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.

Get Yourself a Shave

My earliest memories of Local Hero come from Golden Gate Video. The store's comedy section was pressed up against the back left wall, across from the mini fridge with the 50¢ sodas. For years, Local Hero's enigmatic VHS cover watched over me as I scanned across new Adam Sandler releases and middle-period Bill Murray fare, always registering but never quite prompting me to rent it. This lasted until late middle school, when I rented the tape on one of our earliest family vacations to the Stanford Inn by the Sea in Mendocino. All at once, the film's soggy, vaguely enigmatic cover art gave way to a subtle but fully realized little world, reflecting a foggy Northern California coastline with an almost uncanny accuracy.

I began to collect DVDs in 2001, after noticing a Tower Records ad for the entire first season of The Simpsons miraculously spread across only 3 discs. Counter to my Mom's concerns that the discs were audio-only CDs, I in fact discovered not only visual quality surpassing any home media I'd seen before, but supplemental features; creator commentaries provided precious new insights into The Simpsons, but also introduced me to a way of learning about the media I loved which I would never have dreamed of. I quickly learned that not all DVDs were created equal. Transfers, special features, and even cases varied substantially between releases, with lower profile releases slipping into stores without the bells and whistles afforded their more popular counterparts. So it was that Local Hero arrived to my home in a snapcase, accompanied only by its trailer with a transfer that barely surpassed the preceding VHS releases in quality (albeit in widescreen).

Local Hero stuck with me through the ensuing years like few movies ever have. I watched it repeatedly in 2004 after losing my vision, with Ferness serving a perfect getaway after appointments. I included a rip of the film in the care package I sent my wife as she studied abroad shortly after we started dating -- a choice which in retrospect seems to say as much about how highly I thought of her as vice versa. As the years went by, I became more conscious of the high grain transfer with successive viewings on TVs at home and mobile device screens I'd bring on planes. My archaic DVD slipped quietly out of print, and in the absence of an American market replacement version (save a similarly bare bones appearance in a Burt Lancaster 4-in-1 pack), I settled with an understanding that my much loved disc would have to be enough.

I bought my first Criterion Collection DVD in 11th grade and began collecting them in earnest in college. When I joined My Criterion, I entered Local Hero as the film I'd most like to see added to the Collection. More than a decade later, the June email announcing future releases arrived with Local Hero as a surprise inclusion, characteristically tucked away second from the bottom. Three long months later, my snapcase DVD could at last be retired, likely 18 years after its original purchase.

The upgrade justifies the wait. The transfer looks terrific, offering well deserved clarity to the film's beaches and the craggy faces of its remarkable character actors alike. The abundant archival material is accompanied by an impressive amount of extras from director Bill Forsyth, who's largely retired from the industry since my old DVD was pressed. Local Hero's soft-spoken personality has always belied both the nuance of its characterizations and its assured craftsmanship, and it was never going to clamor for a reexamination (let alone the princess treatment) on its own. I hope this rerelease can help to broaden the film's exposure and call attention to it as the Great Movie it really is. For me, it's wonderful after half a lifetime thus far to see Local Hero with some of the visual haze stripped away, but the foggy core ever intact.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (3) The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses

[This is the eighth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

The Stone Roses arrived on the international scene fully formed with their eponymous 1989 debut, a vast and outrageously confident album befitting a band that had already been touring for nearly 6 years. Through a complex series of contract disputes and interpersonal conflicts, the band would ultimately come to stand as the forebears not only of the figureheads of a second British Invasion, but also of those groups’ tendency to fizzle out just as they reached their peak. The thin drums and trebly basslines of The Stone Roses anchor in 1989 music that borrows liberally from very nearly everything preceding it – including, almost as if to make a point, Renaissance balladry on “Elizabeth My Dear.” The guitar-dominated proceedings certainly owe a great deal to The Smiths, an influence which may also have unlocked such unabashedly pretty moments as the chiming “Waterfall.” Much has been made of the absence of overt electronica on The Stone Roses, given band’s place within the drug- and dance-centric Madchester scene. If it isn’t quite a party album, though, it’s a relentlessly kinetic one thanks to its powerful rhythm section and swaggering frontman. The latter does ultimately steal the show, singing “I Wanna Be Adored” and “I Am the Resurrection” with absolute conviction, and either no awareness of or no concern for the disconnect. The effect is something of a magic trick, lending plausibility to The Stone Roses as a miraculous flash in the pan arriving at the precipice of the 1980s to encapsulate the decade, rather than the slow brew it really was. It was perfectly appropriate that the band’s next act was effectively to disappear.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (4) Paul's Boutique - Beastie Boys

