Author: Doug LeMoine

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basketball kansas basketball reviews tip

March Madness / My bracket, with explanations

UPDATE 1: A cou­ple of changed picks; UPDATE 2: Some eerie resem­blances my brack­et and those of SI writ­ers; UPDATE 4: Sur­vey­ing the car­nage: Thoughts after the first two roundsHere's the brack­et that I made on the Mon­day after the seed­ings were announced.

my 2007 bracket - ideal version

UPDATE: Since Mon­day, I've been spend­ing a lot of time read­ing up on the teams I don't know/care about — in SI.com and its Tour­ney Blog, sta­tis­ti­cal ana­lyst Ken Pomeroy's blog, the NYT Brack­et blog, and the ever-unfriend­ly ESPN.com which must hide a lot of its use­ful stuff behind its sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, Insid­er. In any case, the more you read about the first round match-ups, the more con­fus­ing it all gets. I've seen many of the teams play at some point dur­ing the sea­son, but I'm total­ly in the dark on pret­ty much any team from the Pac 10 (even though I live in Cal­i­for­nia, I just real­ly can't even force myself to care about it) and almost all of the mid-majors. One brack­et change came out of this — I can't believe I'm say­ing this, but Duke seems less like­ly to get upset by VCU. Duke has been crit­i­cized a lot for being soft, slop­py, and gen­er­al­ly unin­spired, and they're com­ing off a sting­ing loss in the ACC Tour­na­ment. How could they not be hun­gry? They've got a bunch of tal­ent­ed play­ers, and it just seems real­ly unlike­ly that they won't be able to pull off a win against a VCU team that has only played one team in the tour­na­ment (Old Domin­ion). While I've only changed one out­come, my read­ing did pro­duce many doubts in my brack­et, which I detail below. (It also caused me to cre­ate three more ver­sions of my brack­et to account for the dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios that the pun­dits high­light­ed — What if Ore­gon can't play defense? What if Oden explodes on the scene and dom­i­nates every­one? What if North Car­oli­na is as good as they appear to be in 3‑minute stretches?)

Some second thoughts

UPDATE 2: Inci­den­tal­ly, SI writer Grant Wahl's brack­et is almost exact­ly the same as mine. (Actu­al­ly, same with Seth Davis). Same Final Four; same final game; same out­come. The only big dif­fer­ences are that he has Texas beat­ing UNC (UPDATE 3: Now, so do I), and Creighton beat­ing Mem­phis, where­as I have both UNC and Mem­phis get­ting knocked out in the next round. (I also have more first-round upsets than him … Oral Roberts over Wash­ing­ton State, etc).UPDATE 4 (in the week fol­low­ing the first two rounds): After two straight years in which my brack­et burst into flames dur­ing the first week­end, I was just hap­py to emerge with 15 out of 16 teams still alive. Most­ly, I got burned by my late changes — Texas beat­ing UNC and Duke beat­ing VCU — and by the fash­ion­able upsets that I stub­born­ly decid­ed to stick with — Geor­gia Tech over UNLV, Creighton over Neva­da, and Oral Roberts over Wash­ing­ton State, each of which found their own ago­niz­ing way of dri­ving a spear through my heart. Crxp.As usu­al, there were a cou­ple of teams that I was total­ly, total­ly wrong about: (1) UNLV. Obvi­ous­ly, these guys can play. I dis­count­ed them because (a) who did they beat? and (b) the coach's son seemed to play an inor­di­nate­ly impor­tant role. Both seemed like big-time red flags. I ignored the fact that they were expe­ri­enced, and that they were clear­ly pissed off by their #7 seed. Who would have thought that the team that rose to the occa­sion would be com­posed of hard-nosed guys led by jour­ney­man coach Lon Kruger (UNLV), and not com­posed of McDonald's All-Amer­i­cans and led by the saint­ed Coach K? Seemed unlike­ly before it hap­pened, but oh how sweet it is in ret­ro­spect. (2) Texas. Dur­ing the two Kansas games, they were dan­ger­ous­ly weak at guard. Both games would like­ly have been blow-outs if Durant hadn't total­ly gone off in the first 15 min­utes of each. Abrams is a ter­ri­ble ball-han­dler who needs mul­ti­ple screens to get his shot going, and Augustin is com­plete­ly dom­i­nant one moment and out-of-con­trol the next. USC forced these guys to play a big­ger role by tak­ing away Durant's drib­ble; good call, Tim Floyd. (Didn't real­ly think I'd be say­ing those words any­time after 2002). On the oth­er bench, Rick Barnes made no dis­cernible adjust­ments. Again, not that sur­pris­ing, in retrospect.The next round looks most­ly bor­ing to me, though I guess half the games could be excit­ing — UNC-USC, if USC is able to hang on while UNC goes on its peri­od­ic runs, A&M‑Memphis should dis­play some good offen­sive fire­pow­er (unlike Pitt-UCLA, which almost cer­tain­ly will be a grind-it-out snore-fest), and KU-SIU which could be excit­ing if KU has a hard time run­ning its offense against the defense-mind­ed Salukis. Let's hope that it's not excit­ing in this way.

