The Four Kingpins of the Wire

Stringer wanted to be a businessman. Prop Joe, at heart, was a hustler, not a drug dealer. Prop Joe just wanted to get over on you, and drugs just happened to be the way to do it. Avon almost had too MUCH swagger. He was like Michael Jordan without the athletic ability, so he competed elsewhere. Avon also had a critical weakness, which is that he cared about family and people too much.  Remember, if Avon wasn't so bothered by D'Angelo's murder, the tension between him and Stringer never gets that bad, they never betray each other, and they either co-opt or destroy Marlo.  Stringer has the co-option underway with that scene in the row home. 

Marlo? Man, Marlo was about nothing but killing and maintaining his rep.  Please note that I offer this observation not as a criticism of Marlo. Marlo had absolutely nothing else in his life other than the Game, which probably is why he was arguably its best player. He doesn't get too concerned with profit maximization, hustling the other guy, or family. In time, if he stayed in the Game long enough, inevitably he would have gotten sloppy or bored and slipped just enough for some other kid to jump up and take the crown.  I assume Avon and Stringer were a lot like Marlo when they were coming up.  

But that time hadn't come yet.  Marlo was nothing but pure, unadulterated hunger. He was a great follow up to Avon and Stringer because he's NOT cool and he doesn't have much game (as witnessed by how awkward he is with the ladies). All he has is the willingness to do absolutely anything to protect his sh!t. In the end, Marlo best understands the code of the streets: you have to do anything to survive, and you must throw away anything that gets in the way without a moment's hesitation, like some nightmare version of Buddhism.

Rush Limbaugh

I finally heard the clip, courtesy of The Black Guy Who Tips.  The underrated part of this whole surreal, hilarious saga:

Rush Limbaugh thinks that the amount of birth control pills a woman takes is related to the amount of sex she is having.

Now, Rush's ignorance may intentional.  He may be trying to conflate the pill with RU-486.  You don't get to be a billionaire off a talk radio show without being smart.  But I prefer the other interpretation, which is that he really thinks you need to take more birth control pills the more you have sex.

Tee hee hee.

With that in mind, caption this picture.

Rajon Rondo and the Cul-De-Sac of Doom

NBA fans know very well that some teams are trapped in the hopeless middle.  More than any other league, one needs a transcendent superstar to win an NBA title.  If your doesn't have one, the best way to get one is to  live in a city like New York, Miami, or Los Angeles that a superstar will consider when he becomes a free agent.  Otherwise, the best way to get a superstar is to be so awful that you can get a high draft pick and draft a superstar.

What that means for the contemporary NBA is as follows

1. Have a superstar, and have hope for right now: Miami (the favorites), Oklahoma City, Chicago, Orlando (if Dwight stays), the Clippers, the Lakers, Memphis (if Z-Bo comes back and is really the guy he was in last year's playoffs), and Dallas
2. Have young potential superstars on their roster, so might get there in a few years: Cleveland, Washington, and Sacramento (BIG CUZ COME UP!!)
3. Truly terrible teams with a good chance of getting the first pick in this year's draft, aka the Anthony Davis Sweepstakes: Charlotte and New Orleans
4. Completely Screwed: Everyone else

None of what I just wrote is news to NBA fans.  Today, however, I'd like to think of the plight of players on Class Four teams.  Specifically, let's talk about Rajon Rondo.

I am a known Rondo hater, because he can't shoot and he is always scowling, a habit he may have picked up from former teammate, close friend, and officially TWEDP enemy Kendrick Perkins.  However, in last night's discussion with This Substantial Nonsense, I realized how unfair the NBA media and public are to Rondo.  Rondo is not good enough to be the best player on a title team, but he is still one of the 15 best players in the league.  Besides his complete inability to make a jump shot, he does literally everything.  He is a one-man fast break who is fantastic in transition.  He defends as well as any point guard in the league.  He and Russell Westbrook are the two heirs to Jason Kidd's title of Best Rebounding Point Guard.  Most of all, he finds the open man and puts his teammates in the best possible position to score better than any point guard east of Steve Nash.

