as the year turns


We mark the turn of the year we have in common, and the turn of the year that is ours especially, because it marks our birth, our inauguration day. Remembering my birthday this year was almost unavoidable, since it was portentously mentioned many times a day on television for weeks, even months. Countdown to June 30 even had its own banner, though not yet its own theme music on cable news.

Then on June 28 the surprise backroom transfer of Iraqi sovereignty was accomplished---no big deal, just harried-looking men huddling around a piece of paper that could have been a cartoon somebody copied off the Internet, and suddenly the countdown was dropped, and June 30 not mentioned again. So my birthday went by as quietly as usual after all.

There will be important birthdays marked soon-George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were both born the same summer I was. We're all of the age that birthday fuss becomes reserved for the turn of decades. But probably more for me than for them, this coming year assumes a more defining importance. G.W. will either be president or an ex-president next year, but there's not that much difference in identity once you've been one. Bill Clinton is being pretty smart about his authorial authority---he understands the effects, large and small, with the power of celebrity creating real contact of his words with millions of readers and non-readers of his book, so he's written things that others have written better, but without the audience and the power to reach them. I do wince when I hear of him bragging that he had no writer's block. He also apparently had no editor block, internal or external. He may have written a fine book, there are no rules about that, but writing is not his trade. Still, could you even imagine G.W. writing a thousand pages---or even reading them?

But where was I? Oh yes, my birthday. In late June I picked up a book--a gift Margaret gave me on some earlier occasion, Christmas or birthday:Original Self by soul man Thomas Moore. It's comprised of short thematic chapters, similar to his book of meditations some years ago (which Margaret also gave me.) At least that's how I had been reading it, a chapter now and then, perhaps before bed.

But in late June one passage I read struck me, with a certain birthday appropriateness. I read a few more chapters then, and realized that although each chapter was self-contained, the chapters could also be read sequentially, as a kind of organic exploration. So I made that my birthday project, reading this book front to back.

As usual I found passages and thoughts that pertained to various simmering writing projects (even a Star Trek reference) but I also placed little checkmarks here and there where a thought jumped out at me. So just for fun, and to mark the occasion, I've typed up those line, and offer them to you.

I'll begin with the passage that first got my attention, and then proceed sequentially in terms of the pages where the quotes appear, repeating that passage in its proper place. Of course, the quotations take on more power with the surrounding contexts.

Thomas Moore has a genial face, a soft manner in his writing and speaking, which helped attract a following for his first best-seller, Care of the Soul. He achieved the popular success that his mentor James Hillman hasn't. Partly because he's younger, more media-friendly, with the spiritual aura of a former Christian monk, but the casual manner of a suburban American family man who has good things to say about sex; partly because his writing is more personal, and Care of the Soul in particular deals more specifically with finding meaning through appreciating and honoring the textures of daily life.

But Moore's message is no less complex and even heretical than Hillman's. It can even be considered harsh. They agree on the limitations of the current dogma of human potential as constant growth, and spiritual growth as something to pursue because it's healthy. Moore and Hillman don't minimize the difficulties and the darknesses, and their conception of soul bears this out. Spirit is airy and pure, the body is earthy and prone to troubles. Soul includes them both; it is the mediator, the harmonizer, the active synthesis that defines identity and is the center of vitality, the blue fire.

I don't go for any dogma, and striving for spiritual growth and complete health seems pretty okay and healthy to me, as long as you realize that it's the process and not the attainment you'd better concentrate on, or else you're just setting yourself up for failure and guilt. But I agree completely that these limitations and complexities exist and we must resist the temptation to be scandalized by them. Soul is pretty important.

But I should let Moore---Thomas, not Michael this time---have the stage.


"It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity---following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life." (126)


"The secret of a soul-based life is to allow someone or something other than the usual self to be in charge.
(7)

Anxiety is nothing but fear inspired by an imagined future collapse. It is the failure of trust.
(13)

But an established habit of defensiveness is not the same as defending oneself in the presence of a threat. The former is a neurotic habit, while the latter is a way of keeping sane.
(16)

Puer [Latin for child, a term used by Jung to describe the spirit of youth] is not simply literal young age, but an attitude of youthfulness that may be full of spirit, high destiny, and a forgetfulness of mortality. It is a spirit that brings new life....As Jung says, dreams of children may signal some new beginning, a fresh turning of the cycle. [29]

The best response [to depression] might be to respond courageously to the world's suffering. The attachment to sadness one sometimes senses in people diagnosed as depressed may simply be the odd presence of ego in what is the world's malady. If we could let go of the need to make it personal by clutching it close as a symptom, we might find some relief by finding its proper mileu. (35)

Each artist seems to have access to a special chink in the opacity of the cosmos, a crack through which they can perceive the whole and make a philosophy and a life out of it.(40)

The impetus for dealing only with what is may be rooted in a spirit imagination of pristine clarity. If only life were simple, separated from the haunting past, the underworld of emotions and desires, and connections with the rest of the world! It may be equally important to deal with what was and what appears to be beneath the surface of things. (42)

Our criticisms have obscured the archetype [of patriarchy], and in all areas of life we are left without the leadership and procreativity we need. Procreativity differs from plain creativity in that specifically it seeds a future, offering confidence and hope. (51)

We may each have an idea of who we should be, knowing the seeds of a self for many years. But our idea of who we are and the direction we ought to go may be entirely thwarted by circumstances and fate. We may discover that we are most ourselves when we are furthest from the self we think we ought to be. (57) Our life is then a response, our creativity a surrender. (58)

The ideal is not to become sane and hygienic, but to live creatively by responding positively to the powerful moods, feelings, and ideas that captivate us. If we don't meet these life-shaping expressions of the soul creatively, they will quickly become adversaries, and we will develop the split psyche so characteristic of our times, in which our sane lives are flat and aimless while our passions seem incomprehensible and out of control. (60)

Modern psychology tries to tell us that we are constantly developing creatures, but I prefer to think of us as seasonal beings. We have our summers of sunny pleasure and our winters of discontent, our springtimes of renewal and our autumns of necessary decay. We are essentially rhythmic, musical. As the ancients used to say, our emotions are in orbit, like the planets. Patterns that define us return again and again, and in these returns we find our substance and our continuity, our original nature and our identity. (64)

This loyalty to one's own myth is understandable because our story is the most precious thing we have. Our lives depend on it. (65)

The story within and beneath the familiar story is almost always full of insight and new possibility. It may take courage to go another level down, to abandon clarity, however illusory, for confusion and puzzlement. Our habitual stories usually protect us from the mystery of our lives. But there is always the opportunity to take our storytelling deeper, always the chance to find the intelligence and comfort we have been seeking at a level far beneath the basement of our expectations. (67)

Many want to be somebodies, and that appetite is probably natural and fine, but it can also be a distraction from the rich life available midway between being somebody and nobody.
(70)
Maybe it isn't literal celebrity we long for, but the sense that life has meaning, that we belong on this earth, that we are contributing, and that we are appreciated...But the thing for which being a celebrity is only a symptom is the strong sense of self offered by one's passion, one's real substance, and true and heartfelt recognition from the people around us. (70-1)

We may come to know our friends and lovers over years of conversation and experience, but we may eventually realize that it is enough to love them without knowing what they are all about. We may not approve of everything they do, and we may not appreciate their eccentric ways, but still we know and appreciate them. We have faith that in the dimness of our ignorance we have the opportunity to give ourselves more fully to their reality. Unconditional love means that we don't love on the condition that we understand. (74)

We go on living when meaning fails and when we don't get it right. We go on in the presence of mortification, a word that means simply "death-making", and we become who we are destined to be as much through the death-making as the life-making. Success and happiness are impossible without the continuing nudge of death. Living through our mortifications is the coupon for vitality and the ticket home. (80)

Both Shakespeare and archetypal psychology take their power from their capacity to reveal what we all know, if we were only to think openly enough, about the fundamentals of human life. If we could live from that deep place of recognition, we might allow ourselves the beauty of our eccentricity and tolerate in others their efforts to find their souls in the odd collection of emotions, fantasies, and behaviors that form the raw material of a human life. (92)

But it is also the path toward that extreme of desire, that ultimate love that usually feels unrequited, which is the eternal and the infinite. The opening made by desire, that hole in our satisfaction, is the opening to divinity, and only there is our desire brought into the realm of the possible.
(94)

....we feel the absence of meaning and are speechless when we learn of atrocities in our society. We don't know how to think about them because we don't know how to think, and we don't know how to think because we don't believe that thinking for its own sake is worthy of our attention. (97)

In the currently accepted view, as long as you do the right thing, it makes little difference what your reason is. But this, says T.S. Eliot, is the greatest treason, a betrayal of our humanity, because the interior life counts. Without it we are indeed machines that can be manipulated genetically and given new mechanical parts. (98)

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion. It is the other way around. Fact is an illusion, because every fact is part of a story and is riddled with imagination. Imagination is real because every perception of the world around us is absolutely colored by the narrative or image-filled lens through which we perceive. We are all poets and artists as we live our daily lives, whether or not we recognize this role and whether or not we believe it. (100)

During the European Renaissance it was thought that the first role of the imagination was to keep old thought fresh through reflection, interpretation, and re-presentation. (102)
I love Monday mornings, the time we wash our clothes and write our books. Yet I sail in imagination and I like to leave nothing I touch uncontaminated by my own fleeting way of thinking. (103)
In the intersection of movement and stasis, life becomes interesting and is worth living. Change ennobles tradition, and honoring the old gives grounding to vitality and movement. The waters of a mountain stream flow constantly and yet it is one stream, a static picture of endless flow. (104)