Categories
flickr

Online adventures / my Flickr hecklr

Egg and eagle
Fondue


Ear­li­er this week, I noticed that there had been a lot of activ­i­ty on my Flickr pho­tos. Some­one named "fur­gurl" had com­ment­ed rough­ly 50 times, and the com­ments them­selves were pret­ty unusu­al. Most were lengthy, not the stan­dard "OMG!" or "nice shot!" or what­ev­er. They were also all low­er-case, filled with mis­spellings and weird punc­tu­a­tion, and in almost every instance, pret­ty cru­el. Cru­el com­ments! On Flickr pho­tos! Weird, huh?The exam­ples above are the only halfway clever com­ments, and they were the only ones I kept. (Apolo­gies to Nathaniel, Adlai, and my mom's sausage fondue).The rest focussed on just a few themes: the absence of make-up ("try wear­ing eye-lin­er!" was a com­mon refrain when women were in the pic­ture), out-of-date cloth­ing ("was this pic­ture tak­en in the 70's?" or "who wears THAT?"), beards ("that one is clear­ly a mem­ber of the Tal­iban"), reced­ing hair­lines ("take some of the hair from your face and put it on your head!" appeared in a few places), hair in gen­er­al (peo­ple with curly hair were crit­i­cized for curl­ing their hair too much; I was often advised to wash my hair) and the over­all per­cep­tion that no one in any of the pic­tures had ever been on a date. Lots of them were unin­ten­tion­al­ly fun­ny in that (a) no ratio­nal per­son would have ever noticed what­ev­er "fur­gurl" was point­ing out, (b) the crit­i­cism often betrayed, let's say, a mis­placed fix­a­tion on super­fi­cial stuff, and © each includ­ed all the mak­ings for a sar­cas­tic com­ment except the sar­cas­tic tone, which actu­al­ly kind of made it even more funny.I didn't real­ly want to delete "furgurl's" com­ments. On the oth­er hand, I didn't want the heck­ling to go unan­swered. But the prob­lem was that "fur­gurl" had no Flickr pro­file, no pub­lic pho­tos, and didn't respond to the Flick­r­mail that I sent. I could han­dle anony­mous pub­lic cru­el­ty, real­ly, but only if the play­ing field was lev­el. She nev­er respond­ed to my mes­sage, so I took them down.Here's where it gets weird, though. When I Googled "fur­gurl," many of the results involved the same per­son, one Anne Bar­tee. (Behold, she has a web­site). When I clicked around the site, I found this, a let­ter she wrote to a hypnotherapist/advice colum­nist in the Tolu­can Times. In it, she describes her­self as an "inter­na­tion­al pop artist," and asks some provoca­tive questions:

I've been on TV and radio all over the world, and also in "Bill­board" mag­a­zine. Can you tell me if there is a link between "bad cul­ture" and pub­lic mis­per­cep­tion of what is tru­ly good? Rap and hip hop and sim­plis­tic drum and bass beats have dom­i­nat­ed music for far too long, encour­ag­ing the pub­lic to embrace yet low­er stan­dards. But sure­ly the pub­lic can­not believe that this is good music. I won­der; is this an exam­ple of the say­ing, "You can sell them garbage if you paint it gold?"

