I love artists who don’t try to be critics. Kawhi is that guy. Fun guy. He’s an artist, and he doesn’t try to be anything else. He doesn’t even do social media. In an interview after game five, he was asked, “How would you describe the level of defense you and your teammates are playing right now?” It was the last question of his post-game interview and I bet he was tired, exhausted not only by the physical demands of the game but by the gameness of the game: the spectacle of it all, the routine interviews, the note cards. “Ummm, I mean, I’m just living in the moment,” he said. “That’s for you guys to try to describe and, you know, make fun of, make fun out of, and you know I’m in the moment right now, I don’t know.” (Shy guy Leonard’s last words are often “I don’t know.” Fuck, I love an icon whose core is an averted gaze.)
And we did, we do, and we will make fun of and make fun out of it all
The “we” here, to me, is everything. When Anupa Mistry retweeted an old video of people chasing bliss, dancing in the street, stopping traffic, posing on top of cars, honking horns, and just generally wilin’ out, I wanted to be back in Toronto again. From what I can tell from my New York City perch, it was really like that. Heavy rain didn’t stop anyone. Jurassic Park looked like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Fans waited for hours. There were more people than expected, I read, so police were forced to shut down some streets downtown that they had not anticipated. Coburn, my friend from high school, called me at four in the morning. Everywhere, the city was alive, and there I was, south of the border, not sleeping.
But imagine what our lives would be like if we could occupy the streets like that all the time? If the streets belonged to us? If we were always so blunt and exposed?
I saw another tweet that said there were no arrests related to the game Saturday night. That’s not because the people were “good.” I mean, I saw videos of people hanging from street lights, climbing trucks, setting off fireworks, standing on top of buses, banging on police cars. But Saturday night, “badness” was allowed, framed by a collective joy sanctioned by capital.
I don’t mean to kill the vibe. How could I??? We’ve been supplicants for years. We’ve been going to the bone. Freddie said after game 5, “There’s nothing too big for us.” On Twitter, people were congratulating me. And when they did, I said, thank you, thank you, like I did something.
And I did. We did. I’m sorry but it’s true what Drake said, high off what Rinaldo Walcott called his “outraged joy,” we did this.
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