The wish to be normal conceals a deeper desire: negatively, an attempt to avoid the weight of our individuality, and positively, the idea of being fully ourselves in a community where we can belong and participate. (118)

It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity---following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life. (126)

A second step might be to shape a life that is more in tune with our perceived nature, or dharma, and stand firm in our originality and eccentricity. This intense level of self-possession comes at a price, of course, for friends and associates will feel the rub of individuality when their concern is to sustain the adaptation to unconsciousness, otherwise known as normalcy. (129)

A third step would be to manifest our originality, not at all for ego rewards, but as a necessary way of giving it life and substance...The simple act of showing one's deeper nature is a form of personal liberation and a generous contribution to community." (130)

Moore power to you
by William S. Kowinski

We saw Fahrenheit 9-11 at the evening show on Sunday of its opening weekend, at the movie house in Arcata, up here in far northern California. There was a long line for tickets that went around the block, and the theatre was filled. A few shows earlier in the weekend had sold out---several political groups sent emails urging people to attend on opening day. We stood in front of a couple who had driven down from Crescent City, more than an hour to the north, expressly to see it. In the theatre, we sat in front of a woman who actually recognized the Oregon state trooper shown in the film---he was the only one the state could afford to keep on duty to guard a long stretch of coastline (there were a total of eight troopers on duty for the entire state.) The Oregon coast starts just past Crescent City.

I guess I had expected the same older crowd that predominates at peace marches, and they---or we---were certainly represented, but there were a lot of younger people, too: more of the coveted moviegoing demographic. I had also expected the possibility of the same kind of reception for the film that the better speakers at rallies often receive: boisterous appreciation of the views held in common, each laugh or round of applause the equivalent of a vote. But though the film got a share of laughs and occasional applause, there was also a lot of stunned silence, a lot of cries and exclamations of surprise and shock, and some tears.

Michael Moore's point of view was not as simple as a party line screed, though given his previous movies---especially his first---and his background, it turned out to be characteristic. But the emotion came mostly from the power of the images and from the pattern, the assembly of images. Many of the most powerful images were original or otherwise hadn't been seen much before. But the power of the pattern was precisely in the fact that many images had been seen on television, especially on news reports; moments that came and went over many months were put together. I remember seeing many of them, though some of the most powerful early on were ones I hadn't seen---of the attempts of black Representatives to contest the supreme outcome of the 2000 elections on the floor of Congress (with Al Gore presiding), but failing because not a single Senator joined them; and of the protests at Bush's Inaugural that disrupted the parade. I'm not sure if such images were broadcast or not, because I remember not being able to stomach watching TV at all right after the Supreme Court coup, or during inauguration week.

You can argue about how Moore put these images together---did they really make his point, was that the point that should be made? But I would also argue that assembling these and other similar images, without Moore's interpretations, would have been just as powerful, and would lead to the same "actionable" conclusion: America was duped---all too easily duped---and sold out, and George Bush should not only be retired in November, he and his administration deserve nothing less than permanent exile and ignominy. That's not to say just anybody could have made THIS movie, but that another movie with that particular effect could be made simply in this way, especially with such an abundance of damning images to select.

I'd seen a few TV segments focused on Moore's "distortions," which were minor even if they could be considered distortions. But as I watched the film, what these segments chose to criticize was trivial compared to what the TV critics never mentioned: the main argument in the first part of the film, of the financial connection between the Bushes (and Cheney) and the Saudis, and all the oil, arms and other businesses they and other big Republicans are involved in, stand to gain from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hoped-for outcomes of those wars. The recently published book-length description of the Bush-Saudi connection was written by Craig Unger, who appears in Moore's film---the two of them getting questioned by the Secret Service while standing outside the Saudi Embassy in DC (Craig Unger was a colleague of mine in Boston and Washington).

Though the basic points of Big Oil's determining influence and the Bushies nefarious self-interest in using government for their business interests is clearly demonstrated, Moore's voiceover analysis does seem to overreach beyond the material he shows on this point. But after he makes the point, he pretty much drops it and moves on.

His second major point is more powerful and more effectively shown: that the Bushies manipulated the nation after 9-11 with the potent tool of fear. The manipulation of fear, you may recall, was a major theme in Bowling for Columbine, when Moore asked why there was so much gun violence in the U.S., while there are lots of guns in Canada but only a small fraction of the violence. Moore presents only a scattering of images that should haunt and embarrass Americans and their media for generations (though at least until now the media is functionally so shameless that they’ll erase this from memory and history. At least in person, TV newspeople typically preempt criticism by being more sarcastic about what they do before anyone else gets the chance, but when it comes right down to it, they won’t wound their image.)

From 9-11 through Iraq, the major media and much of America were completely suckered and coopted. However, I thought it would have been worth five minutes of film time to show at this point some of the massive worldwide protest against the war BEFORE the U.S. invasion, which was unprecedented in my lifetime. The Bushies bulled ahead despite the opposition of most other nations, ignoring the warning of knowledgeable people who predicted pretty much what has happened, and especially mocking the outpouring of global preemptive grief.

In this section, Moore shows an unappreciated gift for artful subtlety with footage shot on 9-11 in Manhattan that never actually shows the Twin Towers. We hear the planes hit, we see faces reacting, we see people running, and the haunting images of paper swirling slowly in the wind. Remember that image in American Beauty, of the paper caught by the wind? This was almost as beautiful in a truly awe-ful way, as the wind itself is created by the devastation in progress. This was shock and awe for real.

Moore’s third major point is the most powerful of all. Symbolically and actually, he went back to Flint, Michigan (scene of his first film, Rodger and Me) and its broken streets and its black and white working class. He merely had to show images from today’s Flint that are so much like images from his first film to tell us that the economic pain continues (with a young black making the point that the devastation Americans created and are paying to repair in Iraq looks a lot like the devastation nobody is repairing in Flint), only to be joined by another profound source of pain: working class young people as Bush cannon fodder.

Here are the most powerful images Moore shot for this film: the white Marines recruiting black teenagers at the inner city (not the suburban) shopping mall, with their smooth sales pitch and their salesman lies; the black Marine who has refused to go back to Iraq, joining Moore in trying to get members of Congress to sign up their sons and daughters (only one was serving in Iraq); the actual images from Iraq, including shots of prisoner abuse that go by in a fast and confusing way, but with searing images of combat, of haunted faces, of real and ugly wounds; and finally, the mother whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, in her Flint living room reading his last letter, which condemns Bush for sending them there for no good reason, and in Washington, as she is accused of being a fake by some unnamed interloper in front of the White House---the same kind of rabid right winger, we surmise, who tried to get theatres not to show this film.

Moore had the courage and the guile to show some of these soldiers at their worst in Iraq, pumping themselves up with vicious music as they slaughtered people like video game blips. By doing so, and then showing some of them chastened, haunted, the enormity of what they had to do revealed, he provided real weight to his third point---that the worst Bush/Cheney crime was to exploit these working class young Americans---turn them into killers, or corpses, or with life-changing physical and mental wounds---when this war was, at minimum, not necessary.

It is this final section that I believe earned its large audiences not only in lefty enclaves but in military towns in the South. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns, at which books burn. Fahrenheit 9-11 was the temperature at which the American soul burned.

This film was the #1 movie over the weekend, and its influence has only just begun, even if Spiderman now steals its box office thunder. The DVD and video come out in October. That the rabid right wing tried to crucify this film isn’t very surprising. That the film industry establishment tried to marginalize it---first by Disney refusing to distribute it, then with the R Rating and censoring of its current advertising, while threatening to halt all advertising after the conventions---may seem a bit odd. But though it sometimes has a liberal reputation, the movie industry has never been very brave. It was Hollywood, after all, that created and enforced the Blacklist. The collusion of Big Media corporations that own today's Hollywood with the interests of the mega-corporate Bush government only serve to make Moore’s relevant assertions more credible.

As for the R Rating, it wasn’t because Dick Cheney told someone to fuck off—--that isn’t in there. It’s probably for graphic violence---for the briefest glimpse of the only honest footage of the Iraq war so far seen by many Americans. No, we need to make sure our children continue to believe that warfare is just like a video game, or they might not fall for the recruiter next time.

That even anti-Bush people who came to cheer left this theatre somber, shaken and teary-eyed is a testament to its power both as a movie and as truth-telling.

The Real News Update

Over the weekend, heavy rains and floods in Colorado.
Today, heavy rains and severe thunderstorms forecast for the southern plains.

expected high temperatures:
Honolulu 88F
Fairbanks, Alaska 95F

The Lakers Gripe Page

Okay, here's the deal: The entry for this date will be the ONLY place on this blog---okay, on ANY blog---that I mention the Lakers, or anything NBA. But if you are one of the -0 persons interested, I will keep adding to this date's entry when the mood strikes over the coming days, weeks, months, I don't know, it' s all too depressing...

The thing is I thought I was prepared for the idea of the Lakers without Shaq. His habit of going through the motions (at best) until the playoffs was getting old. In fact it was amazing to see him for a couple of games in the playoffs, especially game 4 of the finals, when it turned out he still could do many of the things that Shaq used to do. Apparently he just can't do them all that often, or on less than two full days rest.