And what is Rondo's reward for his transcendent play?  He plays with one star at the very tail edge of his prime (Peezy), a star who has aged into an incredibly valuable role player (Ray Allen), and an over-the-hill bully who likes to scream at things, as long as he knows they won't scream back (man, I hate KG).  His GM is terrible, so the rest of his roster has one or two valuable pieces (peace to Brandon Bass) and a whole lot of crap.  Because everyone is old, the Celtics can't run, so Rondo can't play the way that would be most effective for him.  Worst of all, he deals with a pampered, ungrateful fan base that recognizes he's the team's best player, which entitles them to blame him because, OMG, Boston fans are so tortured, we haven't won a major sports title in NINE WHOLE MONTHS.

So, of course, now Rondo's name is in trade rumors, and because the Celtics have a horrible GM, a trade is possible.  Hell, because the Celtics aren't going anywhere, maybe the horrible GM is trying to bottom out and get a ticket in the Anthony Davis Raffle.  A trade would be the best thing that could happen to Rondo.  He'd go from a pampered fan base to a place that might actually appreciate the staggering diversity of his talents.  His new team might not be populated with fossils, so they could run more, which would make Rondo even more valuable.

In a new situation, maybe we could learn to appreciate Rondo for all the things he does and not the one conspicuous thing he does not do.  Maybe we could take a lesson from that and not blame Rondo, Andre Igoudala, Josh Smith, and every other guy with a noticeable flaw in their otherwise spectacular game just because they're not one of the five best players in the league.

Why You're Wrong about the NBA All-Star Game

There are three types of people who talk about how awful the NBA All-Star Game is.

One, there are the outright racists, although secretly, they must adore a good deal of the All-Star Weekend proceedings.  If you think I just took a veiled shot at Chris Brown and Nikki Minaj, you are incorrect, because it is veiled no longer.

Two, there are hardcore NBA fans.  For some reason, a large number of the people who love the league the most feel the need to sh!t on an exhibition.  The biggest problem with this class of hater is that it provides the intellectual arguments that the third, far larger class of haters employ for evil purposes

By far the most damaging class of All-Star haters are the guys who don't watch sports but feel the need to express forceful opinions on them, or as they are more commonly known, Colin Cowherd.

Three classes of haters, all with different agendas but united in their complete and utter wrongness.

Because the NBA All-Star game is fantastic.  You know what was awesome?  Almost everything that happened at this year's all-star weekend.

We had a rookie/sophomore game that featured Blake Griffin, Jeremy Lin, a pissed-off John Wall, Kyrie Irving, and the ever-present threat of  Big Cuz undoing all of the progress he's made and doing something monumentally stupid.

We had an All-Star game where Kevin Durant tried to make a claim to being the best player in the league, Lebron James beating him down with a fourth-quarter for the ages, and Kobe proving he's still the league alpha dog by talking smack to the game's best player while Lebron imploded.

And the best part?  We had one of the worst slam-dunk contests ever.  Complaining about bad TV is the surest sign that life has passed you by.  In the social media age, there is NOTHING better than bad live TV. Nothing produces more comedy, if you're subscribed to the right Twitter feeds.  Plus, even a bad slam-dunk contest featured a scrub that will never get minutes in a real game executing a double alley oop.  That should give even the most casual of Colin Cowherds an appreciation of the sheer amount of athleticism in the league.

Three Things Everyone Should Know About Comics and Politics

1) To know Glorious Godfrey is to understand the modern Republican Party.  Godfrey is a reverend of evil who preaches to his followers that belief in a Dark God justifies their ability to discriminate against, despoil, and kill all those who are different from them.

2) Likewise, the 2008 election of Barack Obama is the most Forever People moment in American political history.  The Forever People represent the eternal spirit of youth, that questions everything because they refuse to accept imperfection and compromise and believe that life can be a beautiful paradise.

Seriously, just look at this picture.  Don't you wish you read more comics?

3) Jack Kirby created both Godfrey and the Forever People in about three months of comics.  There's a reason Kirby was the King and why The Fourth World Saga elicits such glee.