The tone, not to men­tion the rea­son­ing, sounds famil­iar. Here's a tip for all you hip-hop stars: Wash your hair! Try some eye­lin­er! And wear some fash­ion­able clothes once in a while, for cry­ing out loud! Anne, if you ever read and com­ment on this, I'm expect­ing your A‑game. Don't pull any punches.

Categories
ixd

ESPN.com / March (information) madness

To the edi­tors of ESPN.com,I vis­it your site every day, mul­ti­ple times a day. Today, I decid­ed that I've had enough. You need to stop. What­ev­er you're doing, just STOP. Years ago, ESPN.com was a use­ful col­lec­tion of online sports infor­ma­tion. It was rel­a­tive­ly easy to nav­i­gate, scan and read. Today, it is a dark, sprawl­ing infor­ma­tion apoc­a­lypse — the Blade Run­ner cityscape of web­sites. Remem­ber that ear­ly scene in Blade Run­ner, where Deckard is read­ing the news­pa­per while the ad blimp cir­cles over­head, repeat­ing the words: "A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies"? That's how I feel when I'm read­ing ESPN.com. The bar­rage of ads, news, tick­ers, scrolling con­tent wid­gets, opin­ion, com­men­tary, analy­sis, what­ev­er it is that Scoop Jack­son writes, and teasers for upcom­ing events on your cable net­work is an absolute mess, the kind of mess that makes CNBC seem Tufte-esque in comparison.

The ultimate dog's breakfast

Where did you go wrong? Years ago, you plas­tered that huge ban­ner ad across the top. This was annoy­ing, but plen­ty of sites (used to) do this and I learned to ignore it. Then there was ESPN Motion — or, as a friend refers to it "ESPN Suck-tion." It's a video play­er that peri­od­i­cal­ly demands that you stop read­ing to deal with a video ad or Sports­Cen­ter clip it has just begun broad­cast­ing. Over time, you added more and more flash­es and dis­trac­tions — anoth­er ban­ner ad above the con­tent, two lev­els of tab nav­i­ga­tion, mul­ti­ple areas of peri­od­i­cal­ly refresh­ing con­tent, and links in the mast­head (!). Final­ly, you mod­i­fied your pop-up ads so that they defy pop-up block­ing soft­ware (most of it, any­way). I have to ask: DO YOU REALIZE THAT THEY ONLY OTHER WEBSITES THAT DO THIS ARE SELLING EITHER PIRATED SOFTWARE OR PORN? Did you guys raid Asta­lav­ista to hire your cur­rent online prod­uct man­ag­er? Actu­al­ly, maybe it was MySpace or Col­lege­Hu­mor. To be fair to Col­lege­Hu­mor, though, it could teach ESPN some things about lay­out and navigation.Now, for any­one out there who wants to take the first step toward mak­ing ESPN read­able again, I sug­gest the following:

  1. Down­load and install Fire­fox.
  2. Install the Adblock add-on
  3. Restart Fire­fox, and sub­scribe to the first item in the Adblock list of filters
  4. Nav­i­gate to ESPN.com, observe that all ads have been removed. As the Sports­Cen­ter anchors would say, "Vic­to-ree!"

To the edi­tors of ESPN.com, I sim­ply request that you (a) kill the pop-up ads, (b) tear the home­page apart (and re-assem­ble it with the idea that it should facil­i­tate access to con­tent, rather than pre­vent it), © take a look at what the NYT has been up to in terms of inte­grat­ing tex­tu­al and mul­ti­me­dia con­tent, and (d) don't try to cram every con­ceiv­able prod­uct onto every page. Sim­ple, right?

