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drewkatchen · 7 years

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Every so often I pull out this little drawing of my dad.

It’s something I made one afternoon when I was a kid. Just some lines from a Bic pen and clearly nothing fancy, but it’s become something of a historical document now, depicting a moment just before a seismic shift uprooted us all. Were it a cartoon, a gigantic storm cloud would be moving in from the east to engulf my family.

I’ve never been great about holding onto things, but somehow this has stuck around.

There aren’t many pictures I have of him -- even fewer are pictures of us together -- and while this isn’t a picture taken with a camera, it’s perhaps the most vivid image I have of my dad. I look at it, like I do sometimes before Father’s Day, and I know the who and where. In a way it works against what items of nostalgia are supposed to do: It doesn’t remind me of the good times or times when life was simpler, so it’s funny I hold onto it at all. When I look at it, I notice I didn’t draw myself into the picture, which maybe is curious, and maybe even then I saw him from a remove, as someone I was studying rather than a man I saw as my patriarch. What the drawing does remind me of is times yes, but times of dissolution and a distinct fraying of the family bond and of my utter lack of control over anything happening to me. All that from one little line drawing. Perhaps that’s why I keep it -- a little anchor to remind me I’ve lived many lives with many different people in many places. Perhaps I keep it because to throw it out wouldn’t make sense, but to keep it doesn’t really either.

It used to sit in a cheap frame on a bookshelf in my grandmother’s home. As I grew up, the picture stayed in the guest room, and on visits I would study it before turning out the lights at night. Who was that guy I drew and where did he go? Who was the kid who made it? Where did he go?

Now I have it in a Ziploc bag, in a drawer in my apartment, so it’s not always visible, a fact speaking as much to my lack of initiative to get it properly framed as it does to maybe my unwillingness to get it framed. It’s slightly yellowed in the middle because no glass covered the paper. I remember that moment in time well...or at least I have a snapshot in my mind, no doubt solidified because of this rudimentary sketch. In the early 1980s, my dad was either living back in my grandmother’s home or spending a lot of time nursing his wounds there after my parents divorced. I remember in that instance he was on the shag-carpeted floor with his back propped up on a chair, watching a small black and white TV, probably Star Trek, which was one of his favorites. His mustache still in full, bristly glory and his tired eyes telling the story.

Did he know in the moment I was drawing him? Does he remember it happening? Does he ever reflect on it?

---

There were good times after the divorce to be sure. We saw a lot of movies, went to record stores and water parks, anything to keep a smile on my face. Sometimes we went alone and sometimes my friend Matt came with us, and if I were unlucky, Uncle David tagged along, lodging complaints the entire time. Always willing to indulge my junk culture fondness, my dad once took me to a midnight screening of Rocky Horror at a central New Jersey mall. I’m sure it was because he knew my mom wouldn’t approve, but what did he care? She was off planning a wedding with someone new. It was a cool secret we shared.

I had to beg for it a bit, but I drank up the experience once inside the dank theater; I was a tiny cultural anthropologist trying to vibe on something far above my head. This was in the mid-1980s, which was way way before I needed to be taking in Tim Curry’s uproarious, sloppy camp and Susan Sarandon dressed provocatively in just underwear. It was the classic suburban Rocky Horror scenario: High school kids down near the screen acting it out and their friends in the audience dressed up and aching to throw toilet paper and rice on cue. What it lacked in finesse, it made up for in pure heart.

“Is it scary?,” I remember asking two cute girls in front of me. They simply gave my dad a quizzical glance, giggled and said I would be fine.

During the pool scene, one of the live actresses suffered a wardrobe malfunction where her breast popped out for a quick second, but that was long enough for my world to shift. My dad looked over at me casually and said “Just don’t tell your mom.” That was him in a nutshell, not prudish and maybe a bit oblivious. We didn’t have baseball practices or sports in common, but we had movies and records.

I don’t need the drawing to remember stuff like that, but inevitably when I do take a look, that is the stuff I see.

