Refinement in rough climates, beauty in bad looking places
There’s a shortage of beautiful things in the part of town where I work. An industrial area that’s getting an overhaul, the spaces in between are vacant, dry dirt lots linked together by buckling narrow laneways that connect through back alleys behind warehouses and factory buildings. Most are out of commission, now holding recording studios, architecture firms, small-press publishers, after hours venues, homes, a crossfit gym whose attendees lap the building to start their class and consistently almost knock me on my ass as they tear blind around the corners I cut, but one that still pumps the air the smell of melting chocolate a few times every week.
There are 2 little cats—a delicate calico and one slight, gremlin bearded grey tabby—that sit calmly in a laneway with tomato plants that climb the chainlink, leaves I’d rub between a finger and thumb and splitting red globes shining in the sun up until a week ago, all of it since cleared out by the garden’s keeper. In the same laneway, an older man and I have worked our way up to “Good morning”s while I pass him doing his stretches on a makeshift deck he’s built off his studio door over the cratered asphalt. Out back of another unit there’s a basketball hoop in one of those big plastic stands. When the Raps won, a life-sized Naismith wheat-paste went up the next day on the wall just beside the hoop’s leaning pole.
The one regular road that runs to a main winds and weaves in ways that rob you of the minutes in the morning that will keep you early, tuning you late, so necessary shortcuts are taken by people whose offices are slowly taking over. I take a skinny little 3-step stairwell tucked off the sidewalk of a big thoroughfare. Top of the stairs it stays narrow until it opens up, on one side, to a 6ft aluminum rail fence guarding a pool behind. On summer mornings when the sun is hitting, little stolen lengths of aquamarine flash in Morse between the posts. There have been nights when I have made the walk to the subway late, very late, and the pool is uncovered and empty and still lit from the bottom, steaming and flat, and the chlorine smell stops me in my tracks and I actually yearn a sec for someone to hop it with right then, or to not be so fried and footsore that I would hop it alone.
After the pool the path opens into a common courtyard, apartment balconies rising along one long side. In the summer, nine stories up, one is full of sunflower stalks so tall that they brush the floor of the balcony above. From there I cut a service road to Naismith alley, rounding one last warehouse to a most days cinematic view by virtue of the space around it, the only thing on the otherwise cleared block it springs up out of, the 10-storey, 100 years old this year, filled with actual ghosts and a fake David Bowie death mask, aluminum factory turned museum where I work.
Monarchs, all summer, had been hanging in the air around it. Tipping their broad bodies into the freak winds that gust across the empty fields waiting to be developed behind the museum, trundling awful close to power lines. Bugs hellbent on distance that hovered in the drift with me as I showed up some mornings on the heels of the night I had just left, occupying no real purchase of time that a person ought to have.
What’s beautiful in bad looking places springs up out of gaps—forced above, below, between. Not blink and you’ll miss it fleeting, actually pretty stubborn, but not all that concerned with making itself known. There’s a rhythm to finding it refined by routine, eventually you learn where to look.
Have you ever Google imaged ‘Milwaukee in winter’? If you live somewhere warm year round, maybe it’s romantic, if you live somewhere presently with nights cooling, then you’ll grimace like you’ve taken a bad bite of something. We don’t need to get all the way into it because many of us will be all the way into it soon, but, there is something you could warm your whole body with, in a place like that, watching Giannis Antetokounmpo do his mean face and stomp down the middle of the paint for a big and rude slow motion layup that ends in not so much of a dunk than a donk and Alex Len going into witness protection.
Orlando, Florida, while a place that gets written home from a lot, in the form of $15 postcards sent from Disney showing you and, ostensibly, a person in a Buzz Lightyear suit impervious to sun bleaching while Randy Newman’s ‘You Got A Friend In Me’ drones on and on and on forever until it coils like an escaped pet python, gorged and fearless, around your psyche, is not a place you’d really write home about. Only one person does a good job of it but otherwise it is land around a swamp, much of it bought up by a Nazi sympathizer to play pretend in. Still, you’ll need a reliable way to cool off. How better than watching Jonathan Isaac casually pop into the troposphere to catch what was the most intentional pass of D.J. Augustin’s life just then, and, unfortunately, like a broken brand new refrigerator jammed on the crushed ice setting, rattle down all over Alfonzo McKinnie’s head.