But then they started talking trade, and talking about who they might get for him, and then I got really bummed. Shaq not being a Laker is bad enough, but what's worse is who could become a Laker instead. Those guys from Dallas? DALLAS? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Dallas is even worse than Sacramento: they are both entertaining teams with enough talent to put on a good show, but they can't actually win anything against a good opponent. Especially Dallas. There isn't a player on that team I can think of I'd care to see in a Lakers uniform. They just don't have it.

Well, nobody seems to really know what's going on. But it's nothing good so far. Derek Fisher has opted out of his contract. What's the Lakers without Derek Fisher? He could still sign with them, but... So Fisher is a free agent, Kobe is a free agent, Shaq wants traded, Malone ain't talking, the best coach in NBA history was asked not to return--- and who says he'll be back? Gary Payton. GARY PAYTON. The one guy they need to get rid of.

The writers are writing in circles. Payton wouldn't say he's coming back unless he knew his buddy Shaq was coming back. But Shaq is really serious about leaving. Which means?

It's Kobe's team now, that's what all the changes are about. Only Kobe isn't saying anything, except to let the Clippers know he's available---and they're shedding players like mad to be able to afford him. THE CLIPPERS?

The owner who started all this has gone off to Italy. I wish I had. His general manager, who nobody seems to like, seems to be delaying doing anything about Shaq, hoping either that Shaq changes his mind or he gets better offers. Jerry West, who built the Lakers championships team, is exiled in Memphis, and he says he doesn't believe Shaq will leave, and he certainly doesn't expect the Lakers to trade him to a team in the West (like Dallas, or Sacramento.) But if anybody with Jerry West's basketball mind or common sense was still running the Lakers, would any of this be happening?

Meanwhile I'm waiting to here from one of the players who is trustworthy, what really happened in the finals. I haven't yet worked up the courage to watch the game 4 tape to see if it's true that Shaq was open in the 4th quarter and Kobe didn't get him the ball, and that's why they lost the game that Shaq dominated.(Not that I could really tell anyway.) Watching the Houston series again, it was clear how important a healthy Karl Malone was to their winning the first round, so maybe they couldn't have taken four games from Detroit. Game 5 would seem to indicate that.

Okay, that's enough for now. Everything (except Phil Jackson returning) is still more or less possible, like Shaq, Kobe, Fish and Malone return to the Lakers, and Gary Payton gets traded for a power forward. I mean, what else nearly good could happen? Kobe and Shaq are so expensive, what really good team can afford either one? Well, I've got my old Lakers playoff tapes, and my old Chicago Bulls playoff tapes. I guess until they wear out I'm good.

UpDATE 7/16

It's not so much that the Lakers traded Shaq, or that they mercifully traded him for 3 players I don't know much about (some say they're good, some say they're bad) and not for players from Sacramento or Dallas, but that these players come (from Miami) with such preexisting fat contracts that the Lakers have little room to improve further, unless they can trade somebody else--and all they've got at the moment is those three guys, and Gary Payton. With Derek Fisher also officially gone---having won his championships he opted to make some money with Golden State, can't fault him for that---the Lakers almost have to keep Payton now, or play without a point guard as well as a center.

See, that's the major problem. Shaq may not have been the player he once was, but he was still big. And now the Lakers are let's just say significantly undersized at the center position, assuming they even know who they might play at that position. Now if these new guys don't work out, they've got to pay them anyway and they can't afford anyone new, even though there doesn't appear to be a really good center out there anyway. They'll be lucky to get Vlady Divac, who was a Laker before he was traded to make room for Kobe many years ago, and might be interested in returning if they can find some way to pay him. He is at least sort of tall and a veteran with some knowledge of the game and the position.

No one knows if Karl Malone is coming back---he loved Shaq but he also loves Kobe and the LA fans. On the other hand, he's being recruited by San Antonio, which has a legitimate chance at the championship next year---which is why he came to LA---and his wife is from that Texas city. So chances are he'll go there, and then the Lakers will really be questionable. Unless managment has another move or two up its sleeve before the season starts.

The big news of course was that Kobe will be back. Probably crucial to that were statements by the Laker owner and GM that Kobe had nothing to do with Shaq being traded and Phil Jackson being un-asked back, although both of them thought that management's preference for Kobe undermined them. Kobe denies he had anything to do with it, he told both he'd be content to play out his career with them, but he did have issues with them and...how the hell should I know?

So the Lakers will be a run and gun team, they hope, and good enough (the sports seers say) to make the playoffs but nowhere near good enough to get very far into them. The other very good teams in the west just got a lot better, simply because Shaq is no longer in the west. He and his new but supposedy more team oriented Kobe-type shooting guard are supposed to make the Miami Heat a surefire playoff team---not too difficult in their conference---but if Kobe and Shaq couldn't dent Detroit, can Shaq without Kobe? Maybe, maybe not. The Lakers are betting that Shaq has one or two more good years at best---probably next year---but that Kobe will become the premier player in the league and stay pretty near the top for the next seven years or more. Next year? The Lakers could be fun to watch, and the Heat could be, too. But as things stand now it's not likely either will be in the finals. Just as well. I can spend the time working on my shot (I can no longer with any degree of accuracy call it a jump shot.)

August 3 UPDATE So the Lakers did sign Vlade Divac, and a forward who can spell at center, and who can run, in Slava Mevendko . But the possibility of the Lakers being a playoff team next year rests entirely now with the decision of Karl Malone.

Malone apparently has offers to play for the Lakers (with Kobe) or the Heat (with Shaq) or for San Antonio (where he arguably would have the best chance for a championship ring, but would be part of a completely new bunch of players that might or might not be a team.) Though Malone came to the Lakers at the behest of Shaq and maintains a good relationship and lots of admiration, he also developed a great relationship off and especially on the court with Kobe. The on-court partnership began to sparkle most conspicuously against San Antonio in the playoffs. It was evident at times in the few games both played during the season, and then in flashes in the Houston first round series. If Malone had not gotten hurt, it's more likely that the Lakers would have been able to hang on and win the championship against Detroit. (Not a lock, obviously, given what looked like team fatigue, but he was the missing element.)

With Malone, Kobe has somebody he can trust on the offense, and somebody he can rely on to play defense. Without Malone, the Lakers will be on a steep learning curve, and without much maturity in the playoffs. So stay tuned: the Lakers season is on the line.

On another note, I watched with actually a great deal of pleasure as Italy dismantled the U.S. Olyimpic team, made up mostly of second and third tier NBA semi-stars. The Italians play a different style, but it's smart basketball, with lots of player movement and crisp passes, and accurate shooting. Apparently they've learned that scoring points will win games. They increased a ten point lead to nearly 30 in the fourth quarter. Not only isn't the U.S. team anything like the Dream Team, but the rest of the world is playing their game. Italy has been a mainstay of European basketball for years---hey, that's where Kobe Bryant learned the game (and learned Italian) when his dad played there.

The Real News

Where do you go for the real news, the significant news, the news you need to heed? Well, you can get the latest on Britney's tour cancellation, the Lacy Peterson trial or Madonna’s name change, plus the furor over whether the voting is really fair for American Idol, in most any newspaper, TV network news, MSNBC, CNN and Fox. But for the real news, you might try the Weather Channel.

There you will see, day after day, a summer full of violent storms from the east coast through the Middle Atlantic States---particularly the Ohio Valley---and into the Midwest. Torrential rains, frequent and damaging thunderstorms. In much of the Midwest, this stormy weather has been accompanied by tornadoes---up to 100 in a day this spring, which NOAA has announced was the 3rd warmest spring on record. Storms in the mountain states, too. And in the West, the worst drought in 500 years. Get that? Since the continent was invaded, since it saw its first metal plow.

Nobody really knows how bad the global climate crisis will get, but it’s clearly underway. Not clearly enough for most people yet, it seems. Americans are incredibly literal---the only time they “got” global warming was the very hot summers at the end of the 1980s in the eastern U.S.---including the media capitals of New York and Washington. Hot summer equal global warming, get it? So the first flood of books and films made their way into the marketplace in 1990. But now there's just storms and floods in some places, drought in others, too scattered and slow for the pattern to look as real as a still photo, a special effects sequence.

Probably it will take a combination of extreme events and a new president to point out what the problem is. Or it might be the next international climate change report, due this year, though with a Bush-approved change in its leadership, probably not till after the election.

What really will matter is what the U.S. does or doesn’t do about climate change. Later it will also matter what China and other growing industrial economies do or don’t do. Much of Europe is getting itself into better position to both cope and begin slowing down the runaway train. But the consequences are likely to go on, and probably continue getting worse, for a hundred years or so. In twenty to fifty years, our children and their children will probably have a pretty good idea just how bad it will be---whether it’s going to be manageable, survivable or apocalyptic.

If it’s apocalypse in store, the half-full folks can cheer themselves by remembering that our species achieved its humanity, that we became pretty much what we still are, except with a closer relationship with nature and the realities of the universe now hidden to us, during the last period of major climate disruption---the most recent big Ice Age.

The kind of consequences outlined in the deadpan predictions of the last international report suggest there will be some big losers (in the Third World mostly) and a few offsetting winners (some in the U.S.), so this will be something we’ll just muddle through. I don’t really think so. For one thing, our current government is not only unprepared for any serious set of problems, but is bleeding away the financial resources the U.S. will need, even if incrementally over a very long time, to cope. The goodwill of the world to offer help that might offset what the U.S. can’t afford, is an even more precious resource being bled away. We could wind up with no recourse but to threaten people with our hydrogen bombs and other WMDs.