Categories
basketball kansas basketball

Pre-post-season thoughts / Containing Kevin Durant

In a pre­vi­ous post, I sug­gest­ed that the Kansas defense must "con­tain" Kevin Durant, there­by imply­ing that Kevin Durant could, in fact, be con­tained. I said: "he's going to get 10–15 points no mat­ter what you do," and any­thing in excess of that was a mat­ter of the oppos­ing team's defense shut­ting him down. Against Kansas on Sat­ur­day, he rat­tled off 12 points in a row between the 17:41 and the 14:14 marks in the first half, and had 20 points just five min­utes lat­er. (Thanks to ESPN's play-by-play for this). And it wasn't like the Texas offense was get­ting him a lot of open looks: He was bury­ing every shot, no mat­ter who was guard­ing him and no mat­ter where he was on the court. 22 feet away, Julian Wright's hand in his face: Rat­tled in. Pulling up from 27 feet at the tail end of a fast break: Swish. Texas didn't even need to run an offense, they just need­ed to get him the ball and then wor­ry about get­ting back and play­ing defense. In the first half, this worked. In the sec­ond half, dif­fer­ent sto­ry. Two things changed (at least): Bran­don Rush was on Durant, rather than Julian Wright. It was hard to say whether Durant just cooled off, or whether Rush cooled him off, but the fact was that he missed 4 of 5 shots before going down with a twist­ed ankle. Sec­ond thing: Anoth­er play­er imme­di­ate­ly dou­ble-teamed Durant on the perime­ter when­ev­er he got the ball, and Texas failed to exploit this for easy low-post bas­kets. (Nice call by Coach Self. Not sure why he didn't go to this ear­li­er, but I'm just glad that it worked). At the same time, I can't believe Texas couldn't exploit this. I mean, teams must be doing this all the time. Why weren't they able to find Dami­an James for easy bas­kets under­neath, or Augustin on cuts to the bas­ket? (I share Bill Simmons's assess­ment of Texas coach Rick Barnes, by the way: "How can you not run more plays for Kevin Durant? Post him up and he has 27 dif­fer­ent ways to score. Curl him off picks and he makes 15-foot­ers like they're layups.") Speak­ing of bad coach­ing, I was mys­ti­fied that Texas didn't start foul­ing soon­er. Kansas wasn't even in the bonus until the 2:20 mark, and Texas didn't start foul­ing until the 1:18 mark when they were down by 8. Russ­Rob missed the front-end of a one-and-one, and Texas cut the lead to 6. Then, on con­sec­u­tive pos­ses­sions, Mario makes one of two; Russ­Rob makes one of two; Julian makes one of two. HEART ATTACK TIME. Instead of a 6‑point lead, it's a 3‑point lead, and Texas has a chance to tie. This is a huge, huge issue going into the post-sea­son, both for the Hawks chances and my own phys­i­cal and men­tal health.Incidentally, with this in mind, I deeply enjoyed a recent piece by Gene Wein­garten about FT shoot­ing: "If I took a year off and prac­ticed all day, every day, I could then defeat the NBA's best free-throw shoot­er in head-to-head com­pe­ti­tion" (via kot­tke).

Categories
basketball kansas basketball

Big Saturday / KU-UT thoughts and predictions

Watch­ing the Long­horns repeat­ed­ly (and ulti­mate­ly suc­cess­ful­ly) dri­ve a stake into the heart of Acie Law IV last night, I got to think­ing about Saturday's show­down between the Long­horns and the Hawks. (I also pen­ciled in A&M for the Final Four. Is there any team in the nation — oth­er than UCLA, I guess — that has such a per­fect blend of March-ready qual­i­ties — go-to guy, great defense, grit, gump­tion? Total­ly g'ed up). Any­way, here's the big stuff that KU has to address:Con­tain Kevin Durant. I know, I know. Obvi­ous. Duh. Every­one tries to do this. But I think Kansas has a chance to suc­ceed. Yes, he's going to get 10–15 points no mat­ter what you do. He'll be every­where — around the bas­ket, out on the perime­ter, get­ting put-backs, rolling off picks and tak­ing jumpers. The chal­lenge for the Hawks is to make sure he doesn't get 30–35, to lim­it the num­ber of open looks he gets on the perime­ter, and to make sure that he doesn't get any­where near a rhythm like he had against Texas Tech (37 points, 23 rebounds). Durant thrives when teams don't have some­one who can get in his face when he's away from the bas­ket. At 6'9", he's going to shoot over the kind of guy who will take away the dri­ve, but he's also fast and agile enough to go around most guys his size. All of that said, I think he's going to have prob­lems with KU's long, fast, and high­ly dis­rup­tive defend­ers — Julian Wright and Bran­don Rush. I think it's total­ly pos­si­ble for them to con­tain him, as long as they stay out of foul trou­ble. Dis­rupt the sup­ply chain. DJ Augustin kept them in the game last night when Durant went into a funk. In many games this year, I've seen him slice through defens­es, get to the bas­ket, and gen­er­al­ly cre­ate the kind of chaos that leads to easy put-backs for Durant. Mario Chalmers, Rus­sell Robin­son, and Sher­ron Collins have to keep him from dri­ving, and com­pli­cate his dis­tri­b­u­tion of the ball. Run them ragged, and don't get beat by AJ Abrams. Or any­one like him. Last year, the rel­a­tive­ly qui­et Abrams explod­ed for four three-point­ers dur­ing a first half run, sin­gle­hand­ed­ly demor­al­iz­ing the Hawks. The good news is that, this year, the Long­horn weapon­ry is far from secret. Abrams, Augustin and Durant play pret­ty much all game, every game. This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the rel­a­tive­ly deep Hawks to be relent­less in their defense — Maybe even press a lit­tle? C'mon, Coach. Gim­mick defens­es have stunned KU twice recent­ly (A&M, OU). Why not break one out once in a while? Mak­ing free throws. The mere thought that this game will come down to free throws makes my stom­ach hurt. The last five min­utes of the Okla­homa game was excru­ci­at­ing in that it almost turned into A&M, Part II. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it's no secret that Kansas can't shoot free throws. They're going to get fouled late in the game; with any luck, Chalmers and Robin­son will con­trol the ball and hit their freebies.Lastly, Collins and Arthur must con­tribute, and Rush has to get his shots. It's pret­ty amaz­ing that the Hawks could get by OU with­out con­tri­bu­tions from any of these guys, but there's no way that a win ver­sus Texas is pos­si­ble with­out them.

