Kobe Bryant, 1978-2020

One of the sad realities of Warriors fandom before the team's improbable rise was two decades of sharing a division with Kobe Bryant. At regularly-scheduled intervals, the Lakers would arrive in town for what felt predetermined: 30-50 points from Kobe and another undistinguished loss. And while "predetermined" made it sound like fate, the reality was probably worse: Kobe Bryant, deliberate and inevitable.

Inevitability was the hallmark of Kobe's career. The sense in watching him was that every triple-teamed layup, off-balance fadeaway, and clutch free throw was going in. Of course, the truth -- increasingly stark as his career wore on -- was something different more often than not. To be sure, he had his titles (3 with Shaq, 2 to prove he didn't need Shaq), but if his winning seasons defined his on-court legacy, his losing seasons were emblematic of his mentality. Hot takes, head coaches, and backcourt partners would come and go, but Kobe would ever remain Kobe. He would call his own shots and live with the consequences. Which is, of course, easy enough to do when you've won more titles playing hero ball than anyone else in history, save only your idol.

It having been a Warriors game, I was watching when Kobe tore his Achilles in 2013. Talking heads were professionally obligated to question whether he would (or could) ever return, but no one who had been paying even passing attention to Kobe Bryant doubted he would play again. When he took 50 shots and dropped 60 points on Utah the last time he stepped on an NBA court, well, of course he did. And as he transitioned from retired basketball player to Oscar winner and ESPN-sanctioned sports media mogul, one could hardly be surprised when it felt... inevitable.

It's truly jarring to see a man so willful die so young, and to think at all about the legacy of a 41-year-old with young children. My friends and I didn't enjoy much of Kobe's basketball prime, but even as adolescents tying too much of our identities to a poorly managed franchise, there was no point in denying the obvious, fair or not. In retrospect, I'm glad to have had the chance to have followed the NBA so closely across his entire career. On reflection now, it's apparent that what made Kobe Bryant so singular as a basketball player is an equally rare and remarkable quality to find in anyone: unflinching commitment to their vision of themself.

Prince, 1958-2016

It was September or October 2006, about a month into my first year at Berkeley, when I saw a new copy of Purple Rain for $5.99 in the discount bin at Rasputin Music. At that point, I knew Prince as a symbol (literally), a revered musical icon, and a Chapelle's Show character, but had never actually listened to his music. I had gotten off to a rocky start to college, and my growing music collection played a substantial role in helping me through. I dug into every corner of the Beatles' back catalog; I continued to wear out the copy of The Eraser I'd bought the previous summer; and after only one or two months I had already spun St. Elsewhere more times than I could count. As I bought music, I'd always intended to listen to Prince, and this particular afternoon seemed as good a time as any.

Sometime towards the end of college – by which time I'd acquired most of the rest of Prince's discography and bought Purple Rain and its otherworldly accompanying poster on LP – I decided to average out that $5.99 over the number of plays or hours I got out of that tinny, mid-80s pressing CD. Though the index card bearing my arithmetic has long since disappeared, by whichever metric I used we were talking about fractions of fractions of a cent per unit. Among the storied peaks of the many discographies I acquainted myself with at the outset of college, Purple Rain resonated with confident, inexhaustible vitality. Today, it's my pick for the best album of the 80s, and certainly one of my 10 favorites ever made – yet it's not without competitors for the title of best album in his catalog.

Prince passed away this morning. In the sense that his health in some way necessitated an emergency plane landing last week, it's not surprising, even for someone as young as 57. And yet the idea remains a shock – perhaps because his transcendent otherness was so immaculately cultivated that it suggested he might, in fact, actually be impervious to such Earthly concerns as death. From his star-making turn dressed in a purple jumpsuit atop a motorcycle, Prince somehow grew more eccentric as he aged, including such highlights as waging war on the internet and fully embracing his extramusical celebrity. Even as he receded from the experimental forefront of popular music, he remained one of its few truly fascinating figures. He announced his memoirs a month ago, and for the first time in my adulthood (with one obvious exception), I remember being genuinely curious to read a musician's full take on their own life. In every aspect of his person, he was one of a kind, and the world is less rich for having lost him.