Or the whole nation-state vs. global corporation situation could come to a head, what with gigantic companies buying up fresh water and doing their best to destabilize governments that might stop them (I’ve even seen this charge applied to attempting to destabilize Canada, the biggest reserve of fresh water in the world.)

It’s all way beyond my meager knowledge, but my intuition does tell me that (and I suppose this is another half-fool move) a lot of the things people are terribly worried about in our technological future---wholesale genetic engineering, human cloning to order, etc.--—aren’t going to turn out to be problems, because society won’t be able to afford them (financially, in terms of energy or social stability), and technology is going to have to take quite a different turn.

There’s just no doubt that climate is going to shape how humans live in the future that is now beginning, for climate always has. And apparently we’ve usually been blind to that fact.

For the last half century or more, and certainly since the 1980s when coincidentally the “greenhouse effect” began to attract notice (although Arthur Miller notes in his autobiography that some scientist he met mentioned the possibility in the 40s) there’s been the drumbeat of the end of western civilization, one that has been growing so insistent that it seems a foregone conclusion. But we might have figured that, absent blowing ourselves up, this might turn out to be overly dramatic. Still, the end of a “civilization” is a bit abstract---a lot of people who wouldn’t agree with each other on what constitutes western civilization, believe it has already ended.

It’s “civilization” or “society” in the broader sense that’s now at issue---humanity that doesn’t shrink way down, that doesn’t go back to the caves and the deserts. Absent being overcome by barbarians---not an idle thought anymore, thanks to…well, let’s not get into that—we’re looking at biological threats. We might be poisoning ourselves fatally---I’ve always expected that my generation would be the litmus test of that, since most of this crap started when we were babies. Overcrowding breeding disease and spreading around the world in a flash, or even the coincidence of a few badly placed disasters that might have gone unnoticed in a less intensely interconnected and interdependent, smugly vulnerable time as ours---earthquake in LA, big volcano eruption somewhere else---or just another brazen meteor—there are lots of scenarios for the possibility of Armaggedon. I’ve even had the nasty thought that a fairly large human die-back is the only way this planet will survive without tossing out the last few million years of evolution: the Gaian enterprise. Still, it wasn’t until this climate thing that it truly seemed that major painful change became all but inevitable.

If it’s the end of the world as we know it, I can’t say I feel fine about it. I’d like to believe we’ve learned enough to make a conscious transition, to do what plenty of us know has to be done (and plenty of people smarter than me know how to do). We could even eventually go back for what we mistakenly jettisoned and see if we can’t recover what we lost in the process of developing certain other aspects of ourselves. At the edge of science and other thought, we seem primed for that.

Oh well.

I’ll keep plugging at this for as long as I’ve got the resources and the wits to do so, because I believe that the future is what we do and what we dream right now, so living in the future and living in the present are really the same thing, as far as our mortal lives go. There are a lot of people working that future more diligently, more knowledgeably and more effectively than me. But facing the climate challenge will take the whole society, and sooner or later it will change the whole society, maybe all societies and cultures on the planet. The longer we do nothing, the worse and the longer-lasting the crisis will be. The sooner people start taking in the real news, the better chance we’ll have to make the major changes that might keep this enterprise going with the least possible amount of pain and destruction.

A Guy Thing

Several of the recent posts in this particular blog have been about sports. In a way they're an anomaly; there probably haven't been any before that for several months. But what do you expect? I'm a guy. I like sports. (Some sports.) I have to, right?

Of course during NBA finals week I also read William Irwin Thompson's book Coming Into Being, which has no sports in it at all, I saw the new Harry Potter movie and watched some DVDs, including "The Hours." You know, the Virginia Woolf thing, the chick flick? And it blew me away.

Maybe I'm strange, and maybe there's no maybe about it, but what's really strange is how strongly gender stereotypes have returned. A great deal of what young men (especially of draft age) went through in the 1960s was redefining our masculinity, and then "women's lib" and feminism in the 1970s seemed likely to sweep away all gender stereotypes forever.

But then some feminists of all genders found it politically convenient to simultaneously insist that gender roles were obsolete (so women could get any job, hopefully at equal pay) and that women were different and essentially better. Gender became a popular political tool, trumping race and totally obscuring what was most important in determining the limitations of my life: class. Feminism of a certain sort became exclusionary.

Which made it much easier for the stereotyping of men to resume. It got much harder to stereotype women beyond the continuing emphasis on sexual attractiveness, but men could be stereotyped with impunity as dumb and barely housebroken. Every societal ill up to and including war was the fault of testosterone.

So strong is the reaction against anything traditionally "male" in some quarters that young boys who don't act enough like young girls in school may be routinely drugged and treated as dangerous mental cases. All children are victims of America's scandalously impoverished schools, but it's the boys who more often wind up in jail. Amongst the upper to mid class young adults, the New Age man is not much of a solution either. Someone once described such fellows as forever looking as if they'd just been hit on the head with a board.

But the most effective stereotyping of men was launched by those who most profit by it: advertisers. Men became not just sports-watching louts, but beer drinking sports watching louts. And so on. You've seen the commercials. It's much easier to sell to a defined market, and much, much better to define the market so it requires the product you're selling. Define this lifestyle repeatedly, and you create a self-fulfilling prophesy, otherwise known as a market of men who believe that being a guy means drinking beer, hating wine, and not being able to shop for groceries without a woman supplying you with photographs of the correct cans and boxes.

There's the true story of a man---and I've got his name somewhere---who made a lot of money writing New York Times columns, and giving lectures and workshops, on feminism. But when he began advocating for men, he stopped getting published, he stopped getting paid big bucks for lectures and workshops, and so on. Remember the reaction to Robert Bly and the men's workshops? They were widely ridiculed as a bunch of comical suburban wildmen, running in the woods, beating on drums and crying. No one would dare ridicule a feminist workshop in these terms, but that kind of gross insulting disdain was widely accepted, without a raising an eyebrow.

But now we've seen that the Iraq prison scandal involves a fair number of the fair sex, just as there seems to be no distinction in behavior exposed by this scandal based on ethnicity or race.

Actually, before I read the Thompson book this week, I was ready to deny any broadly defining role at all for gender, apart from the continuing gender roles and equal pay injustices. I still find most references to "the patriarchy" as offensive and reductionistic, as do folks like James Hillman and Thomas Moore (of course they're just MEN so what do you expect?) But Thompson persuades me that at least the archetypes of gender are meaningful, and that "patriarchy" has some real if limited reference. He's even pretty convincing on the Goddess mythology, though I still think the popular view is much too simplistic, not to mention sentimental, divisive, self-serving and irrelevant. (The problem with nation-states, monotheistic religious cults, industrial civilizations and violence isn't that they're patriarchial; it's that they are nation-states, monotheistic religious cults, industrial civilizations and violent.) And I still think gender as explanation is used inappropriately and unhelpfully most of the time.

As for sports, maybe it's because I come from Pittsburgh, where little old ladies could discuss the Steelers' interior defensive line with comfort and insight. And I suppose I do believe there is something I'd call a chick flick---a movie about relationships with no resonance beyond the mundane---and I'd rather see a good baseball game than one of those. But I find the idea that I have to moan about how "The Hours" is so slow and nothing really happens, because that's the paradigmatic guy reaction, equally as infuriating as the idea that still being captivated by the beauty of a home run swing as I was when I was 10 can be reduced to some cliche that involves swilling Budwisers and scratching.

Is the force with them?

Strange days, my Lakers fans. A single three point shot was the difference that preserves the dynasty, at least for the moment. The Lakers lost the first game of the finals at home, and won the second with a staggering improvised fourth quarter and a dominant overtime. Now they go to Detroit for three games that will tell the tale. They need at least one, and could really use two.

Credit the first game to Detroit's coach, Larry Brown, who had them very prepared and efficient. The Lakers had a tough time figuring the Pistons out, and seemed to be waiting for Detroit's nearly flawless performance to falter. When uncertain, the Lakers depend heavily on Shaq and Kobe, and though both of them came through, the rest of the team was woeful.

The second game showed the Lakers ability to adapt, but their Achilles heel right now is injuries. Contrary to early reports, the Lakers now seem more banged up than the Pistons. Crucial injuries to Karl Malone and Derek Fisher have been costly. Both are playing, Malone is clearly limited and Fisher's shot has been off---though he made two crucial three pointers in the fourth quarter, so maybe he's adapting.

Malone is still valuable on the floor, if only for his courage. The real mystery is Gary Payton, who was a bit more effective defensively in the second game, but is still spiritless and sulky. Neither he nor Malone are hitting their shots.

Injuries (including Rick Fox), inconsistent play and match-up problems had Phil Jackson improvising some strange lineups particularly in the 4th quarter of game 2. But ultimately he outcoached Brown in that quarter, and the battle-tested Lakers dominated the drained Detroit team in overtime.

The star of the quarter was Kobe Bryant, who is now has to be considered a favorite for MVP if the Lakers win the series. Not only for his 3 point shot that tied the game with 2 seconds left, but for his determination, going to the basket for shots that no one else can make, and his defense.

But the player of the game was the rookie with the great pedigree, Luke Walton. Son of Lakers great, Bill Walton, Luke energized the Lakers when he got into the game in the second quarter, and again in the fourth and overtime. He scored crucial baskets, made crucial defensive plays and rebounds, but most of all he made plays, and has the kind of on-court rapport with Shaq that Malone has with Kobe. His passes to Shaq and an inspired alley-oop were the difference. Shaq performed well, especially making an absolutely crucial foul shot and three-point play just before Kobe's three pointer. But he has yet to have the outstanding defensive game as he had against Minnesota and San Antonio.

