My Kingdom For A Backup Point Guard

LeBron James is opting out of his contact with the Miami Heat. That doesn't necessarily mean that he's leaving the team though. It just means that if he stays, they'll have to work out an entirely new contract. Normally if an athlete does this, it's to get more money, on the assumption that the new contract - which will have to exceed other teams' offers - will be more than the old contract.

But in James's case, it's more likely that he'll stay for less money. It's become apparent that the Heat's Big Three stars aren't enough to reliably win a dynasty of championships, so if he is serious about winning Jordan-numbers of titles, the Heat (or any other team James signs with) will need a good supporting cast around him. And they won't be able to afford that if they pay him market-value in his new contract.

It may seem unthinkable that a modern athlete would ever take less money than they could get, but I could believe it in James's case. Remember, the biggest cheque he cashes is from Nike, not the Heat. If he's going to make a ton of money from endorsements, he might as well take a little less from his team contract.

It may even make more sense from a purely financial standpoint. Consider what happens if he takes the biggest contact he can get: he'll wallow away as the only star on a good-but-not-great team. He won't win any titles, but others - probably Kevin Durant - will win. Thus, LeBron will continue to be a star, but not the star. It'll only get worse when Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan retire, and everyone talks about how they each have five-count-'em-five championship rings. Suddenly James doesn't seem like a once-a-generation star, and the endorsements aren't as lucrative.

On the one hand, it would be nice to see a player take a pay cut for the sake of the team.  But on the other, it further stretches the concept of competition in professional sports.  Free agency introduced the idea that players come and go quickly, and sometimes allowed winners to be bought.  Trade-deadline deals changing the nature of a team midseason push it further.  And I've argued that veterans going to an already strong team for a final season or two also cheapens the prize, as did the Heat's stars banding together.  But having star players unite on a single team, and then taking less money so that they can have a deep roster of lesser players?  That brings a new level of artificiality to it.  LeBron, if it means that much to you, just sign with the Spurs.

Im-male-da

It's always bugged me that Imelda Marcos became so well known for her epic shoe collection that she can still be used as a punchline to this day, at least for people over forty. We don't even remember that her husband, Ferdinand, was dictator of the Philippines, or that her shore collection was not the plaything of a deranged rich woman, but a symbol of excess by exploitive leaders. And it's an affront to feminism of Kournikovian proportions that we remember Imelda for her stereotypical excess, while Corizon Aquino, the woman who led the popular uprising that deposed the Marcoses and brought democracy to the Philippines, is remembered only by historians.

But the reason I'm fixated on shoes today is that a rather unstereotypical thing happened to me: I found a pair of shoes I forgot I had at the bottom of the closet. Like most men, I don't own a lot of shoes. I can't speak for all men, but for me is not that I hate shoes, but I hate buying shoes. Aside from sizing problems, there's the style problem.  Most men's clothing fits into one of three categories:

• Formal, good-looking, uncomfortable
• Casual, comfortable, boring
• Sporty, very comfortable, silly

Or to put out another way, you have to look like your boss, your father, or your son. It's especially bad in shoes, where there's little choice between work and sports shoes.

But these shoes seemed to drop somewhere between those second and third groups. Clean, black canvas, they don't look childish or formal. So I wore them today. They were nice and comfortable to walk in. Though the thick canvas does make them a little warm. I feel like I look good, though my get are sweating a bit. But I do have thick socks. Okay, now the sweat is making my feet squeak as I walk. So maybe they aren't suited to summer. The shallow tread means I can't use them in winter, so I'll have to wait 'til fall to wear them. I'll just throw them in the closet for now; I'm sure I'll remember to get them out again in a few months.

Offend In Every Way

There's a word on the net: "mansplain." If a woman is offended by something a man does, mansplaining is the man explaining to her that she shouldn't be offended.

I have mixed emotions about this concept. On the one hand, there have been a lot of egregious examples of guys trying to explain away some really obviously bad behaviour. But I'm not comfortable with blanket use of the term. That is to say, I have no doubt that most - if not all - of the incidents that have been labelled as mansplaining are just guys trying to excuse unacceptable behaviour, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will always be true that the explaining man is in the wrong. This disappoints me when - in the frenzy of condemnations against a man's offensive behaviour - some people take a more sweeping condemnation, thinking of the mansplainer as inherently wrong; this view implies that if a person is offended by something you've done, then you are obviously in the wrong, and you have no right to explain your way out of it.

Again I'm not defending individual mansplainers - all the examples I've seen of them are pretty pathetic - I'm just defending the concept.  But on the other side of the equation, there are a lot of people celebrating the very idea of not caring if you offend people. I saw this image of a Stephen Fry quote being passed around on Twitter

Most of the graphics depicting quotes by famous people that go around the Internet are wrong, so I looked this up at Wikiquote, and found out it is indeed genuine.  It comes from a discussion with Christopher Hitchens in 2005. Fry reiterated at the time that he does oppose laws that ban people from offending others. What's odd is that the article about the event cites the quote only after several paragraphs reporting on Fry's experience of looking for his Great-Grandfather's grave in a Jewish cemetery recently desecrated by anti-Semites. And Fry has worked for the acceptance of homosexuality and atheism, so he's hardly okay with people being offensive.  And that's the problem with this blanket defence of offensiveness: being against banning offensive behaviour doesn't mean that offending others is an admirable pursuit.  Or - to answer Fry's question at the end of his quote - if someone is offended by something you've done, then one or the other of you is acting unreasonably; it might be the offended person, but it might also be you.