[This is the seventh in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Following an abortive career in punk, the Beastie Boys made an overnight leap to stardom with Licensed to Ill, a tone poem of gleeful idiocy that quickly became the best-selling album in hip-hop. Headed by producer Rick Rubin, and armed with an even more finely tuned version of the rock formula already worked to near-perfection on Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell, Licensed to Ill proved an enduring surprise, thanks to the sharpness with which the Beasties skewered the frat culture they had, from the outset, (mostly) transcended. Even those who appreciated the wink behind "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)," though, could never have anticipated Paul's Boutique, which presented hip-hop as a legitimate mode of expression on a scale never before attempted. It honed the wit of the debut and was saturated with a pop culture referentiality presaging nearly 3 decades of post-Tarantino media to come. It retained the signature, labored rhymes that lent the MCs their peculiar charm, but also provided the maturing rappers with genuinely impressive technical showcases. Finally, it lay upon an unparalleled bed of samples assembled by the Dust Brothers; befitting a medium that lives and dies on the spoken word, it not only surrounds and invigorates the lyrics, but complements and occasionally even answers them. Smarter than Licensed to Ill, better produced than Raising Hell, and more consistent than Straight Outta Compton, Paul's Boutique survived a vigorous commercial flop to find acclaim throughout the world of rap as perhaps the first album fully to live up to the genre’s potential. Of course, subsequent to the album’s release, both momentous litigation and a growing awareness on the part of record labels of the potential profitability of sample-based music would ensure that no album could ever be made to sound quite like Paul's Boutique again. Few other hip-hop albums have ever sounded so literate; far fewer have ever been as immaculately produced; and possibly none to date have been so resoundingly successful in both.

Peak Ringo

The ubiquity and adulation of the Beatles makes it difficult to cover their songs: one tends to mimic the arrangements and fail to recapture the magic, or else stray too far and fall flat (except in the presence of transcendent talent). Likewise, while many artists have revisited old songs late in their career, precious few rerecordings have offered value beyond their inherent novelty. A number of rock's legends are by now far enough into their 70s to have had one, or even a few, releases that have addressed aging with grace, and even elegance. With Ringo Starr recently releasing Give More Love, appended with 4 rerecorded back catalog tracks, it was easy to wonder whether he could follow his contemporaries' lead and produce a late-career curveball.

Ringo's discography features only one overt foray into introspection, which followed on the heels of Paul McCartney's nostalgic Memory Almost Full and borrowed from it liberally, thematically and musically. Almost by definition, it was a kindhearted look at a remarkable early career that offered little insight into its author. There's no doubting the song's sincerity, but it sounds like Ringo attempting a reflective Paul McCartney song, which in its heart it probably is. By all accounts, in Give More Love Ringo has produced his eighth-or-so consecutive amiable and largely indistinguishable studio offering. It was perfectly unsurprising for Ringo to revisit the well for 4 bonus tracks to please old fans on a nineteenth solo album. It is at least a bit surprising that one rerecording offers something different from the original.

"Don't Pass Me By" was written in 1962 and released on The Beatles 6 years later. It's a typical White Album recording, sharply arranged and more than a little frantic (especially in its sped-up mono incarnation). It's a simple song that perfectly suited a 1968 Ringo, earnest and immersed in the lovable sad sack persona he'd cultivated in the band's movies. While it was written as a raucous country and western number, it's been retrofitted into a gentle bluegrass arrangement, in keeping with 5 decades of changes to the genre and years lived by the performer. Where the other 2017 rerecordings are happy to retrace the originals' steps, "Don't Pass Me By" was shrewdly allowed to amble, affording Ringo an opportunity to sound not only laid back, but quietly dignified.

Ringo presumably never will release a Memory Almost Full: it's not just that his musical stylings aren't suited to a statement album, but that statements exceeding "Peace & Love" in complexity are not part of his personality. When he ends his own 55 year old song with a reprise of "Octopus's Garden," he sounds at 77 like a man at peace with himself and still content to sit in quiet safety with his friends. We should all be so lucky.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (5) Graceland - Paul Simon

[This is the sixth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Paul Simon followed up Hearts and Bones – the biggest flop of his career - with Graceland, which catapulted his star beyond even the heights he experienced as Art Garfunkel's secret mustache. The album was recorded in apartheid-era South Africa in an act of apolitical musical outreach; it nonetheless drew the ire of the UN and ANC, each of whom condemned Simon's breach of the prevailing cultural embargo. The album's mythology is subsumed by its political context, to which the virtual entirety of the official making-of documentary Under African Skies is devoted. As usual, this unfortunately glosses over what made the album truly special to begin with. Graceland was not only the original mainstream world fusion album, it remains unsurpassed 3 decades later in pure vitality. Paul Simon emerged from his messy divorce from Carrie Fisher with a remarkable, incisive set of lyrics, delivered in some of the best performances of his career. The music, meanwhile, was carefully edited down (mostly) from studio jams directed by Simon himself. These infuse the proceedings with a palpable feeling of discovery: that of an already accomplished artist being exposed, in real time, to an entirely fresh musical vocabulary. And indeed, many of the album's most magical moments are borne of instruments alone, from the storied accordion-and-drums opening bars to the ethereal coda of "Under African Skies." (It helps that he found musicians to perform with so uniformly outstanding as Ladysmith Black Mambazo and bassist Bakithi Kumalo.) Graceland remains touching at such a remove from the collapse of apartheid because it's simultaneously a man's lonely journey through personal turmoil and his being opened up to new, reinvigorating worlds of experience. It remains not only the pinnacle of Paul Simon's career, but an enduring testament to our shared humanity.