If the Lakers follow their usual script, the need for so many "crucial" plays in the second game will lead to easier victories in Detroit, perhaps with one more lapse. But Malone's injury and Payton's confused and spiritless play are very troublesome.

The difference could come down to character and playoff experience. Detroit really fell apart in overtime, and they must know they've played about as well as they can. They could have a great shooting night and run away with a game, but they have to win three more, not just one. But the Lakers fought through tremendous adversity---they lost a pretty big lead and were down by five points very late in the 4th quarter. They had a terrible no-call on a foul to Bryant that was inexcusable (when does a Bryant shot fall a couple of feet short of the basket except when his shooting hand is hit? You don't need a replay to show that, although that is what the replay shows) and a bad call against Shaq for his fifth foul, but they overcame that. Malone made important contributions even though his obvious injury cost them at times as well. In the end it was their thundering will that smashed the Pistons in overtime. It could be the difference, but it's unlikely to be easy.

Luke Walton will probably get more playing time, and he deserves to, but he's a rookie and they don't get breaks from officials. The matchups continue to be a problem, especially on the boards. They need a big rebounding night from Shaq and Medvenenko. But Luke's energy and ball-handling ability could be very important. Is that enough for the force to be with them? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Turns out that Payton is playing with physical problems as well. So, hours before tipoff of game 4, after the Lakers played probably the worst playoff game in their recent history (although they had some bad ones against Sacramento, too, a few years back, a prediction for the outcome of the finals: Lakers in 6.

DOWNDATE Did I say six games? Seven---I meant seven games.

But while it is still possible, the way they lost the 4th game is not encouraging. Whatever happens, the Hollywood ending isn't likely to be there. Karl Malone is completely ineffective with his injury. Finger-pointing has begun among the LA Times sportswriters---one blaming Kobe for not passing enough to Shaq (Kobe did have another bad game shooting), another blaming Phil Jackson for not heeding the request of his 5 former champions and starting the old lineup of Fox, Fisher, Shaq, Kobe and George.

Whatever the reason for the meltdown, if the Lakers don't win the championship, the chances that this team would return intact---which seemed likely a week ago---is about zero. If they lose, the Shaq v. Kobe noise will drive at least one of them out of LA, Malone will retire, Payton will be gone, and other veteran players will probably go, as a new team is built around whatever star remains (if any) and the most promising young players, Luke Walton and Kareem Rush. The end of an era could come as soon as Tuesday. (Which I'm sure for some of my regular readers, won't be soon enough...)

Last Date
There was no Hollywood ending after all, at least for the Lakers. No championship for Karl Malone, whose knee was so bad he didn't suit up for the final game---his injury was the most crucial of many---and he will consult his doctors before the probable decision to retire. No record-breaking tenth championship for coach Phil Jackson, who said there was only a very slight chance he would be back. In the next month--maybe even before the Dems have a VP candidate---the shape of next year's Lakers will be clearer: either almost completely different (no Jackson, Malone, Fisher (free agency), Fox (retires), Grant (retires), Kobe (free agency, but he could return anyway) or surprisingly intact, ready for one more shot (hopefully, without Gary Payton.) Who knows how much ego got in the way, or why Kobe had such a run of poor shooting games...But it says something that every one of the players apologized to Malone for not getting him his championship. Malone said he was disappointed but didn't regret playing for the Lakers this year---he really bonded with this team.

But it was a Hollywood week for Detroit, becoming the first team without home court advantage to win their three home games, and the championship. They played a stellar game, confident that the Lakers couldn't match them, especially with Malone out and Shaq playing on two days rest. The Lakers only hope was that the Pistons would come out flat, and Kobe and other players would catch fire. Instead it was Detroit shooting the high percentage, and both Kobe and Shaq were gracious in defeat, giving Detroit their due as playing a better series and deserving the championship. They were also gracious about each other and Phil Jackson, so all options remain open, and pretty much up to the Lakers management. Then of course the really big decision---who do I root for next year?

The Finals


Down two games to none against the defending NBA champions in the second round, with all of their flaws exposed, the LA Lakers could have fallen apart. Instead they've become a team, a process that was not entirely accomplished until game 6 of the western conference finals. First the stars had to (as they say) elevate their game, and while doing the difficult and improbable things that stars do---in terms of skill, smarts, heart and stamina---they kept teammates involved and played the coach's game. Improbably they won four games in a row against the defending champion Spurs. It took a very improbable shot by a non-star (Derek Fisher) to do it, but most of the time it was Shaq or Kobe or notably both, who sealed the deal.

As predicted here, Minnesota gave them a battle, and also as predicted, there was a most improbable hero, Kareem Rush, whose 6 three pointers won a mostly ugly game 6 (made uglier by needlessly interfering officiating) and the series for the Lakers. And it was Kobe's passes to Rush, and Malone's passes to Mevedenko (and pats on the head when he saw how nervous this reserve player was) that made this a team at last.

So this is what the Detroit Pistons have to face. The Lakers still have a tendency to get lazy (though I thought their much advertised "giddiness" in the locker room before their tepid performance in the fifth game was a good sign---a collective tension release that was another team bonding moment) and Detroit will compete hard, especially on defense. But just as the western conference series was essentially over when the Lakers won the first game, if they win the first game of this series, it will be just a matter of how many games it will take---4, 5 or 6---before they claim the championship. It's not just a matter of numbers, but of the fact that the Lakers have successfully adjusted to their opponents better as the series goes on.

They could get lazy and blow the first game, since it is at home, but that's unlikely. I expect Karl Malone to have a great series and keep the Lakers honest. It will be his first championship, and he may retire afterwards. (Although my decidedly minority view is that he will be back next year, along with Shaq and Kobe. Gary Payton is less likely, and coach Phil Jackson is somewhat of a mystery, but if the two stars and Malone stay, it will probably be as much up to them to ask him to stay as it will be for management to renegotiate his contract.)

I can't say I cared for Malone much before this season. I thought he was mostly a redneck bully; I was slower to forgive him for his comments that caused Magic Johnson to retire (Malone said players wouldn't guard Magic as hard because they'd be afraid to get some of his HIV-infected blood) than Magic was. But he's shown me something this year. Even though he was hurt for a good part of the season, he was the guy who held this team together and insisted on its character, with an openness and honesty, emotion and calm that belies his muscular play. At 40 he may not have the ability to have an MVP series but he's going to be a crucial element. The guy who will be playing at an MVP level will be Kobe, and it's not irrelevant to mention that Malone and Kobe have bonded off and especially on the court this year; at crucial times, before Shaq elevated his game and the team knew what to expect of him, the Malone-Kobe combination was what kept the Lakers going.

Who else is going to step up? Rick Fox has had a dismal playoffs, still hampered by his injury. His defense and passing have been crucial in the past---perhaps they will be again. Gary Payton will earn his championship on defense in this series, but he's capable of scoring in heaps. That's what this Laker team learned-that when the defense gives somebody an opportunity (and they must, faced with the decision to double team and swarm Shaq or Kobe), every one of the "role" players is capable of making big shots, and lots of them. Detroit is perhaps more banged up than the Lakers, though Derek Fisher was playing hurt and not terribly well in game 6. But at this point, every team and every player is hurting. Still, the finals are the finals, and the adrenalin should raise the level of play. Game one is Sunday.

The K Scale

Instead of thumbs up or down, a five star system or a ten point scale, or even the SF Chronicle's "little man" whose posture indicates levels of approval, I am introducing a new system, the K Scale, for the evaluation of new movies.

This new scale is needed I believe because of the sheer awfulness of the vast majority of new movies that ruin the taste of perfectly good cardboard popcorn in 987-screen cineplexes throughout the land.

But more than that it's a highly personal scale. It reflects in part my maturation from a young curmudgeon, mortally offended by degradations upon the cultural potential, to my present state of practicality, and acceptance that demographics have passed me by, additionally leavened by mortality awareness.

So now I make no apologies for my personal taste, and my general priorities of don't waste my time, let alone my money.

I introduce the K Scale in time for the summer movie season. This is actually the time of year I am likely to see new films in the theatre. I know I should be more moved to see the wintry serious films but I find myself spectacularly uninterested in the emotional upheavals of younger Hungarians or the spiritual, sexual and shopping traumas of younger denizens of Manhattan, London or Beverly Hills. The operative words here are "younger" and "trauma." I figure I've paid my dues over the years in having my own emotions wrenched and wrung out for art, through two hours or more of seduction---getting to identify with or care about the characters-and abandonment, as awful things happen to them, with perhaps a couple of glib minutes of hopefulness at the end. Life is taxing enough, thanks.

Which doesn't send me to films of mindless violence either. Possibly due to some mental defect, I find violence disturbing rather than entertaining, even if only as it pushes the fight or flight button. I'd rather not go through that unnecessarily.

Not all action films are just violent. Some are just dull. For instance, the currently popular Kung Fu style fighting bores me to distraction. The fight sequence in the second Matrix film (which I saw only because the first was intriguing; I wasn't dope enough to see the third) only had me yearning for Fred Astaire. He could have done that sequence with so much more style, and with better music.