Dave Brubeck, 1920-2012

1959 was almost certainly the biggest year in jazz history. Beyond the justifiably beatified Kind of Blue, it featured the true emergence of at least three of its greatest icons, near simultaneously: Ornette Coleman, with The Shape of Jazz to Come; John Coltrane (in his own right), with Giant Steps; and Charles Mingus, with Mingus Ah Um. Often omitted among these landmarks in the purist's histories of the music - yet having outsold nearly all of them, especially then, but even subsequently - is Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Throughout a long life well-lived, Brubeck retained an odd stature with music critics: one in which, seemingly, no matter how many of them put in writing that the man's music had never received its full due, that basic, underlying fact never changed. One reason that Brubeck always remained a consumer's jazzman was his very popularity with those consumers. For many jazz theoreticians, his lack of "true" musical vision was as well evidenced by the continued charting of his albums through the rock-heavy 1960s as by his disinterest in the free structure associated with the avant garde. Another reason is his affiliation with the Cool Jazz movement, one which lacked the political intrigue - and, it must generally be said, the sheer virtuosity - associated with bop.

Finally, of course, Brubeck was white. As with white artists in most other traditionally black musical arenas, white jazzmen have faced an uphill climb towards legitimacy. (Such dubiousness is often justified: for every Eminem there is usually at least one Vanilla Ice, and for every Elvis Presley a Pat Boone.) Unfortunately, this incredulity by association has tended to overshadow Brubeck's role as one of jazz's most forward-thinking bandleaders. His quartet, after all, became integrated at nearly the same time as the higher-profile addition of Bill Evans to Miles Davis' quintet. (He had also led an integrated band in Europe during his service in WWII.) Brubeck continued to cancel appearances that protested the presence of his bassist, Eugene Wright, until such protests finally stopped. Perhaps the most poignant evidence of the impact racial affairs had on Brubeck emerged 40 years later, during the filming of Ken Burns' Jazz, when he broke down in tears as he recounted his thoughts following the war:

You know the first black man that I saw, my dad took me to see on the Sacramento River in California and he said to his friend, "Open your shirt for Dave." There was a brand on his chest. And my dad said, "These things can't happen." That's why I fought for what I fought for.

Like Davis, Coleman, Coltrane, and Mingus, Brubeck released great albums both before and after his 1959 masterpiece; more than any of them, though, Brubeck's album has singularly defined his career. Time Out can more than stand on its own musical merits. The success of its pioneering experimentation with strange time signatures lies less in the act itself than in its unobtrusive execution. It's also impossible to deny the catchiness of the immortal "Take Five," or the beauty of "Blue Rondo à la Turk." The album is timeless, though, on account of its mood, and here it stands apart from the other landmarks mentioned above. The Shape of Jazz to Come and Giant Steps are opening salvos, and they continue to resound, first and foremost, with the air of great artists announcing themselves. Mingus Ah Um, by contrast, is a refinement of that which preceded it - the sharpening of the sweep and fury of Pithecanthropus Erectus that would ultimately culminate in The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Predictably, among the five, Time Out is closest in spirit to the sublime Kind of Blue. Yet where the latter's magic lies in the otherworldly nature of its perfection - drummer Jimmy Cobb famously argued that it "must have been made in heaven" - the calm of the former is decidedly of this earth. The effortlessness of the performances throughout seem to owe more to comfort than to confidence, and it's no coincidence that Brubeck was the only man of the five (save possibly Coltrane) who could accurately have been described as a "gentle soul." With his passing, jazz does not lose the last of its titans, but it does bid farewell to the one man among them who more than any other survivor represented calm amidst the storm. In the end, more than his undeniable chops or monumental output, Brubeck's legacy will rest on his basic decency, which as both a person and a musician made him a man truly worth admiring.