Categories
kansas basketball

Kansas basketball / A late-season report card

After the loss to A&M, I jot­ted down some notes that I titled "Resolved & Unre­solved." In the sub­se­quent five games, there has been a migra­tion of some items from one list to the oth­er, most­ly in the direc­tion of res­o­lu­tion, which is nice. 

Resolved

  • Rota­tion. Coach Self seems like he's found the right starters, and his bench guys inject ener­gy almost every time. This was not the case last year, and even ear­li­er this year, when Kaun, Jack­son, Wright and Hawkins (last year) were in and out of his dog­house and the start­ing line­up. I'm not get­ting too excit­ed about this, because it's one of the more ele­men­tary require­ments for any deep advance­ment in the tournament.
  • Pace. Dur­ing Self's first year, it was clear that Miles, Lang­ford, and Simien all strug­gled with his insis­tence on cohe­sive half-court defense, which pre­vent­ed a lot of the sprint­ing out that char­ac­ter­ized Roy's offense (and prob­a­bly was a major part of why those guys came to KU). Lang­ford espe­cial­ly seemed to strug­gle when he wasn't get­ting mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties for (rel­a­tive­ly) easy tran­si­tion bas­kets. This year's team seems to have ful­ly embraced Self's approach, while also run­ning a pret­ty mean fast break when they get the opportunity.
  • Defense. It's Coach Self's call­ing card, and it ensures that KU is com­pet­i­tive in every game. There isn't a team in the coun­try right now who has a defin­i­tive answer to it; I say this with con­fi­dence because Flori­da is real­ly the only team that would appear to be dom­i­nant, and we all know what hap­pened there.
  • Bench. A new­ly resolved mat­ter, thanks to both Sher­ron Collins and Shady (whose huge rebounds late in the K‑State game allowed KU to steadi­ly pull away). Dar­nell Jack­son is always sol­id, and occa­sion­al­ly he is a total badass. Watch­ing him tear­ing shit off the glass and kick­ing it out to Russ­Rob is a com­fort­ing sight, espe­cial­ly when Kaun and Shady seem to have so much trou­ble lay­ing down the law in the paint.