The point is that both sides are wrong. Whether you think that offending people is always acceptable, or that it's never acceptable, you're wrong. And it doesn't take too much imagination to come up with counterexamples proving that you're wrong. By all means, continue to fight against extremists at both ends of the scale, but don't kid yourself that you're fighting for some absolute, inalienable right. Really, you're just one of many trying to find a reasonable middle ground.

Mall Pall

We've seen plenty of stories in recent years about how shopping malls are dying. But yesterday I saw one from The Guardian, and figured that if even the mall-challenged British are noticing, then it must be a big story.

The article attributes the end of malls to a renascence of urban retail, and the growth of online shopping. Those trends may be real, but it misses the biggest competitor: big box stores. They also claim that young people are rejecting older generations' mall culture. But a look around a mall today shows they make up a big part of the clientèle. Attributing cultural changes to young people being simply different is lazy journalism.  Also, they keep citing examples of dead and dying malls that just happen to be in rust belt communities where pretty much everything is decaying.  But whatever the reasons, shopping malls have hit a wall - many still do a lot of business, but no one is building them. 

Judging by my other tastes and values, I should hate malls. They're ugly temples of conformity, promoting mindless consumption and car-centric cities. But really, I've always had an affection for these retail behemoths. Maybe it's the pseudo-social atmosphere that lets you be private and public at the same time. Maybe it's the weird way it shows-off a community's aspirations. Or it's the fact that for all the external ugliness and internal blandness, it's still the grandest architecture we regularly experience. No matter the reason for my love of malls, it has helped that I came of age after they had become the dominant retail format. Earlier generations watched the mall eat away at beloved civic institutions and never forgave them for it.

Their complaint was that malls replaced downtown shops, as well as town squares. But what they didn't realize was that while malls destroyed those institutions, they also replaced them. The town square may no longer be the meeting place for the city, but at least the mall provided a new meeting place. And that's why I now lament the disappearance of malls. Big box stores have all the same negatives as malls, but without that positive of being a meeting place.  Hopefully something will replace the social function of the meeting place.  Otherwise, the Walmart greeters are going to get really tired of throwing loiterers out of the store. 

Somehow, The Radio Star Is Still Alive

Over the last thirty years, any time a baby-boomer complained about the state of popular music, that rant just isn't complete without a claim that music videos have ruined music. The idea is that in turning music into a visual medium, it's become more about the image than the music, and more important that a musician look good than have talent.

It certainly is a believable argument, but it isn't born out in practice. Yes, there were plenty of good looking artists made it big during the Age Of Video. But there were plenty of artists made rich in previous eras on the strength of their looks, even if their fans only saw their idols on posters or Ed Sullivan. And don't forget that the most egregious examples of less-talented artists using their looks for success were motivated by racism, not video.

Really, I can't think of any examples of artists who made it big based purely on their video. There are examples of songs that used notable videos to get exposure they wouldn't otherwise get. I'm thinking of songs like "No Rain" or "Take On Me." But I wouldn't say those songs were undeserving. The "Nice Video, Shame About The Song" phenomena never really happened.

At least until now. The only artist I can think of that is known for videos first and music second is OK Go. And the strange part is that they did it after the end of the Age Of Video. Their latest video is one continuous shot, full of optical illusions, and is spreading across the Internet at beyond-viral speeds.

Their music is good, but their video skills are superior to their music skills. And this was the first of their videos where I've really found myself listening to the music - they didn't used to have that early New Order style to them, did they?

But I do have to give them credit for their willingness to embrace their place in pop-culture. So often we see musicians do things like storm out of interviews for being wrongly-portrayed, or refuse to play their big hits in concert. Most bands in OK Go's position would defiantly make a really dull concert-footage video at this point. But they seem happy to be "that band with the videos."

“Thank God for books and music and things I can think about."

Here's the latest in my apparently continuing series of people who deserved better obituaries than one paragraph in the entertainment section.  It was in this morning's paper that author Daniel Keyes died.

Keyes is best known for the novel Flowers for Algernon, the story of a mentally challenged man who undergoes experimental surgery to improve his intelligence.  You could describe it - as the newspaper did - by repeatedly mentioning that it's often used in high school English classes and then leave it at that without further insight. But I'd just like to add that it's a brilliant examination of how intellect shapes human interaction, and so often ends up holding us apart.

Warping Time And Taste

When the portal from the Nineties opened up on the street in front of me, I eagerly anticipated what could be sucked through into the present. A quaint relic of the early Web? A long-lost Nirvana single? Some day-glo clothing?

But no, the only thing to come through that hole in space and time was a car. Here it is: