of his doctoral thesis, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, that ill-starred “savior of mothers.” One must always proceed deeper, lower, in Celine’s cosmos

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The two Asian-American women to our left had come from San Jose to Berkeley’s Greek Theater because the brother of one, who was boyfriend to the other, had been a great fan of the evening’s headliner; and the women knew, if he had not died six months before, he would have been at the concert. In fact, they believed him there now. Each held his photograph to contemplate, while they smoked the joints through which the music reached them, beneath the chill, grey, starless sky.

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The author wrote this brief Movement memoir in advance of participating in the upcoming conference at the University of Minnesota on the 50th anniversary of The Port Huron Statement [http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs].

I was a child of small town Texas, and of a single parent mom, a feminist. We were poor closet liberals. Austin was my mecca. I excelled there, in the late fifties, and morphed into an existentialist at a residential community of learning alongside The University, the only integrated housing on campus, both by gender and by race. We met in rigorous seminars with a collegium of renegade Christian ministers, headed by a chaplain from WWII who’d seen the carnage, demythologizing the church fathers and scriptures; studying the contemporary theologians

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“You should be asking what his wife thinks of him.” That was Bob Dylan last month stiffing a Rolling Stone interviewer who entreated him to endorse Obama or at least concede racism was at the root of right-wing rage against the President. Dylan’s evasions got me thinking about who he is now and how he became an American avatar. I’ve gone on to consider the aspirations of other pop artists who’ve dreamed big in the Age of Obama.

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I PROLOGUE

Lebron James has been a groundbreaking force in many ways, but who expected him to be in the forefront of the humanization of superstardom? A team player in all senses – even extending the notion to the NBA family of players – after seven years of Cleveland, he felt he needed someone to make the assist, help him carry the load. His buddy Dwyane Wade wasn’t quite enough last year, but this year, he found the perfect man; or, that man found him.

In Kevin Durant, whose calm self-effacing manner makes him a kind of anti-Kobe Bryant, James serendipitously was presented with the exact proper foil to carry him home without demanding that James trade too heavily on the alpha male aggression that he has seemed mysteriously to eschew.

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People are always talking about The Creator, meaning some great abstraction beyond ourselves for whom and to whom we give deference to if we don’t want to cop to God. (When we were in the organization we use to call our weapons “Gods” so you can understand the relativity of the term.) But for all our talk about the Creator, we rarely use that term for those moving among us whom we could concretely use that word to describe. And whose creations are knowable, tangible, though wonderful even if we could stand in a bar and have a beer with them. It is as if our familiarity with humanity downgrades its profundity. Like the only truly heavy stuff is what we don’t understand. Like the economy, what’s truly valuable is what we don’t have.

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Russell’s Way, Lin’s Path

Philosopher-king Bill Russell used to say basketball is a simple game, played by grown men in short pants. As the hem-lines dropped, though, the force of Russ’s dictum waned. The Jeremy Lin phenomenon leaves one looking back to Russ’s clarities and ahead to a New Age of lucidity for homo ludens.

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My Uncle Manny, a doctor, was at the Battle of the Bulge. When he came home, he lived with us on 46th Street. After he moved out, he left behind a collection of German beer steins and some books. He never talked about the war in my presence, and only one of those books pertained to it: the cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s Up Front.

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Diane Arbus: A Chronology 1923-1971 by Elizabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus. Aperture, New York, 2011. 185 pps.

During the last years of her life, Diane Arbus visited institutions for the mentally ill to photograph the residents, people often physically as well as mentally disabled. I remember being repelled by these photographs, and gathered that Arbus had by now crossed a line in her own mental state, becoming engulfed by a spiritual/emotional darkness from which she would never recover. She committed suicide by slitting her wrists in 1971 at the age of 48.

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I can’t tell you exactly when I stopped being surprised to hear people say that the best American art was being made for TV.

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An oasis of whore in a desert of boredom: “La carte et le territoire”

Houellebecq, in the end, will probably be remembered as the kind of writer who never forgot to tell us how much an upscale prostitute charged extra for anal sex in the third millennium

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