Lebron Gets It

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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Louis Reyes Rivera (1945–2012)

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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The Hoodie

A fox tail dangling from a leather belt. A key chain dangling from a leather belt. A leather belt with a personalized name buckle. Low top red Converse sneakers. High-top black Converse sneakers. Green suede Puma sneakers. Clamshell white Adidas sneakers. White Nike basketball athletic footwear. Blue chinos with the orange stripe running down the side. Black “overlap” slacks with two overlapping seams running down the side. Black “AJ’s” slacks with white thread running down the side. Denim jackets with the sleeves cut off. Leather vests worn without a shirt. Leather motorcycle jackets. Leather blazers. Leather pea coats. Leather bomber jackets. North Face jackets. Shearling jackets. Black Bally boots with a Cuban heels. Army jackets. Combat boots. Doc Martens. Black baseball caps with the letter X emblazoned on them. Black caps and jackets featuring the logo of the Oakland Raiders. Hockey jerseys. Baseball jerseys. “Throwback” basketball jerseys. Starter jackets. Gold chains. Floppy denim hats. Tan Timberland work boots.

Hoodies.

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The Garden of Chelm

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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Manny and Bill, Willie and Joe

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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Irrevocable

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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R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: “Low Country Blues” & “The Artist”

In 1965, three friends and I walked into a Chicago bar dressed in jeans and work shirts, sporting the hairdos of the time — the kind you had to pat into place because no comb can make its way through. We were going to a legendary blues bar at 47th and Indiana, in a solidly African-American section of the city; it was late and the street was mostly shuttered for the night — maybe a check-cashing place and a chicken shack were open, besides our destination, Theresa’s, the dimly-lit club where Junior Wells and Buddy Guy were appearing.

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Warrior Karma

Walking the Tiger’s Path: A Soldier’s Spiritual Journey
Paul Kendel
Tendril Press, 2011

“The Tiger’s Path” is the name that the Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham gives “the path of discernment” in his book Ruling Your World. “Venturing onto the path of the tiger, we place our paws carefully. We respect karma; we know that every decision we make has repercussions.”

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Blood Dread

Novelist Jesymn Ward first posted this short meditation on what Obama’s rise meant in the deep South in 2008.

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Porn Theater: On Houellebecq & Bolaño

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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Matinees and Memories

When I was a boy, my father took me to westerns (Whispering Smith, Red River) and my mother to musicals and Disneys (Easter Parade, So Dear to My Heart).

But once I entered fourth grade (1951), my parents decided I was old enough to attend Saturday matinees alone.

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Hard Call & Wise Responses

Historian – and longtime First contributor – Wesley Hogan was sparked by The Help’s spin on the Southern turn toward freedom in the 60s. Her piece on the book and movie starts our mini-roundtable on this cultural phenomenon. Hogan’s Call generated a response from a reading group of retired black women who had their own opinions about The Help. Ancella Bickley recorded their views for First and her summary follows Hogan’s piece. After that, Hogan returns with a quick review of recent historical writing related to the subject of black domestics.

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First Thoughts on OWS

First writers and readers – Amiri Baraka, Jeremy Brecher, Benj DeMott, Diane di Prima, Mark Dudzic, John Fullerton, Dr. Donna Gaines, Ty Geltmaker, Lawrence Goodwyn, Adam Hochschild, Staughton Lynd, Greil Marcus, Deborah Meier, Dennis Myers, (AKA) Nolemonomelon, Jedediah Purdy, Aram Saroyan, Fredric Smoler, Tom Smucker, Scott Spencer & Richard Torres – comment on OWS.

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