(A) Man on the Moon

On August 25, the world lost one of its titans, Neil Armstrong - a man singular in his defining accomplishment, as well as his refusal to live his life on anyone else's terms. His stark refusal to be caught in the spotlight for most of the last three decades of his life seems especially striking in an era of internet-driven overexposure of erstwhile celebrities. (It should be noted that refusing to take credit for his feats in space hardly set him apart as an astronaut: one would be hard pressed to find one who doesn't automatically credit his accomplishments primarily to countless engineers, mission control, and the other members of his crew.) Yet to call his list of accomplishments staggering would, if anything, be an understatement. Needless to say, he was the first man to set foot on the moon, and his deeply touching (if erratically delivered) "one small step for (a) man" quotation was heard live by 450 million people - more than 12% of the population of a world that was still widely devoid of radios and television sets. Often forgotten following what he did once on the moon, though, was his manual landing of the module on a site he had deemed safe on the spot while flying with less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the tank. His legendary eight days aboard Apollo 11 also overshadowed a career in which he logged nearly 2500 hours in experimental aircraft for the Air Force and flew in both the Gemini 8 and 11 missions to space.

More recently, two years nearly to the day before his death, Armstrong made a rare decision to broadcast his feelings when he criticized the Obama administration for its decision to surrender the forefront of American space exploration to private firms. Speaking before the Senate, he described the contemporary state of NASA funding as one that "presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere." It is curious that spaceflight has been so thoroughly neglected over the past (precisely) forty years. For a government so long committed to profligate spending - the best record of any American president over the last 70 years in providing balanced budgets was Dwight Eisenhower, at 3 years out of 8 - what was once perceived as a tenet of national (and indeed, earthly) pride has been reduced to only 0.5% of our larger-than-ever national budget. I hope that Neil Armstrong's greatest legacy may one day be his having taken part in the resumption of American predominance in manned space exploration. For now, as a small tribute to a man I admire as much for his few, well-chosen words as his grace under fire, I have digitized the long out-of-print CBS LP Man on the Moon, which was narrated by Walter Cronkite and documents the history and journey of Apollo 11. It's a beautiful reminder of man's all-too-fleeting capacity for genuine, transcendent accomplishment. You can download it here.

In Memoriam: Jack Bennett

My dear friend Jack Bennett was killed on the afternoon of June 24 in a boating accident on Stillwater River, just south of Columbus, Montana. He was 31 years old. He died attempting to help others on the river whose raft had become wrapped around a bridge pylon.

Few of the handful who regularly read this blog will have known Jack, nor are many from among his family and friends likely to ever find this post. Instead, I'm throwing these words out into the void of the internet just so that they'll be there, and so that I'll have at least said them. Jack was a kindhearted man with a tremendous sense of humor: a pleasure to shoot the shit with, a capable conversational partner in discussing the heavier aspects of life, and a willing and talented participant in countless gif wars on Facebook. I bonded with him over movies, music, beer, and the joys of the internet. We helped each other through our postbac science marathon, and he was one of the few whose natural grasp of physics (in particular) positively dwarfed my own. He returned the infinite love of his delightful dog with an affection that came as close to a matched level as surely any owner could muster. Though I was just under seven years his junior, he treated me with the respect of a peer in both science and life - an honor, it was clear, that he was much more sure I had earned than I was. I'd always been looking forward to another beer with him, and now it seems there can never be one. I wish I'd gotten to know him further, but I'm very grateful for the time we did spend together. I'll leave this video here for him: a song we'd discussed before as one we both held dear, and one whose bittersweet sentiment seems to perfectly capture both the terrible waste of his death and the celebration of a life that was truly well - if all-too-briefly - lived.