With the picture itself, I was just doing what kids do, drawing and keeping myself amused as the adults were left to pick up the pieces after life got complicated. What’s notable about the drawing is I was never good at it, but somehow in a few crude lines I managed to capture my dad’s look as it were. I remember my grandmother loving it in that smothering love kind of way but also remarking to my dad how strange it was that this pen drawing by his kid looked so much like him. All these years later I find it so odd that I put my name atop the drawing and that I didn’t write ‘Dad.’ Was I trying to sign it as if I were a real artist? At the age of four, did I even know artists did that? Regardless, my grandmother snatched it up quickly, put some cheap plastic around it and there it remained until she died and I brought it back to my home.

This is one of the things I consider as Father’s Day rolls around every year.

But this year I’ve decided to make a change.

---

This month, I’ve been bombarded by companies that have cooked up some curious ways to make a fast buck off Father’s Day, a day that still doesn’t seem to get even a fraction of the interest that Mother’s Day generates. I’ve received numerous emails from Etsy, an independent movie chain announcing a special screening of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ for pops and a massage place telling me to purchase the ‘Father’s Day package.’ ‘Only a few days remain to take advantage of this great Father's Day deal!,’ the ad tells me; total cost is a mere $375. This morning on the train I even saw some type of ad encouraging me to send dad steaks. Another email from a tech wholesaler cheerfully tells me in the subject of an email that drones are part of their ‘Popular Father’s Day Specials.’ And so on. I can pass off these base attempts at getting me to open my wallet, but there’s still something about that drawing that gets me, even after thirty-plus years.

There’s never been an easy way to summarize my Faulknerian family history and my feelings about it. Yes, there was divorce and new parental figures and many moves, but it’s all more than that. There was something just fundamentally wrong with the people chosen to be my actual parents, like in the way my mom would viscerally froth to me how the agreed-upon child support check wasn’t enough or how my dad was a mama’s boy, calling my grandmother each night when he got home from work. I can see it all in a panorama, the totality of growing up. It was a lamp always broken or a car missing an engine. The three of us together were never meant to light up a room or get down the road together. And so we didn’t. My dad, a nice person with very little strength, has always been on the horizon line of my life, supportive, sometimes wise but also crushingly thoughtless all in one stroke and always at a comfortable remove. And then as I got older he just kept receding, until I could look at the horizon and no longer see or feel him there.

Now he’s just this drawing on an old piece of manila paper.

But, here’s the thing...it’s not the only drawing I have. Duh.

This story wouldn’t be complete without an oil painting, this time of me, from a mall. Its vintage dating back to 1985 and man did I have a lot of hair back then. By this time, I lived in Virginia Beach with my mom and stepdad, and while on a visit, my dad brought me to a mall (malls were a placid constant in my young life) and had one of those caricaturists draw this of me. I look so thrilled. Perhaps he considered the drawing I made of him, and he intended for this to sit next to it at my grandparents’ home. Turns out, my grandmother eventually placed it in her den, just in her periphery as she watched television or read. While I appreciate that, I can’t see how my bummed out face ever made anyone happy.

Just like with my drawing, I remember the who and the where so vividly: He was just about to leave again, back to the new life he had to create for himself, and I was devastated by it. Each trip brought some whiff of stability and permanence only for that to be torched again in a week’s time. The two of us at Waterside Mall in Norfolk, Virginia, another mall in another state. This time no Rocky Horror, no midnight bonding over glam and popcorn. He had to get going.

Life existed like this for two more decades: Visits came and went, we placed phone calls and sent emails and then true cracks in the armor began showing themselves over time. I miss him, but ours was a bond he chose to sever. In the end, he was just a chapter and not part of the whole book. And now I can only let something like Father’s Day mean so much to me.

Maybe it was always part of the plan for me to end up with these two pictures. I nearly hugged them when they first became mine, like catching up with a part of me I’d forgotten ever existed. My dad made it clear he didn’t intend on taking them. If I wanted, I could hang both images next to each other on my wall and we’d be together again in a sense. Lined up just so on a wall, it could be him looking at me and my blank visage. Or, placed another way, it could be us both ignoring each other. Maybe one day it will get to the point that I do, but for now, on this Father’s Day, they’re both off to a storage space. The drawings can sit there together, away from me and certainly away from my dad, and they can maybe work some stuff out on their own. Or not.

#father's day #storytelling #dad

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jodyedgarus · 6 years

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Why Can’t The Rockets Be The Warriors?

