Our Boys

Posted 4:14 PM by sean
I probably won’t be posting for the next few days, so before I go, here are the boys I am talking about whenever I say ‘Our Boys’

Raymond Felton- Six foot tall point guard. Carolina has a rich tradition of point guards, and Raymond, after only twenty some games, has already positioned himself as one of the five best to ever play for Carolina. It is possibly that he will become as great as Phil Ford or Ed Cota or Kenny Smith. He reminds me of my friends who succeed after much hard work is married to their talent, people that I can never seem to be close to but in whom I have enormous trust.

Damion Grant- Six Eleven Center. Damion is a monster who is crippled by two things, his knees and his total lack of basketball knowledge. Apparently, until about two years ago, he was a cricket player. He decided to stay in high school one extra year in order to get his SATs up to a respectable level. That level is reported to be in the low 1300s.

Jonathan Holmes- Six foot tall point guard. John is a senior and white, and has probably had to deal with a lot of jokes made about his name. He and Will Johnson are apparently real emotional leaders, and after what they have been through I can’t imagine that they aren’t both amazing men. Anyone out there who wants to hire the best man available for any job anywhere should find Jon Holmes and hire him.

Will Johnson- Six foot Eight forward. Will is also a senior and is playing basketball as a walk-on. He is on scholarship after all these years, but it is the coveted Morehead Scholarship. He has played in more games at UNC than any other player ever, and shoots and rebounds really well from the outside. He reminds me of my friend Seth, he is so lovely and so capable and so hard to be afraid of.

Jackie Manuel- Six foot five, listed as a 3. Almost absurd that he has a position defined by his offensive set when he should just be listed as a six foot five blanket with the reach of a 7 foot tall guy. Jackie is amazing. His heart and hustle remind me of the best of Joe Forte, but his obvious love for Carolina and for the team put him in a class all by himself. He is a monster on defense, in many ways the best defender Carolina has had in years including Haywood and Jamison. When you see him, you would swear he was 6 foot ten. He is like so many of my secondary friends, the guys who try so hard and laugh whether they succeed or fail.

Sean May- Six foot eight Center. May is an upended sofa of a man. He looks like a football player, but he moves like a ballerina. He has a broken foot, but the mere thought of his return, coupled with the fact that we have shown we can win without him, makes the rest of the ACC nervous. He loves the game so much that he is actually a favorite among those who hate Carolina (i.e. everyone who doesn’t love Carolina).

David Noel- six foot six small forward. Possibly one of the best things to happen to Tarheel fans in two years. He is paying his way to go to Carolina, and when McCants and May weren’t in a couple of games, Noel exploded. He is an athlete’s athlete, he’s like my friends who can act, direct, produce, even paint the frickin’ set. At this point next year, he will be devestating.

Byron Sanders- six foot nine power forward. He might be two seasons away from amazing, but against UVA, he showed Watson that he is capable of flashes of brilliance. Three times in a row he stopped the big man, two blocks and two rebounds. He is sweet and long faced. Watching him play is like listening to my friends sing, it is sometimes not so good but they match a lack of talent with a plethora of intensity.

Melvin Scott- shooting guard, six foot one. I loved this guy last year for being one of the few bright spots and for sharing a surname with my roommate. All last year we kept tabs on cousin Melvin and cousin Jawad. Melvin can be deadly from anywhere, an insane shooter who, unfortunately, sometimes meets shots he doesn’t like. I wouldn’t bet against him hitting it from anywhere on the court, but he’s complicated, going long stretches of hitting nothing. He’s like the girl friends I have, infuriating and gorgeous, a complete enigma but still someone you adore.

Jawad Williams- Six foot eight power forward. He reminds me of my sister. As soon as you think he’s down and out, he rebounds and is just amazing to watch. You can never count him out. He can do everything, and as soon as he does it all the time he will be a first round NBA pick. Plus, he carried on the Williams surname that has done the Tarheels proud for years.

Rashad McCants- Six foot four small forward. My favorite player in years. He is sort of a mess, but a phenomenally talented mess. I can’t help but identify with him. When he is on, he is amazing, and when he is off he hates himself and blames everyone and sulks. And everyone wants him to grow up, but I say, go ahead and sulk. He has an artist’s temperament in the body of an athlete. He can’t help himself. If he had gone one step in a different direction he would be a brilliant director or choreographer and no-one would know why he was drinking alone in the dressing room or why he treats the people in his life so badly. I have never seen anyone who hates to lose more, or who blames himself more for his failings at the same time as celebrating his successes. He is a whole person, complicated and brilliant, and everyone knows what they can do if they don’t like his shit.

These aren’t just basketball players, they are both people and symbols of people. They become stand-ins for me and the people I love, and when they play I watch them like I would watch my own friends and family. And the people we play against… they become worse than Saddam.

I know it’s unreasonable, but I have no choice. It just happens.

Lifetime Achievement Push

Posted 9:33 AM by sean
Every year my friends and I vote on and release "The Cribbies", a companion set of awards to the Oscars. Whereas the Oscars are voted on by the Academy of Motion Pictures, the Cribbies are assigned by the members of The Virtual Crib. More on who they are at some other date.

http://www.dankois.com/cribbies/

In any case, one of the nice things about the VC and the cribbies is that we get to occasionally make up categories that serve a particular function in any given year. While Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay and Guy You Most Want To Do It With remain on the ballot annually, sometimes we get to vote on ‘Biggest Lie’ or, a likely award this year for John C. Reilly, ‘Worst Guy To Be Married To’.

This year, I am pushing for a lifetime achievement award for a brilliant and under-appreciated actress, Mary Steenburgen. She is one of those actresses who never really headlines anything, and yet with really simply delicacy and accuracy, she will often be the thing you remember about a movie long afterwards.