So the dramas are too draining, the comedies are mostly not funny (and whatever is funny I've seen in the TV promo) and the action pictures are largely without redeeming value. Add to these feelings my new preference for DVDs. In terms of pure viewing---the picture, the sound---they easily beat theatres for me. Plus I can pause, rewind, fast forward, repeat, and indulge in the textural extras and commentaries. All for prices much lower than I would pay for the privilege of sitting in badly proportioned seats behind an excessively tall person who talks throughout the film, my feet sticking to the floor, the picture so dim I can see through the letters in the titles, and the sound pitched to ear-splitting explosions and incomprehensible buzzes of dialogue.

Still, most of my viewing life came before videos, and I have strong affinities for the experience of the movie theatre. I've seen hundreds of films in theatres, including scores I've seen repeatedly. (Glancing through the lists of the ten best film comedies, thrillers, westerns, musicals, fantasies, histories, and dramas in The Book of Film Biographies, edited by Robin Morgan and George Perry, I note that while of course I don't agree with all the choices, I've seen them all except one-"Goodfellas", which I don't miss in the least.)

I also have a partner who likes to go out once in awhile. So once in awhile, and a bit more often in the summer, I'll see a first-run film when it opens. I've always liked science fiction, my favorite as a kid and still appealing if for additional reasons. Science fiction, comic book mythology, fantasy of a certain kind---that's where the new magic is. (Though the Tolkien films were often striking, they were more effect than substance, and the effect was less enchantment than special effects battlefield exhaustion. And I am definitely not interested in the strongest-survive, "fight evil with evil" war movies disguised as science fiction or fantasy.)

So there are a few films I want to see this summer. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban first and foremost-I think this is going to be a good one. I'll see "The Day After Tomorrow" somewhat for professional reasons, but I enjoyed "Independence Day" and found a lot to see and think about, even if I can't say I totally admire it. I was a big Spider-Man comic book fan, so I'll see that one. There are a couple more of that ilk. And of course we all await "Farenheit 911." All this is made easier by a Christmas gift of a movie pass card. Because now that I don't get in free as a reviewer or important art person, money is an object.

So fittingly enough, money is the basis of my K Scale. (What? You think I forgot?) In everyday terms, in our house we tend to rank upcoming films as "see at theatre," "never see until trapped on an airplane with it" or mostly "something to rent when it hits the $1 rack." My K Scale is an outgrowth of this method of thinking.

Instead of rating films based on how much I liked them, which is a sucker's game anyway because you have to see them first, I've decided to rate films I haven't seen by how much money I will require to be paid in order to go to a theatre opening weekend and see it. (I suppose this is also based on habits of mind derived from being a film reviewer, when I saw lots of films only because I was paid to write about them.)

Though the exact K Scale is still in development, here's the basic idea. I start with the smallest amount, say $20. Say there is a film I wouldn't mind seeing and sort of would like to see, like Shrek 2. (I enjoyed Shrek. I loved the Billy Crystal character, and the Harry Hausen in-jokes.) A total stranger could convince me to see it by handing me $20. Then again, I might see it anyway, if I simply wanted to go to a movie and it was playing, or my partner did, or some friends. (Though they are more likely to want to see some serious wintry film, and so I'll go... if it doesn't happen too often. )

After that, we get into serious application of the K Scale. Now we're talking about movies I wouldn't see unless I got paid to see them. (This amount, by the way, is in addition to a free ticket and a pre-paid tub of popcorn.)

So for current movies, the K Scale would be:

VON HELSING.........$30

This is a film I'll probably rent someday, since I'm mildly curious, and I can watch it on fast-forward. But for $30, I'll go to the theatre.

TROY......$60

A film I am unlikely to see even on video unless I'm doing research on the Zena Era of Anachronistic History.

DOGSVILLE... $75

A worthy if not brilliant film I'm sure, but I just don't want to go through all that, thank you very much. But for $75, I'll see it.

And so on, up the scale until we get to the likes of:

KILL BILL (any number).... $10,000
That's what it will take to get me to see these films. The idea of going to see the decadent corruption of filmmaking talent wasted on hip shock and unrelenting cynical violence has no appeal, but $10,000 will soothe the pain, especially since I can contemplate it during the film, plus it will pay for some extra Dots and maybe one of those big Snickerdoodles.

I also apply the K Scale to individuals. For instance, I will go to a film with a cast that includes Ben Stiller or David Spade only for the price of $15,000. (For each film. If both are in it, I'll give you a break and take $25,000.)

Though I reserve the right to adjust the scale according to the continuing deterioration of film quality and the level, sanity and agenda of the general culture, I do have a top, or bottom, point of the scale so far. It is:

PASSION OF THE CHRIST....$50,000 (in advance, cash or cashier's check only.)

Free Barry!


I’ve watched Barry Bonds play baseball since his rookie year for my hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. He hit his sixth home run on my fortieth birthday. His homeruns in those days were memorable mostly for the speed with which they left the park, though he did hit some titans. He was a line drive hitter, but they were the hardest line drives I’ve ever seen. The last Pittsburgh Pirates game I saw at Three Rivers Stadium was at the end of his last season there. He didn’t homer but he had five or six hits, rockets to right, center and left.

Lots of people in Pittsburgh didn’t like him, including sportswriters, but Pittsburgh always had to have a dark hero to go along with the favorite, especially when both were black. Willie Stargell was the beloved Pops, Dave Parker was his bad boy shadow. Bobby Bonilla was the popular favorite when Bonds was in the same stellar outfield, on that brilliant and tragic late 80s, early 90s team that one year came within an out of going to the World Series, and never could quite get past the Atlanta Braves several years running. Pittsburgh hasn’t had a contending team since.

Since 1993, Barry has been on the San Francisco Giants, which came within a single win of winning the division that year, and couple of outs of winning the World Series two seasons ago. And of course in the past several years, Barry Bonds has emerged as probably the greatest baseball player of all time. He followed his record-setting single season home run year with the batting average title the next year.

I’ve only managed to see one game in San Francisco since he’s been there, late last season. He did something rare for him---he struck out twice. Still, it’s a great ball park with great fans, and everyone holds their breath when Barry comes to the plate. So often he rewards them with the kind of home run that takes your breath away, like a Michael Jordan dunk or a Kobe Bryant drive, or some of those amazing things the women gymnasts do.

This year, despite his father’s death last fall, and the shadow of the Balco drug scandal, and turning forty himself this season, he started out with tremendous hitting. In mid April he tied Willie Mays (his godfather) for third for total home runs with a shot that practically bears his patent: out of the park in right field, and into the Bay. The next day he moved ahead of Mays with a shot to the same spot (both balls, incredibly, retrieved by the same guy, out there amongst the other boats and kayaks positioned just to chase Barry Bond home runs.)

A few days Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist, let loose the rhetoric along with the statistics. “Barry Bonds is rewriting the Book of Baseball Wisdom. The hardest thing to do in sports right now is to miss Barry’s round bat with your round pitched ball.”

At that point, Bonds was hitting .500, with 7 homers and 16 RBIs in 34 at bats. “His slugging percentage is 1.265, a figure so high that only dogs can read it." Ostler wrote about a Sunday against the Dodgers, where Barry hit a double, a homer, another homer, and an RBI single. “Bonds’ second homer caused the Dodgers to do some soul-searching at two different meetings on the mound in which there were seven participants. I think the group included a Bonds specialist the Dodgers flew in from Zurich. I’m pretty sure I could hear them singing ‘Kumbaya.’ It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a meeting at the mound broken up by the fire marshal.”

Then Bonds hit at least one home run in eight straight games. This is the major league record, held by several players (I believe the first one was Dale Long, for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1950s. One of those stats I memorized from a bubble gum card.) But Barry didn’t hit a homer in the ninth game. He wasn’t allowed to. The San Diego Padres intentionally walked him, every time.

That, my friends, was poor sportsmanship to the extreme. It used to be that in baseball and some other sports, it was a matter of honor to let a player going for a record have a fair shot at it. You didn’t tell your pitcher to throw a fastball down the middle, but you didn’t tell him to walk the guy out of a chance.

But it was only the beginning. By early May Bonds had been intentionally walked 29 times, at a pace to break the single season record of 68 before the season was half over. (The record is held by, you guessed it, Barry Bonds.) By mid May, he had been walked 54 times in 35 games. At first he shrugged it off, saying that the important thing was that the team wins the game. That worked while they were winning. When they slumped, he talked about the strain of it, of staying mentally and physically prepared when he never gets the chance to hit. Then he started talking about being traded. Then his back started acting up again, and he was out of the lineup.

Walking Bonds so much is statistically bad baseball by some accounts (if the idea is to win more than you lose by walking him), but by my account it’s bad for baseball. It corrupts the game. It’s also obviously bad for the baseball business. People don’t go to baseball games to watch the greatest living hitter and maybe the greatest of all time not get a pitch to hit. This is a guy who in the best of times gets maybe a couple of hittable pitches in a game, hardly ever more than one during an at-bat. That he hits as well as he does has to be measured against this.

But this titan of hitting in the last years we will ever get to see him hit is being denied the opportunity to do what he does best, and we are denied the opportunity to see him do it, if only on TV. We’re denied the chance to see him break Babe Ruth’s all time record, which he could conceivably do this season, though not with the at-bats he’s being currently allowed. Then there’s Henry Aaron’s record still to go. There’s no reason that Barry Bonds can’t become the all-time home run champ, except for all those walks.