10/27/1981 - 6/24/2012

זכרונו לברכה

May his memory be a blessing

9/11/11

Ballpoint pen, markers, pencil,

newspaper, newspaper ash

September 11, 2001 was in many ways a nightmarish initiation into adulthood - a demonstration of mankind's oxymoronic capacity for inhumanity on an inconceivable scale, experienced transcontinentally as though it were occurring in view of my family's front door. A decade later, words remain hard to come by, and in any event inadequate (as, lamentably, do drawings, though the example reproduced above - drawn in my annual state of abstract sadness and anger after a night of little sleep - was certainly heartfelt). I'll certainly never forget that awful day, and can never forgive those hateful cowards who then did and will continue to deliberately and specifically target innocent civilians. More powerfully than I can express in prose, this photo of Robert Peraza embodies what evil leaves in its wake.

In loving memory of the 2977 lives lost and the countless others torn asunder on September 11, 2001

Wouldn't You Miss Me at All?

Today marks the 5 year anniversary of the death of Pink Floyd founding member Syd Barrett, the most famous acid casualty of the 60s and one of the guiding lights of psychedelic rock. Where so much of the era's freakout music was characterized by self-indulgent, free associated lyrics designed to sound more profound than they were, Barrett's took precisely the opposite approach: his view of the world was a childlike one, imbuing his songs with a unique balance of carefree euphoria and unease. His melodic sensibilities were also superb, and early Floyd singles like "Arnold Layne" are, ignoring their other virtues, simply great, effortless pieces of songwriting. Of course, he's most widely remembered even by many Floyd fans as the man who disappeared, shaved off all his hair, and lived the rest of his life in his mother's home, obese and cut off from the world he no longer trusted. His subsequent solo albums are fascinating, exhibiting in equal parts the musician he once was and the increasingly fragmented mind he'd become; they're frequently as great as they are troubling. His legacy mostly (and rightfully) leans on his band's towering debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Ultimately, though, his greatest gift to the world, beginning as early as the 60s, may have been providing a much loved face to the then-taboo perils of mental health. The tragic way he spent the majority of his life - as well as songs like "Dark Globe" (below), a shattering chronicle of a fully conscious, reluctant descent into madness - continue to serve as a stark reminder of the patience and care we owe to all those in similar straits.

In Memoriam

1946-2006

Peter Falk, 1927-2011

Though the grind of the traditional continuous streak of summer midterms demands the bulk of my time and attention, I'm compelled to offer a brief appreciation in memory of Peter Falk, who died yesterday at the age of 83. He's best remembered, of course, as Columbo, a the titular character of a show carried exclusively by Falk's inimitable capacity to play an unremarkable-looking man who was nonetheless believable as an infallable detective. He also brought a grandfatherly charm to The Princess Bride that made him the only castmember to compare with the otherworldly lovability of Andre the Giant. The greatest role of his career was a small but indelible turn in Wings of Desire, where he played himself, Peter Falk - an angel who'd surrendered immortality for a chance to live among the mortals he'd only been able to watch from afar, and never regretted it. It was precisely that strength of character, as manifested in real life, that made Peter Falk a hero to me: one who overcame half-blindness (also in his right eye), certainly to great success and acclaim, but more importantly, with the humor and fortitude that endeared each of his characters to so many. It feels most appropriate to end with a baseball story of his: "I remember once in high school the umpire called me out at third base when I was sure I was safe. I got so mad I took out my glass eye, handed it to him and said, 'Try this.' I got such a laugh you wouldn't believe."

In Memoriam

Wayman Tisdale - "The Fonk Record"