She won an Academy Award for a movie called ‘Melvin and Howard’, which I have never seen, but around the same time she was the modern romantic interest for Malcom McDowell in "Time After Time". This was, by far, my favorite '80s HBO Played A Thousand Times' movie. For the next few years, she kept getting stuck in movies where she could be slightly daft, movies that referenced themselves like ‘A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy’ and ‘Romantic Comedy’, and she was amazing in both these films, even with a crappy Dudley Moore vehicle being the only thing carrying her.

It wasn’t until the end of the 80s when she stole my heart permanently. Parenthood is one of those perfectly balanced movies, full of stuff for guys, packed with stuff for girls, hilarious and hard to watch, full of lines you find yourself quoting all the time. And it contains several other actors that need to be considered for Lifetime Achievement Awards, but at the center of the movie, the reason it works, is Mary. She is demanding and strong, smart and feminine, demure and powerful. The movie means to be about Steve Martin, but it’s actually about her, about how she manages to deal with him. When they are looking through the trash for the retainer, when she tells him she is pregnant, when they fight before the school play, there is just moment after moment of perfect acting in this movie for her.

Three other performances have to be compared to that one. First, as the aging beauty queen in Miss Firecracker, suddenly that same hallowed frame is filled with a mild desperation, her looks, that you never really considered before, become a clown mask, distorted and angular. Then, and Jesus I love her in this, she walks out of Philadelphia with the most indelible reaction to the whole issue. She is surrounded by heavy weights, some of the best actors alive then, and she has my favorite moment. As the lawyer for the defense you see on her face that she wishes not only that this guy didn’t have AIDS, but that no-one did. Not because it would be a better world, but so she wouldn’t have to think about them having it, and what they did to get it. She is a thousand pounds in this movie. Finally, just a short while ago, she was revelatory in "Sunshine State", a mess of a movie, but one in which her performance has to be seen to be understood. The depth of her need to do well, her wide swinging powers of love and disgust, are amazing.

She did a lot of other stuff, "Powder" and "The Butcher’s Wife" come to mind, and has been a steady working actor for 25 years. But as a thin beautiful American woman, her best roles are behind her now, her biggest opportunities to shine. I don’t know if her TV show is still on, or if her marriage to Ted Danson is either, but I know that she is one of the people that made me want to be an actor. Her skill and precision are amazing, her beauty and dignity so subvertable when needed, she is the living embodiment that there are no small parts, only small actors.

The War

Posted 11:13 AM by sean
The hardest thing that our elected representatives have to do is to chose between evils. They never talk to us about the horrible gray areas like choosing between losing a hundred lives and losing a thousand. But those choices have to be made. If there was an airliner full of Americans flying at the pentagon, we would now shoot it out of the sky, but on September 10, 2001, that would be unthinkable.

The way Iraq is right now, if Saddam lives another ten years, the millions of people who will die is, in my mind, so much higher than the number of people who will die in a short war. The problem is that the people dying in Iraq without the war are Iraqis, with the war it will be much less Iraqis plus hundreds, maybe a thousand, Americans. And for me, that is complicated.

I hate organized religion and nationalism more than maybe anything else in the world, which makes dealing with my pro-Israel friends and relatives difficult. But I believe in America as an idea, I believe that being an American is not something you are born in to or that you are brainwashed to accept. It is something you choose, like millions and millions of people who took ships and planes to this country did, like the people risking their lives to cross the borders and stringing together dingies do every day.

And the loss of American lives to protect Iraqi lives has to be a large exchange rate, it has to be times ten. I will trade a hundred American lives for a thousand Iraqi. I will trade an economic dip in the US to liberate and allow American ideals to flourish in a country that is currently oppressed.

However
--- Saddam is not in the business of killing Americans. He is in the business of being an oil despot.
--- Bush is the wrong man to lead this war. Aside from Colin Powell, the number of hideous mis-speakings in this administration is insane. He can’t build a coalition.
--- We aren’t stopping Saddam from taking over the Middle East. He hasn’t shown that he has the ability to do damage to anyone.
--- I am not convinced that Saddam has any ties to Al Qaeda and even if he does, I am not convinced that he has anything to give them. He wants to be rich and to sell oil to stay rich, and the only way he would support our enemies is if we attack him and he is going to die.
--- Going to war against Iraq does not insure that when the war is over we will have the infrastructure in place to actually save lives in Iraq.
--- Bush is fighting this war because he wants to avenge his Dad, because he has limited imagination for how conflicts can be resolved, because it will give the US a puppet government in the middle east that he believes will calm down tensions, because he can offer the oil contracts to rich American businessmen who have been promised them, and to remain as presidential as possible in order to keep Republicans and himself firmly ensconced in power. And because he believes that, in the long run, it is necessary and will save lives.

So, I can’t support this war. I am not convinced that the exchange rate is high enough. People don’t become farmers because they realize the advantage in calorie/acre, people don’t make writing systems that will give them advantage over illiterates, people don’t play basketball to lose weight. But we need leaders in our government who see the big picture, the larger picture and the world-wide-influence picture and make the difficult decisions for reasons that may be too complicated for normal people to fully grasp. And I don’t think we have the minds in the white house now to do it.

When I think of other areas of ethnic cleansing around the globe, I feel like a hypocrite, but I also believe that if you, or your grandmother or great grandfather came to this country (like mine did) in search of being an American, in search of the freedom and ideals that out country seems to embody, then you deserve to have your representatives do what they can to keep you alive so you can pursue happiness. It is more important to me that Americans live than anyone in the middle east does.

My mind is not locked into this. If there are WMDs, if it is shown that Saddam can destroy our country and wants to, if it can be shown that the exchange rate is really high, then I would support it.