BONUS THING: Now is a great time to start reading DC Comics again, because Iris West has adopted a new identity called Pandora and is going to ask the Justice League to help her stop her husband Wally, who has turned evil and is using the Speed Force to destroy the universe.  FLASH FACT

The Black Swan, Speed Racer, and Why Good is Overrated

Last night, I watched The Black Swan for the first time.

Dawg, HER ARMS TURNED TO WINGS.

It has come to my attention that some fools didn't like this movie.  Specifically, some fools be saying that this movie is melodramatic camp filled with ridiculous imagery.

Fools, STOP BEING FOOLS!!  Of COURSE it's melodramatic camp!  Some among you might recognize that there's nothing fundamentally wrong and a lot right with well-executed melodrama.  But I'd argue that The Black Swan is cool and amazing beyond any camp elements.  I love a well told, well executed plot as much as anyone, but to me, that's not what movies do best.  Movies have the ability to take advantage of image and movement.  Where a movie like Frost/Nixon, which I also love, uses plot as the device to engage the intelligent viewer, The Black Swan uses imagery, psychology, and melodrama.  The Black Swan people spend just as much time thinking about what Natalie Portman should look like as the best traditional playwrites thought about crafting a coherent plot.

Besides, in the postmodern world, do you really care about why a really cool image hits the screen?  Of course you don't.  You care whether the sheer specter of Cthulhu coming out of the water is the most terrifying, nightmarish image you can think of, precisely because it comes from a place that doesn't entirely make sense to you.  Does it hit you on a really primal, pre-rational level?  Does it get into your dreams at night?  Does it mess with your head, stick with you, blow open your mind to new possibilities about things that crawl around in muck hidden from everyday experience?  These are the questions that matter for the most meaningful art of our age.

That might seem to lead to down the road where I'm apologizing for the Michael Bays and James Camerons of the world, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Those lazy hacks are just playing to people's expectations and giving them comfort food.  In of themselves, special effects do not blow people's minds, because special effects have become the expectation for a certain type of film.  The people behind movies like The Black Swan, Speed Racer, and other such movies are working as hard as they can to expand our horizons.  In true postmodern/hip-hop style, The Black Swan blends genres to create the effect.  I can't imagine how the jerk marketing executives at Fox Searchlight felt when they started watching what they probably thought was going to be a beautiful little dance movie with Queen Amidala that they could sell to families at Christmas only to realize that it became a psychological piece about 30 minutes in and a complete psychedelic mindfck for the last half hour.

Look, man, I don't know how many ways to say it: the organizing principle of TWEDP is that human perception is limited, and that anything that gets us out of our rational mindset to consider what we have previously excluded is a great thing.  I could never, ever, ever have imagined that a movie like The Black Swan, or the images within it, could be imagined by people.  That makes it a win.

College: Is Rick Santorum Right?

Santorum called Obama a "snob" because he thinks everyone should go to college.  Yes, this is the same Rick Santorum who is running for the presidential nomination of the party that screams "class warfare" at the first hint of any government policy that helps the 99 percent.   This stump speech is rooted in basic resentment of fancy book learnin that attacks the supposed right to impose wrong beliefs about evolution and global warming on America's children.   If you choose to roll your eyes and move on with your day, I ain't mad at cha.

However, at the core of this particular bit of Santorum nonsense is a real debate that the United States should be having.  For my dissertation I interviewed a nationally known superintendent and scholar who lamented the same trend.  He served a rural school district that saw its mission not just to get students ready for college but also to make sure that students stayed healthy during high school and could get jobs after.  In other words, he recognized a real educational dilemma that Santorum's rhetoric only points to and exploits.

At most, only about 60 percent of kids finish college, and the numbers are well below 50 percent for black and Latino students.  We need to do better for these kids, and part of that effort should be increased opportunities to go to school and increased support for students for whom college may be more difficult than the average.  But especially with the price of college going up, I'm not sure that our society can afford to get everyone to college.  Even if we can, we need to ensure that those students who choose not to go to college have acceptable life opportunities.