Following an outstanding career at the University of Oklahoma - one which saw his number retired and the national award for best freshman named after him - and a gold medal in the 1984 Olympics, Wayman Tisdale was taken with the second pick in the 1985 NBA Draft. Though his professional career was marked by a number of excellent seasons, Tisdale remained as widely known for his delightful personality and surprising virtuosity on the bass guitar as his performance on-court, and he actually retired early in 1997 to focus on his music. Unfortunately for some of the fans the Tiz made in the NBA, he chose to make his career in smooth jazz. Though his music was always well-played and immaculately produced, it nonetheless was prone to much of the generic feel endemic to the genre, and Tisdale may thus have never enjoyed the full commercial success his extramusical celebrity should have afforded him. In 2007, to the dismay of basketball fans nationwide, Tisdale was diagnosed with cancer that would remain an issue for the rest of his life and lead to the partial amputation of his right leg the following year. He carried on through his illness with characteristic grace, and even founded the Wayman Tisdale Foundation to raise funds for fellow amputees without enough money for prosthetic limbs. However, he died suddenly in May 2009, an abrupt end that not only robbed the world of an inspiring, gentle spirit, but even worse, seemingly took him without a chance to say goodbye. The October 2010 release of The Fonk Record therefore came as an enormous surprise. For one thing, it contained recordings made gradually over the course of 12 years, without any outside attention. It was also naturally strange to hear Tisdale more than a year after his death, not only on the bass, but even singing. Most disorienting of all, though, was that the album's name turned out to accurately describe its contents: it really is nothing less than an honest-to-god funk album, and one that could have been pulled out of a Bootsy Collins time capsule, at that.

Even without the added novelty of Wayman Tisdale releasing an album like The Fonk Record, it would have been odd to find anyone recording this kind of music in 2010. After all, by most any account, though it lived on in derivative forms, the funk proper had died by the early 80s: P-Funk ran out of gas, James Brown was reduced to a used carbon copy of himself, and Sly Stone literally disappeared into a tear in the fabric of time and space. Yet upon investigation, Tisdale's move makes perfect sense. Funk had been born in the context of a sad state of affairs for black Americans in the late 60s and early 70s, when the choice for socially concerned black popular musicians was either to produce a soul-searching affair like What's Going On or simply to forge ahead and (admittedly, anachronistically) Tear the Roof Off the Sucker. In the face of life-threatening - and, according to subsequent interviews with his widow, painfully debilitating - illness, Tiz, like so many of his bass forebears, turned to the fountain of funk as a source of spiritual comfort. It's as much a testament to his strength of character as his musicianship that The Fonk Record genuinely manages to be as good as the story behind it would make his fans hope. Perhaps Tisdale's wisest decision was to remain true to the genre and ensure that the music never feels overly sentimental. So though there are some moments rendered more meaningful by circumstance - when Tiz sings "there ain't never gonna be another jam like this" on his George Clinton duet "This Fonk Is 4U," or when his bandmates transform the breakup ballad "Been Here Before" into a goodbye to Wayman - the album remains, first and by far foremost, an excuse to simply have a great fucking time. It's the most appropriate goodbye conceivable, and convincing proof that he was as gifted a musician as he was a basketball player or a human being.

Eleh Ezkerah

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day - very nearly exactly the 66th anniversary of the final liberation of Germany's concentration camps (the last "big one," Bergen-Belsen, was liberated on April 15, 1945). It's an appropriate moment to remember that there are two components to the "Never Forget" motto so inextricably associated with the Holocaust. The first is to defend the victims themselves: to fight to remember each extinguished soul as an identity, rather than a statistic. There are, of course, any number of ways to connect. Projects like Francesco Lotoro's miraculous KZ Musik series demonstrate how music allowed the spirits of imprisoned composers to escape the darkness of the camps. Documentaries like Alain Resnais' Night and Fog make the overwhelming inhumanity of the Holocaust less abstract, while dramatizations like Steven Spielberg's immortal Schindler's List can highlight the essence of basic human decency even in the face of the unspeakable. (I humbly encourage you to check out a Holocaust memorial journal issue I worked on last year, available here; free hard copies are available by mail on request.)

The second critical component of "Never Forget" concerns the perpetrators, rather than the victims. Appropriately, this evening President Obama announced the death of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden - a man, much like Adolf Hitler, driven by a virulently hateful ideology, willing and even eager to extinguish the lives of however many innocents stood in the way of the realization of his plans for the world. History tells us with unflinching regularity that mankind is wont to produce men of unrepentant evil. Just as we are bound to protect their would-be victims and remember the fallen, so too are we required to do all in our power to wrest from them the capacity to harm, from rapists to the perpetrators of genocide in Sudan. For so long as evil persists, none of us are truly free.

לזכר ששת המליון

May their memories never be forgotten.