Unresolved

  • The go-to guy. Yes, Collins has emerged as a major late-game threat. Is he a true go-to guy yet, though? I'm not sure. Coach Self gave him the ball in last pos­ses­sion of the A&M game, rather than Chalmers, Rush, or Wright, so clear­ly the staff believes that Collins can do it. He's got the mox­ie, not to men­tion the game, for mak­ing big plays late in the game, but the rea­son that I think that this is still unre­solved is that, usu­al­ly, when you've got a go-to guy, the rest of the team seems relaxed and com­fort­able, and this com­fort trans­lates into wins in close games. Thus far, I seen very lit­tle com­fort dur­ing close games (a la Mis­souri, Iowa State, A&M, Texas Tech). I start­ed to see more of it dur­ing K‑State, but it still took some luck — Rush's three-point play after Julian's ter­ri­ble no-look some­how skit­tered through four K‑State defend­ers — and some K‑State mis­takes in order for KU to escape with a win. Nev­er­the­less, this is get­ting bet­ter, no ques­tion. What needs to hap­pen: Kansas needs to win an A&M‑style game, a down-to-the-wire game in which the oth­er team keeps bring­ing it (like Flori­da), and in that game the go-to guy needs to exe­cute on every pos­ses­sion, like Acie Law of A&M did.
  • Post play. If this team didn't rely on scor­ing in the post, I'd say that Sasha Kaun has been pret­ty sol­id. He rarely makes a bad pass; he picks up the occa­sion­al stu­pid foul (but seems to be get­ting bet­ter in this regard); he estab­lish­es posi­tion well and draws defend­ers. Defen­sive­ly, he's rarely out of posi­tion. Lit­tle of this ever makes it on a stat sheet, and all of it con­tributes to open looks for oth­er play­ers on the offen­sive end, and few­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for the oppo­nent on the defen­sive end. So he's sol­id, except for the fact that he becomes offen­sive­ly inept at real­ly inop­por­tune times. It's hard to ignore the many, many occa­sions when he has failed to fin­ish the bun­nies; if he gets fouled, we all know what we're in for. Shady, on the oth­er hand, sim­ply needs to get hun­gry. All of the tools are there; they just need to be brought to bear with a lit­tle pas­sion. Not that I'm going to make any Rudy Gay com­par­isons. There's no way that Self would ever allow Shady to con­duct him­self with the non­cha­lance that Gay rou­tine­ly brought to UConn. What needs to hap­pen: Shady needs to show more of what he showed against K‑State; Kaun needs to con­vert his easy bas­kets; Jack­son needs to keep doing what he does.
  • Easy bas­kets. Free throws fall into this cat­e­go­ry; so do layups. I've nev­er seen a team blow so many open, close range buck­ets, or brick as many FTs. Jack­son and Kaun are approach­ing Richard Scott-lev­el incom­pe­tence in this regard, and even Chalmers and Russ­Rob (admit­ted­ly, my favorite of the cur­rent Hawks, esp. after he got in Carti­er Martin's face dur­ing the K‑State game) isn't 100% reli­able down the stretch. And Rush missed the two FT's after Huggy's T, which could have put KU up by 7. (Good thing Collins hit a three in the ensu­ing pos­ses­sion). Any­way, one virtue of Roy's teams is that they seem to get 10–15 easy bas­kets every game: fast break layups and dunks; post guys who get sprung open by a back screen; open jumpers for the big guys trail­ing the fast break. Self's teams must get few­er of these looks, which may be okay since they seem to have trou­ble con­vert­ing them any­way. What needs to hap­pen: It may be impos­si­ble for this team to become a good FT-shoot­ing team, but it's emi­nent­ly pos­si­ble for them to make layups, espe­cial­ly Kaun.
Categories
inside art san francisco the ancient past visual