Both of these, refinement in a rough climates. Beauty in bad looking places.
The dove was bobbing around the base of the temporary chainlink fence supposed to keep people from cutting through the field behind the museum or running their dogs there, that now, with the fence, seemed instead to denote as an official place for those things. At first I thought, a very pretty pigeon, then noticed the delicate black ring around the base of its neck, its clean white belly, its primaries a mix of soft fawn and the chalky purple of dry candy dip-sticks, and how it didn’t shy from me coming closer. I cooed at it, not even thinking. Murmured, “How pretty are you?” and, “You belong to somebody”, because all beauty lays a mantle of ownership, even when you know better.
When Draymond Green feels like it he will ruin your day. And he feels like it fairly often. His favourite thing is to come flying at speed that makes it seem leisurely, that slows the very act of flight, so you really get a good look at how rude when he floats from three strides away to end up directly in front of an inbound, an open corner shot, a second—less—exactly after it has left a guy’s hands. Green gets exactly what he wants and they get a perfect view of it. There’s a reminder in this, or in how he stuffs basketballs back down to the earth from whence they came, of Green’s omnipresence. Big, ugly, celestial disruptions, like Mercury going retrograde all over your life. Green likes to remind players that he is only ever one orbit away.
If you tear a piece of fabric along the grain and it comes apart clean, with a rough edge, that’s the kinda cloth PJ Tucker is cut from on court. I wanna say denim. Tucker is walking around out there with unfinished business for everybody. Has it been a whole season or more since someone did that thing to Tucker’s guy? He hasn’t forgotten and he will play like he is jogging their whole body to remember, not ease up until they do, and then just slightly, not all the way satisfied until he gets an apology out of them. On court, in some way, they will yield. When DeRozan and Lowry were Tucker’s guys, I thought for sure no bad thing could ever come for the Raptors again. Now Harden is Tucker’s guy and you can tell PJ’s enjoying the work the same way James is enjoying all that space. There isn’t a guy who is less anyone else’s guy than James Harden, and who is half as lucky, because that’s the kind of challenge PJ Tucker stares back best at.
But off the court, Tucker’s fabrics are silks, wools, linens, cut with steady shears in an expert hand and only ever meant to be worn on one body—his. Tucker takes the same fluidity and assurance in choosing his clothes as he does to his mark on the court. He is a deliberate dresser, intrigued by trends without bowing to them. He knows what he wants to wear.
“When I went to play in Europe in 2007, I really got into high fashion,” he said. Seeing older Italian gentlemen in brands like Brioni and Isaia, accessorizing “dope pocket squares, glasses and suede loafers” really stuck with Tucker. “That has always been my initiative, to do my own thing and take things that don’t really go together and put them together,” he explained. “Wear a tuxedo jacket with some track pants, whatever I feel like, whatever I think is dope.”
“When I was in Phoenix, people started noticing and looking every day to see what I was wearing, but it never really affected me,” he confessed. “When you do this every day, it’s just something you do. Even in Europe I was getting dressed up for every single game. Nobody may be watching but it’s just me. It’s how I live and it’s how I move.
Tucker moves on the court the same way he does in clothes, aware of what fits his body, bullying a jadeite two-piece suit or his shoulder, over and over, into whoever is idiotic enough to stand under the net when there’s an offensive rebound on the way. Dressing dudes down or himself up, the right fit, a symmetry that stings.
Train tracks cut the eastern and western edges of the industrial pocket of the neighbourhood. Behind the museum is land slated for 3 different construction projects but now, weeds and wildflowers that have sprung up from a full growing season, waist high. There’s a runoff pond a visiting pair of geese knew to stay off of. The pair, spotted a couple times, until there was only one, and that one came back every day for weeks and to snip at the grass and bed down in the shade across from the freight elevator. It watched me load 1,000 helium balloons branded with the name of a new vape pen, a freestanding gilded gold birdcage with a swing big enough for burlesque dancers to fit on, and a 120 year old ash tree, in several tonne sections, into the freight.