254-54 (82.4675%)

The 2017 Warriors were a hyperbolic sportswriter's dream: the first apparent champions in league history simultaneously good enough to ruin basketball and bad enough to be beaten by just about every previous title winner. Of course, the year's storylines were dominated by Kevin Durant's arrival from Oklahoma City. When the season ended on Monday in a second title in three years, the Warriors had tallied more wins in three seasons than any prior team, completed the winningest playoff run in league history, and most remarkably of all, capped a season in which they won 67 games almost as an afterthought. Throughout the year, fans and columnists nationwide downplayed Durant and his team, whose accomplishments invariably would be sullied by their audacious choice to mutually improve. History may bear these arguments out. Several points are nonetheless worth considering in the meantime.

KD

Kevin Durant's decision to join the Warriors was predicated on the team's culture and style of play, both of which are built primarily around selflessness. [1] In the better part of a decade spent as the NBA's preeminent bridesmaid, Oklahoma City failed to add the talent of three future Hall of Famers up to even the sum of its parts, much less anything greater. The Thunder ran a system so impossibly static that pundits somehow felt obligated to ask if consummate teammate Kevin Durant would prove able to share the basketball. Unleashed in Oakland, Durant revealed the breadth of his offensive talents with an efficiency unknown even to him, all while emerging as one of the league's most versatile lockdown defenders. Though he publicly credited Draymond Green and the coaching staff with improving his defensive approach, Durant plainly benefitted from being surrounded by an offense able – and more importantly, willing – to facilitate for him. Freed to take as few as seven field goal attempts in a game (if not called on for more), Durant hounded passing lanes and guarded the basket with ferocity. That a past MVP and 7-time All-Star even had a next level is shocking enough; Durant was wise to recognize the untapped potential few others would dared to have suggested existed.

The Warriors

The aforementioned questions about whether or not Kevin Durant could fit into the Warrior system were put to rest within weeks of his taking the court. Those who did find fault with the Warriors agreeing to sign Durant were concerned less with Xs-and-Os and more with the team's unwillingness to man up and win on their own terms. Though this argument fails to ring quite true in light of past contenders who acquired superstars in successful pursuit of a missing piece (e.g., Malone, Rodman, or even Love), it's worth considering that with the exception of LeBron James [2], KD is the greatest player in history acquired by free agency. It's better, then, to think of the move as the obvious culmination of what I already described two years ago as the best roster engineering in basketball. Since the 2012 Draft in particular, Bob Myers and the rest of the front office have nearly a perfect track record in free agency, drafts, and trades. 2017's roster changes exemplified these decisions even beyond the obvious choice of signing Durant. David West replaced Mo Speights seamlessly. Zaza Pachulia provided the team a body in the low post when it was needed. Most impressively, JaVale McGee joined Shaun Livingston on the Warriors' reclamation list of players who finally reached the potential that the league had seemingly been robbed of. Even if Durant was Bob Myers' (and Draymond Green's) masterstroke, it would not have been possible had not Myers already created the NBA's best working environment – a team whose dynamic (and potential) was so clearly worth enduring an entire year of unrelenting criticism from most people in the world of basketball.

NBA History

11 teams have won NBA titles since 1980. Prior to these Warriors' first title, in the preceding 35 years the trophy had belonged to only 9 teams. 6 franchises traded titles in 31 out of 35 of those years; in other words, correcting for what amounted to anomalies, the Lakers, Celtics, Pistons, Bulls, Spurs, and Heat had averaged 5.17 championships apiece within recent memory. Remarkably, in their quest to destroy parity within basketball, the Warriors and Cavaliers have slightly improved an average franchise's historical likelihood of winning a title. That, of course, is a meaningless but suggestive statistic. It's more telling to think back on the emotional legacy of recent decades of professional basketball. The 1980s belonged to Bird's Celtics and Magic's Lakers, more or less alone. Literal-minded fans might point to the titles of the Bad Boy Pistons or the '83 76ers [3]; few would even claim to think about the unfulfilled potential of young Hakeem's Rockets or anyone else. The 1990s belonged to the Bulls, and anyone claiming to wish that Michael Jordan hadn't skipped baseball and played in more NBA Finals is either an Orlando Magic fan or a liar. [4] Dominance in basketball is not only old news, it's one of the most cherished aspects of the sport's lore. What's easy to forget is that it didn't feel that way at the time: take the immortal Bulls, whose 72 win season was partially explained away in 1996 as a byproduct of expansion, or MJ himself, who stopped receiving MVPs only because people grew tired of him winning every year.

My takeaway from the above, as an openly biased fan enjoying his just desserts after 2 decades of unrelenting mediocrity, is that these Warriors are good for basketball. They have unlocked the full potential of three generational talents [5] and nearly a dozen other high-caliber players. Their managers and coaches have in every other respect enabled one of the most overwhelming runs in the history of American sport. And between them all, they have shown the way towards a brand of basketball befitting the unprecedented levels of talent and athleticism with which the NBA finds itself endowed. It would benefit both non-Warrior fans and the sport itself if other teams across the league found a way to follow suit; in the meantime, the Warriors fully deserve to reap what they have sown.