Small worlds / Phil Collins, The World Won't Listen

Flickr photo


I met Phil Collins (the British artist, not the British pop star1) at a bar in Brook­lyn in the mid 90's. At the time, I didn't know him as "the British artist," I knew him only as my friend Tom's leg­endary boyfriend. I remem­ber lit­tle of the night, but I do remem­ber a hub­bub accom­pa­ny­ing Phil Collins's wan­der­ings around the bar; he seemed to cre­ate some kind of event wher­ev­er he went. At some point, he approached the table with two tall drinks, placed them in front of me, and said some­thing like "These are from an admir­er of yours." As it turned out, they were from an admir­er of his, and this admir­er per­ceived, shall we say, a lack of grat­i­tude when his drinks were giv­en away. There was a con­fronta­tion, as I recall, and Phil said some­thing like, "Well, I'm sor­ry, I nev­er turn down a drink, but you can't hon­est­ly expect me to drink [dis­be­liev­ing voice] rum & coke?" (Or what­ev­er the drinks were). All of which serves as back­ground to my reac­tion to Phil Collins's piece, The World Won't Lis­ten, at SFMOMA, which was pret­ty excel­lent. The premise is pret­ty sim­ple: He filmed young Turk­ish folks singing along to The Smiths best-of com­pi­la­tion "The World Won't Lis­ten." The effect, on the oth­er hand, is deep and res­o­nant. The Smiths' odes to teenager­dom — all vac­il­lat­ing emo­tions, frus­trat­ed inar­tic­u­la­tions, pierc­ing moments of under­stand­ing, sex­u­al ambi­gu­i­ty — take on a deep­er social dimen­sion through the voic­es of (in many of the cas­es) non-Eng­lish speak­ers. Add to this the fact that the singers are Mid­dle East­ern, and it becomes dif­fi­cult to avoid a polit­i­cal read­ing. Songs like "There Is A Light That Nev­er Goes Out" sounds less the over-dra­mat­ic nihilism of a West­ern teenag­er and more like a very real plea from a teenag­er caught in an increas­ing­ly fun­da­men­tal­ist world:

Take me out tonight­Be­cause I want to see peo­ple and IWant to see lifeDriv­ing in your carOh, please don't drop me home­Be­cause it's not my home, it's theirHome, and I'm wel­come no more 

Real­ly impressive.Cool: a web post­ing for the event that he filmed.1 Speak­ing of the British pop star, here's a clas­sic: The video for "Sus­su­dio" [YouTube]

Categories
ixd lit

National nightmares / Restoring a modicum of utility to the Complete New Yorker

I was one of the suck­ers who pre-ordered The Com­plete New York­er mag­a­zine. I am a long-long-time New York­er read­er, and the entice­ment was just too pow­er­ful — 8 DVDs filled with 60+ years of cul­tur­al com­men­tary, quirky car­toons and cool cov­er art, all in a dis­tinct high­brow-yet-prac­ti­cal-mind­ed voice and scanned in at super-high-res? For a few extreme dorks, this was intense­ly excit­ing. Expec­ta­tion-wise, it was like the release of a smar­ty­pants Playsta­tion 3.Upon arrival, it also resem­bled Playsta­tion 3, in that it sucked, big-time. My expe­ri­ence improved slight­ly after The Occa­sion­al Scriven­er post­ed a hack that allows you to copy issues from the 8 inde­pen­dent DVDs onto your hard dri­ve. An extreme dork after my own heart. Many thanks.The real­ly big, un-hack­able prob­lem: The search tool is a house of hor­rors. Imag­ine that you've final­ly been intro­duced to a long-time idol, let's say Bob Dylan, and he agrees to come home with you and sit in your liv­ing room and tell you any­thing you want to know. But then when you ask him to tell you the com­plete sto­ry of the "Judas!" show, you real­ize that he doesn't speak Eng­lish; he just sits there silent­ly, impas­sive. That's how this thing makes me feel. The whole point of get­ting Com­plete New York­er is to have your mind blown by the wealth of cool stuff in the old­er issues. There­fore, the chal­lenge faced by the inter­ac­tion design­ers is to facil­i­tate get­ting at that stuff, i.e. MAKE IT EASY TO SEARCH for what you want. The shot below rep­re­sents the Pro­crustean bed on which each searcher must lie.

The real­ly egre­gious crimes have been doc­u­ment­ed else­where, but I would just like to add: 