Alone with all that and only the goose I felt if not an acknowledgement then at least a bland awareness which, depending how desperate you are feeling, can be a kind of communion. Was it lonely, waiting for a partner that I thought had to have been killed but could have flown off, or was it taking a breather. Was it lonely, or was that me, opening a bleating freight elevator to whatever next out of control thing was waiting.
One day it stopped showing up. What you know of loneliness is sometimes better mirrored back to you, versus the absence of anything at all.
DeRozan, Harden, Westbrook, ISO on the court, maybe one friend each until they’ve left or leave them, so ISO IRL, too. Harden has Tucker now, DeRozan always has Lowry even if the distance is too much for my heart to really bear, but Westbrook, even with Durant and AD (after Durant), did not so much need to make a new routine as go back to his steady state.
Westbrook alone on court is the best way he knows how to work. For a lot of people Westbrook is a mirror. Reflected in him a hundred different ways to get mad at a guy playing ball. But for him there’s no refraction, he doesn’t see himself in anyone else out there, only through. Westbrook’s loneliness comes when he steps temporarily out from his own silhouette, when he’s not anymore the figure absorbing the light. How he goes with Harden, then, might work perfect.
Harden is the big lonely sun and Russ is the satellite about to pass out of our known universe. Harden has to be the one with the light spilling off of him, preferably from distance, and Russ can sail right by, but whichever way he moves he’s going to bounce some of it back, like a wink, way out on his own trajectory. Loneliness and distance, not always interchangeable. In Harden Russ finds a main-sequence star he can come and go from. Wear all his different jackets in the stadium tunnel, try for and get a triple double almost every night, go home. Westbrook has always been himself but in Houston he might not feel on his own doing it for the first time in a long while.
There’s a great view of the storms that sweep into the city, rolling fast from Lake Erie, visible kilometres off from up inside the museum, out its double-tall factory windows. Dark clouds rush in, the light suddenly shifting to bright gold—disaster light—a downpour and from the time it takes the storm to pass from west to east, one side of the building to the other, a full rainbow will spread on the heels of it. They stretch over the cleared lots, their ends burrowing down in clusters of seven-storey sumacs with leaves all flipped upward in the way trees pay tribute to storms, silver undersides fluttering like shoals of small fish from the wind, air pressure, ozone.
I’m very sorry to say, but I think Kyrie Irving could be the storm this year. I think he wants something, finally, that he could not conjure out of himself last year in Boston. Who could blame him but every way he chose to put it during Nets media day was so succinct, lucid to the point of moving through self awareness into self reproach, then past that to self aggrandizing without so much as talking about himself vs all the spaces he was going to put himself in.
It was like weather.
A permanent protective circle around Durant, for one, and projecting himself all the way to the end of his career, in Brooklyn, as another. DeAndre Jordan was the one who said it was the universe who put KD, Irving and him all together, but still, Kyrie gone full galaxy brain really ran with that line of narrative, ostensibly, through time.
These Nets are better poised to deliver on the promise that brand new-look Nets of Garnett and Pierce, plus Frank Gehry’s fingerprints still fresh enough on the contested Barclays plans, could not. I’d be lying if I said the photos James Herbert was sending me of Jarrett Allen, grinning through the entirety of media day, didn’t make me place my loyalties to Toronto in a locker I’d forgot the location of at a bus depot just a little. But I also never lie about Jarrett Allen.
What’s beautiful, what you come to lose your mind a little bit over, will never make the kind of sense you can count on. Our aesthetics, attractions, shift and shed as easy as skin, as cells. Ten years you can have a whole new skeleton and a very disturbing attraction to, case in point, the Brooklyn Nets. What else can you do but lean all the way in to what snags you, to what seizes your lungs and heart in one huge hand and squeezes, until your eyeballs fall out? Beauty goes—razed, built over, walks away with one hand slowly wagging, one shot from impossible, one dunk that catches gravity nodding off for a second—you gotta grab it.