It’s far from the biggest crime against humanity currently in the docket, but it’s a disgrace to the game of baseball nonetheless. And we can use all the grace and inspiration and wonder we can get.

Summer Preview

What's this?---Half of Arcata's population has suddenly disappeared!

Taken by aliens? The rapture? Health care and cheap gasoline in Canada?

Not exactly. School is out.

The university students who comprise half of Arcata's population are mostly gone for summer vacation. As are the ones who won't be back, the graduates. Last weekend their families gladdened the hearts of the local restaurants with their traditional biggest weekend. Now some of the local eating establishments will shut down completely for weeks or months, while others shrink their hours.

This was as close to an alien invasion as we get, though. I remember several years ago sitting in a local establishment called Los Bagels (yes, it is a Mexican bagel bakery and café) near a table of invaders from the Planet New York. Having spent some time there, I recognized the accent. But then, so would everyone else here. I've learned that here in far northern California, "the East" (which begins just past Las Vegas) is essentially defined as "New York," and everyone who lives there is Jewish. But the provincialism of the cultural capital of New York is also justifiably famous. From that table I heard one older woman exclaim, "I can't believe we're eating bagels here, on the edge of the oith!"

So now summer begins. Despite the increased quiet, the decreased traffic on the streets, it's shaping up to be a busy one. I'm doing three, maybe four writing jobs for the university, plus an article for a magazine. All of them will be due in July. As an elected Kerry delegate alternate, I could attend the Democratic National Convention in Boston in late July, if I scrape up the money to do so.

Counting the reviews and articles I just finished, I haven't had so much paying work at the same time in several years. Last summer's highlight though was the time I spent writing a play. As regular readers may recall, my goal was to finish it in time to enter it in a contest, which I did. It turned out to be a strange sort of contest. I didn't win, and I didn't lose. As far as I know, no one did. The theatre involved seems to have run into financial problems, and never chose a winner, perhaps because they were obligated to mount two productions of the winning play in two different cities, and pay out some prize money.

This spring I entered this play, a full length called "Dance of Souls," in another competition. Though it is for a festival to be held locally, the judging is "blind" (no names on the scripts), and the final choices are made by judges far away. The theme is ecological theatre. This spring I also wrote another play for this contest, a one-act comedy called "That Human Comedy." I suppose I could find out, but at the moment I have no idea whether either or both of these plays made the final cut and got sent to the distinguished outside judges.

Writing and entering the comedy may have been a mistake, since it's easier to like comedies and I'm more interested in the success of the full length. Still, even if they didn't make the cut and/or don't win, I have high hopes for future productions or at least readings.

Writing these plays was a blissful experience both times. Follow my bliss? I'm tempted. I do have the itch to do another this summer. I've had a basic idea for one for at least a decade but every time I wrote a little dialogue for it, it didn't work. If I get enough good dialogue to get started, I may have to. There are other projects of my own that it would be smarter to work on, after this blitz of paying work. The chapters I wrote (also this spring) for the nonfiction "Soul of the Future" finally worked, after several attempts over way too many years. I have a really good plan for the rest of the book, and I'm confident that I can write it, and that I will write it, eventually, and publish it, even if I have to self-publish. And there's my young adult novel, which an agent in the field encouraged me to rewrite. After many false starts, I think I've come up with a way to do it. It would make more sense to work on either or both of those.

I enjoy writing on both of these projects. But plays somehow are the best. Realistically, what I should be concentrating on is getting productions or readings of the ones I've already written-the abovementioned two, plus my antismoking musical for middle school age. But realistic is a relative word when you are my age, without credits or credentials in the field, up here at the edge of the oith.

Fish

Political comment, and plenty of it, has been relegated to the (clickable) American Samizat blog lately. But by Thursday I’d hit the emotional wall. Five of the last six books I read were on terrorism and war: four for a review already published in the San Francisco Chronicle, and one I’ve reviewed for a future issue. In the midst of this, the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal hit, followed by the beheading of an American civilian, both of them weird stories as well as doubly horrific because of how seamlessly they fit into my reading. And of course the war in Iraq continued, as the prisoner photos played endlessly, illustrating every even marginally relevant comment made by anybody on TV.

The moment I couldn’t get past was when one news show dropped Iraq for a few minutes to finally report on the Sudan, and the immense “humanitarian crisis” as we so blithely have to call it, caused by war there: refugees starving in border camps, having fled from the slaughter of ethnic cleansing. It was the kind of scene we’ve grown too accustomed to out of Africa for decades, the flies on starving babies. But what got to me most was the incredibly beautiful clothing the women wore—the brilliant colors and patterns of their everyday life. It was just too much to bear.

So I opted out of the newstream for all of Thursday. How about a nice relaxing basketball game instead? Fortunately for my blood pressure, I couldn’t watch the Lakers-Spurs Game 5 live, but had to do a tape delay. I turned it on just in time to see Phil Jackson’s half-smile, see the score (Lakers by one point) and hear the announcer sign off saying, “one of the most dramatic games in NBA history.”

This second round series has been billed as the one that will likely decide the championship. The Spurs won the first two games at home, over the Lakers who looked disorganized and slow, especially in 4th quarters (when in previous championship years, they systematically dismantled the Spurs) after their 5 game first round over Houston. But then the Lakers won game 3 by 20+ points at home, and held off the Spurs to win the fourth quarter (finally) in game 4. These were classic Kobe and Shaq games, the kind that seemed gone forever.

I learned that the Lakers had held a lead through most of game 5 in San Antonio, where they have never yet won a playoff game. Apparently with ferocious defense and a lot of Kobe Bryant offense, and an unusually active Deavon George. But by the 4th quarter they were just hanging on, their shots weren’t falling, and the Spurs were desperately attacking and scoring. A 16 point third quarter lead turned into the Spurs ahead by one point. The rest can only be recited:

At 11+ seconds, Kobe gets a screen from Malone, elevates on a jump shot and scores. Lakers by one.

With 5+ seconds the Spurs inbound to Tim Duncan, their veteran MVP star. The Lakers defense is stifling. He can do nothing with the ball, and Shaq has come out to stop him beyond the foul line. He throws the ball towards the hoop without being able to see it, as he falls down. The ball goes in. It’s a miracle finish. The Spurs go wild, as do their fans.

It’s all over except for the formality of a Lakers inbound, because there is less than a half second on the clock. Four tenths of a second, to be exact. After a couple of time outs, the Spurs cover Shaq, they cover Kobe, and Gary Payton throws a perfect pass to Derek Fisher. Payton has replaced Fisher as a starter. There are few players better liked or respected by his teammates and the media than Fisher. When murmurs were becoming open dissatisfaction with Kobe’s game, Fisher spoke up for him. He plays tenacious defense and in earlier years was known for his dagger three point shots when they meant something. This year he wasn’t playing all that well off the bench, until the playoffs. He'd never made a game winning shot. They call him Fish.

He’s left handed, he was on the left side of the basket, open. As he caught the ball he started to twist for his shot. Through replay after replay, the ball was maybe a foot out of his hands when the lights around the backboard flashed on, signaling end of the game---and so the shot was legal. And the shot went in.

While the commentators search the record books for anything like this—3 changes of lead in the last twelve seconds, two miracle shots, the last with less than .5 seconds on the clock—they also cited history: that in a 2-2 series, the team that wins game 5 wins the series more than 80% of the time, including last year’s Lakers-Spurs series, almost a mirror image of this one: the Spurs led by more than 20 points, the Lakers fought back and could have won the game on a Robert Horry 3 pointer that went in---and came out, at the buzzer.

But as usual they’re a bit too quick to proclaim the Lakers as champions yet. The odds are in their favor for game 6 in L.A., and they do seem to have jelled as a team more than ever before. Payton to Fish could turn out to be the glue that will hold this team together and take it to its destiny. But the Spurs have lost 3 in a row and face elimination, as the reigning NBA champs. They've shown they can come back. The Lakers are going to have to be intense, and they can’t suffer another 4th quarter letdown. (Kobe was so exhausted he had to receive intravenous fluids for dehydration after the game. Even on the bench in the last seconds it was clear he was having trouble catching his breath. He appeared to meditate for a moment, and when the horn sounded to resume play he jumped up to join his teammates.)

But the Lakers do get better as a series goes on, which credits their court smarts and their coaching. The problem is fatigue in the fourth, and energy and concentration throughout, which has been inconsistent. After a first round and early second round with lots of days between games, these last four games have come with just a day between. It's good for concentration, but not for aging legs. Still, they're at home and the crowd should boost their energy. In a inconsistent year, they've done pretty well in big games, and Phil Jackson teams do well in closeout games.

Even if the Lakers get past the Spurs it’s not over. Though it’s doubtful Sacramento can win 4 out of 7 from them, if Minnesota wins that series, they could pose problems. The Minnesota Timberwolves are the team of the near future, but this could be their year to emerge. They're young, fast and hungry, with this year's MVP Kevin Garnett. Still, you have to like the Lakers chances a lot better than when the playoffs started.

Even if they can’t maintain, they’ve played some memorable games already this postseason. None more so than Game 5, which I have securely on tape, and the ending doesn’t change whenever I watch it. There’s the shot, Fisher running down the court towards the dressing room, grabbed by the exhausted Kobe, who apparently just kept repeating, Fish, Fish, Fish. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Earth Day Essay: The Forgotten Apocalypse

by William S. Kowinski

Anybody here remember global warming? It's been more than a decade since a few horrendously hot summers in parts of the U.S. inspired a flood of books, articles and television reports on the grave dangers of climate change caused by fossil fuels and other "greenhouse gases." But now, despite continued rising temperatures, and increasing certainty among scientists that the climate change already underway will cause or at least exacerbate ruinous problems that may threaten humanity and the world as we know it for centuries, global warming has become the forgotten apocalypse.