  • Per­for­mance that reminds me of the 90's. If this had been released in 1998, I could eas­i­ly for­give the lag every­time a but­ton is pressed or a search is exe­cut­ed. But real­ly, when I type "white" into the gen­er­al search field, and it churns for near­ly 20 sec­onds, I don't know, it makes me homi­ci­dal­ly mad. Anger at slow per­for­mance is like road rage — once you've got it, you can't get rid of it, no mat­ter how much you avoid being in a car.
  • Why the cru­el and unusu­al search com­plex­i­ty? Search­ing is nev­er made eas­i­er by sur­fac­ing every pos­si­ble method of doing so right off the bat. Google — the world's most pop­u­lar search inter­face — seems like an effec­tive guide here. Start sim­ple, and reveal sophis­ti­ca­tion when nec­es­sary. There aren't real­ly even that many ways I could con­ceive of search­ing the Com­plete New York­er — author, date arti­cle title, date range … That's about it.
  • Wast­ed ver­ti­cal real estate. Near­ly 33% of the ver­ti­cal space is con­sumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars seg­ment­ing the screen. Com­bined with the often biz­zare and most­ly use­less "Abstract" below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users (I) make deci­sions on what to launch in the view­er. Unforgiveable.
  • What the heck is this thing called?. The fact that the search results do not con­tain a high­ly valu­able piece of infor­ma­tion — umm, the title of the piece — makes it a pain in the butt to scan (for instance) the sto­ries of JD Salinger, the assort­ed work of EB White. Actu­al­ly, pret­ty much every search is com­pli­cat­ed by this.

I could go on and on, but I won't. Here's my sug­ges­tion for CNY 2.0: Con­sol­i­date the exist­ing wid­gets into one wid­get with mod­est dynam­ic behav­iors. The wid­get would have one sim­ple ini­tial menu that deter­mines how you want to search — key­word, author, issue, depart­ment. This selec­tion then deter­mines the fil­ters you'll need — if you choose "key­word," maybe you get "depart­ment" and "date" as fil­ters. In doing this, you buy back all of that chrome real estate, allow­ing more results to be dis­played. Win, win, win. Of course none of this mat­ters much if data­base per­for­mance isn't improved, but here it is anyway:A modest proposal

Categories
inside art san francisco visual

Missed former SF locals / Chris Johanson

Chris Johanson

Once upon a time, a San Fran­cis­co res­i­dent strolling around these chilly city streets could brush by Chris Johan­son pret­ty often. Even before I knew who he was, I'd seen him around the Mis­sion a lot; when I final­ly con­nect­ed the dots, I real­ized that he was the guy who had drawn lit­tle signs and bits that I'd been lov­ing for years. As I recall, he drew a lit­tle guy above the uri­nal at the Uptown (or some­where I peed a lot); either way, his sim­ple fig­ures and their cryp­ti­cal­ly expressed thoughts would be burned into my brain for hours after I saw them. He moved to Port­land a while ago, and San Fran­cis­co has been a lit­tle less visu­al­ly excit­ing ever since. For one thing, his beard is an inspi­ra­tion to any aspir­ing bear­do, and his lead­er­ship in this regard will be sore­ly missed. More: A cool pro­file of Chris from Spark, a local PBS art show.

Categories
basketball

Geniuses / In praise of Bill Walton

Whether he's crit­i­ciz­ing a par­tic­u­lar play­er ("Tony Park­er just made the worst pass in the his­to­ry of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion") or the refs ("Why even have a rule­book?"), or extolling the virtues of a bench­warmer who hits a cou­ple of shots in a row ("If Eric Piatkows­ki con­tin­ues play­ing at this lev­el, he's going to replace Jer­ry West on the NBA logo"), Bill Wal­ton nev­er fails to amuse dur­ing an NBA broad­cast. His com­men­tary is a mas­ter­ly blend of satire, deep knowl­edge of the NBA, and cur­mud­geon­ly dis­dain for play­ground antics and run-and-gun slop­pi­ness ("Cut­ti­no Mob­ley has just made the two worst shot attempts in the his­to­ry of this proud Hous­ton Rock­ets fran­chise.") Too bad he's been rel­e­gat­ed to the broad­cast B‑team; I miss his pres­ence dur­ing the big games. If you're look­ing for Wal­ton quote col­lec­tions, check out The Great Bill Wal­ton, Goril­la Mask, Com­plete Sports, and this real­ly bizarre ESPN pod­cast in which Bill makes repeat­ed ref­er­ences to some Brazil­ian celebrity's Inter­net sex video, prais­es Bren­dan Hay­wood ("keep run­ning, it's good for you"), tells a pret­ty good sto­ry about Lar­ry Bird mak­ing a series of three-point­ers and bank­ing each one in, and dis­cuss­es his love of, and frus­tra­tion with, cross­word puz­zles ("What is a 10-let­ter word for 'surge'?! I was crushed when I couldn't come up with … 'esca­la­tion.'").