It will undoubtedly be mentioned in various Earth Day perorations, and it is the subject of at least one new television documentary, "The Great Warming," which will be aired on April 22 (but only in Canada. A 90 minute version made by the same Canadian company---Stonehaven Productions---is tentatively scheduled for PBS in October.)

The real resonance test will come at the end of May when the world's first major global warming disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow," kicks off the summer season. Director Roland Emmerich has exchanged climate change for the alien threat of his blockbuster "Independence Day" (and the radiation monster of his unsuccessful remake of "Godzilla".) Though most scientific speculation on possible effects of climate change have evidently not limited the film's special effects, its web site includes some reference to the real problem. The film's ambition to raise awareness is suggested in the title's echo of the landmark 1983 television film, "The Day After," which changed public perceptions with its dramatization of nuclear holocaust.

But even big screen catastrophe may not be enough. The recent release of a Pentagon-sponsored scenario that described geopolitical as well as environmental effects of abrupt climate change---a few nuclear exchanges over water shortages, for example-- barely made a ripple in the news cycle. Nor has the growing concern beyond North America, which reached a telling apotheosis in the recent statement by Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government: "Climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism."

So why are we so determined to be oblivious? The list of possibilities might include:

Monstrous message: Torrid temperatures for decades, abandoned coastal cities, food and water shortages, diseases, resource wars, not to mention no more SUVs---it's too big, too terrible, too far ahead in time; it's too extreme to believe, and if true, too awful to think about. Denial conceals despair: with no apparent easy solutions, we lack faith in our creativity or character, and probably in each other. Besides, after the Cold War's thermonuclear threat, and while trying to cope with international terrorism, we're suffering from apocalypse fatigue.

Dueling Experts: It's comforting as well as apparently sensible to buy the line favored by the Bush administration that if all scientists don't agree, it doesn't get on the agenda. Chronically indifferent media reporting on science adds to the impression that this is another case of experts saying coffee is good for you on Tuesday and bad for you on Wednesday. In fact, given the incredible complexity of what's involved in a number of scientific disciplines taken to their current limits, it's remarkable that a hefty consensus exists on the basic notions that climate change is real, that our fossil fuel use is largely responsible, and that consequences will be profound and possibly catastrophic.

The Usual Suspects: On the assumption that if Americans believed in global warming they might expect their government to do something about it, major elements of fossil fuel industries have conducted a skilled and relentless p.r.campaign of denial, while pressuring politicians to remember who is buying them. So a question of real economic as well as basic ecological consequence becomes part of the ideological and political shouting show, and America is either entertained or wearily tunes out.

Numbing nomenclature: In a world of warm and fuzzies, and "happiness is a warm puppy," it's hard to get upset about something that sounds so moderate and nice as "global warming." Even the old "greenhouse effect" sounds decidedly unthreatening. Who's afraid of a greenhouse? It sounds green, and warm. The currently popular "climate change" is similarly gentle and bland. People eagerly travel long distances for a change in climate. Various attempts have been made to heat up the nomenclature: "the climate crisis," "Thermageddon," but nothing has caught on.

No Rachel Carson: Books continue to be published that contribute solid information, but none has had the simple eloquence or impact of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which got DDT banned and jump-started a new kind of environmental awareness.

Failed focus: Are increasingly bureaucratic environmental organizations dissipate their energies on their separate brand-name issues, refusing to set priorities and work together? So far it seems they've failed to focus on global warming as the keystone issue that not only is the most crucial, but addresses virtually every other significant environmental issue, from deforestation and pollution to species extinction.

What is newest and most challenging about global warming is that once its effects are clearly apparent, it's too late to stop them. This is where the fashionable concept of "the tipping point" transcends its usual trivial application. Once the tipping point of global warming is reached, nothing will stop it, and it will only get worse. We will then be forced to cope with it, and maybe slow down its progress. It is not the kind of crisis we're used to, that we can just wait until it gets bad, then fix it and go back to normal. It will change normal, probably for generations.

That's what makes leadership on this issue so dangerous, and so crucial. The basic tasks are easy to state but not to contemplate: first, face the problem. Then take the actions we can to slow down the warming, prepare for possible consequences, and foster the creativity and innovation that might blunt this crisis in ways now unforeseen. Not since Jimmy Carter challenged Americans to become more energy efficient during the last oil crisis has a president dared to risk the political consequences of suggesting such efforts and limits. Just how much this contributed to his failure to be re-elected is debatable, but in fact the combination of his leadership and the perspicacity of many American businesses resulted in a decade of substantial economic growth without using more energy. Now we're told this is impossible.

Now energy efficiency is no longer fashionable, excess is considered patriotic, and leaders avoid moral leadership by denying the dangers. Instead of building resolve and an emotional consensus, we are left with bewilderment. But not to engage, to inquire and do what we can, is to deny and damage the civic soul of America, long before we face the worst physical consequences.

Our failure so far to confront this threat exposes all our flaws, and so may begin our most profound tragedy. But here and there, some Americans are starting to notice changes---New Englanders who see the maple trees and the maple syrup industry dying, or Pennsylvanians who notice that the deer ticks are more active and virulent because of longer and warmer summers. If they begin to connect the dots on their own, will they demand leadership, or at least be ready to follow it? If so, they have in John Kerry someone who understands the issue and is ready to act on it.

This is an issue that more than any other tests our ability and willingness to think about and care about the future. The challenges are to think big, think ahead and take responsibility now. We have some tradition of taking responsibility for the future, in the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee: "In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come." Thinking ahead together, and thinking for the welfare of the whole planet, are new to us. But we know what the future means when we look into the eyes of children, and the climate crisis will likely be felt by those who are children now.

"If I were a young person being handed this problem by indulgent predecessors, I would be angry," writes James Speth, co-founder of the National Resource Defense Council, in his new book, "Red Sky at Morning." Perhaps that's why the aforementioned new documentaries on global warming are being hosted by young singer Alanis Morissette, and actors Keanu Reeves and Leonardo DiCaprio.

In what remains for me the most cogent media treatment of the subject, the 1990 international television production, "After the Warming," host and writer James Burke examines the crucial role of climate in western civilization and presents a plausible history of global warming from the perspective of a citizen in 2050. (It would be plausible, that is, if humanity had delayed action until only the year 2000, as he supposed it would.) Burke's future self compares us today to the man who falls from the top of a tall building. As he passes the 17th floor, someone asks him how he's doing. "So far, so good," he replies.

Playoffs

It's been a hard year to follow the Lakers, or even to like much about the NBA. The Lakers have been crazy: brilliant in stretches, and dispiriting in others. They've also been beset by an almost unbelievable series of injuries. Literally no starter or even regular player has avoided getting hurt, some for long periods of time (Karl Malone, Horace Grant, Rick Fox) and some with multiple injuries (Kobe Bryant) and chronic ones (Shaq.) And the psychodrama has been pretty unattractive.

It seems that major players on many teams had serious injuries this year, perhaps due to the increasingly "physical" play. Both the injuries (which throw teams into unbecoming chaos) and the trend towards hockey or football style of play have made NBA games less fun to watch.

Soon the playoffs start, and I feel more conflicted than usual about spending the time watching them. When they got Karl Malone and Gary Paton, the Lakers thought they had a dream team but so far it's been more like a nightmare. At times when they jelled, they seemed unbeatable, but most of the time their team flaws were very evident. Other teams know their vulnerabilities. They can be outplayed with speed and intensity.

Which Lakers team will show up? That's often been the question, not only because of the lineups changed by injuries, but by attitude. Shaq is having trouble focusing, even when he apparently wants to. Or so it seems.

Their first round series with Houston may tell the tale. The teams match up well, and the Lakers can't lose focus or intensity, but must use their experience. If they play hard and well, they could dominate. If they fool around and try to win games in the fourth quarter, they could lose the series, or even win the series but lose the war---the next round.

It will be too bad if it's decided by injuries. For a brief moment towards the end of the season, the Lakers had their starting five playing. But then Rick Fox got hurt again, and in the last game of the regular season, they lost Karl Malone again, as well as their two main remaining bench players (Derek Fisher and Deavon George), both of whom have been starters. All of them are expected to be back, but when, and how effective will they be? Horace Grant's injuries are keeping him out of the playoffs altogether, and several other players are hurt.

The Lakers could win the championship, but right now they'd do it as underdogs. Minnesota has the hottest team, and defending champion San Antonio the strongest combination of playoff experience and playing well at the end of the season. But anything could happen. The Lakers could struggle every round, and win them all. Or they could totally dominate certain teams, or all of them. Or they could be gone after six games.

It seems the drama will be Kobe. With his dashing from court room to court, and the mercurial moments he has and the Lakers have surrounding him, together with his immense talent at the top of his game---he just won the Lakers last game, and the Pacific conference championship, with two impossible shots, an off-balance long three pointer to tie the game at the end of the fourth quarter, and a touch-and-shoot three pointer at the end of second overtime with one second on the clock to win the game.

But with that expectation, odds are it will be someone else who makes the difference. Someone unexpected. Besides to see the residual beauty of the game, I guess that's why I'll watch. Starting Saturday.