We’ve seen all this before. And it was not so long ago.

On Tuesday night, with his Houston Rockets up 2 against the streaking Portland Trail Blazers, a little more than three minutes on the clock, James Harden made a three. A few possessions later, he made another. The Rockets won 115-111 to go to 57-14 on the season, best in the NBA and four games up on the reigning champion Golden State Warriors. On both shots, Harden took what would have been called hero ball shots in another context. No other Rocket touched the ball; everyone in the arena knew what Harden would do, and how. Harden has made these shots his signature and his team’s by finding success where others have found only stacks of Rudy Gay box scores. And while the league has come to view the shot as not just unguardable but reliable, it has at times waffled on whether Harden’s team can be trusted. Funny, given the recent history of ascendant teams led by star guards with an unguardable shot.

Just a few seasons ago, a team was led by two star guards who hadn’t found much success in the postseason thanks to a history of injuries and bad fortune. It featured a young big man who anchored the defense and epitomized a key facet of modern offenses. It boasted a sixth man who would have been a featured starter on practically any other team, a roster loaded down with dead-eye marksmen and a fleet of versatile wings who could switch assignments and not fall down. This team won the NBA title.

(Key: Steph, Klay, Draymond, Andre, just about everyone else, and the top-ranked 2014-15 defense.)

The 2014-15 Golden State Warriors were an unexpected development. The team had won 51 games the previous season under then-coach Mark Jackson, and the roster was largely unchanged coming into that season. Once the season began, however, it was clear that something was very different. Golden State won 21 of its first 23 games and finished the season with 67 wins, ranked first in defensive rating and, importantly, second in offensive rating, up from 12th the season before. Yet a broad set of NBA observers doubted that a team playing the way the Warriors did could win a title, even after they’d already won it.

This season, the Rockets ran out to a 25-4 record before losing seven of nine games. In all but one of the losses, they were missing Harden, Chris Paul or Clint Capela. (The remaining loss was to the Warriors.) Since then, Houston has lost just three times in 33 games. FiveThirtyEight’s projections expect the Rockets to win 67 games total, up from their tally of 55 last season. They have the top-rated offense not just this season, but for as long as Basketball-Reference.com has been keeping track. They sneak into the top 10 on defense this season as well, an improvement on 18th the previous season. They’re flat good. But you know that by now. What’s important here is that when a team is this good, regardless of what its doubters say, the question isn’t whether it has arrived but whether it will win the title or merely its conference.

There are a few ways to slice this. Since 1983-84, this year’s Houston team ties for 20th among all teams in net rating (the difference between points scored and points allowed per 100 possessions) through 71 games. That’s a bigger deal than it may seem, for a few reasons. First, the teams ahead of this season’s Rockets are immensely accomplished. They include four Michael Jordan teams, three Tim Duncan teams, two Laker teams — one Shaq and Kobe, another Magic and Kareem — one Kevin Garnett Celtics team and, of course, the past three versions of the Golden State Warriors. In general, teams at Houston’s level at least win the conference. The teams that didn’t make the finals tended to have extenuating circumstances. The 2012-13 Thunder, for instance, were the top seed in the West but lost Russell Westbrook in the first round and fell to Memphis in the second. The 2011-12 Chicago Bulls lost reigning MVP Derrick Rose in the first game of the first round. And the 2015-16 Spurs faced an exceptionally high level of competition, losing in the second round to a Thunder team that went up 3-1 on the Warriors.1

Net rating isn’t the only factor in which Houston is dominating, and as Benjamin Morris wrote for FiveThirtyEight a few seasons back, margin of victory is actually far less predictive in the playoffs than it is in the regular season. In fact, it’s Houston’s wins that make it a playoff force. In the postseason, the difference between two teams’ win totals is much more predictive than margin of victory. If the Rockets finish with 67 wins and the Warriors finish with their projected 61, Morris’s data from his 2016 article suggests that given home court advantage, Houston would win a series 70 percent of the time — even if the two teams were dead-even on margin of victory.

The Rockets may not be quite as good as the Warriors were in that first season or as Golden State was in the 73-win 2015-16 campaign. But, then, neither are this year’s Warriors. The team’s injury troubles and continuing sloppiness have turned it into a merely dominant team, not an all-time one. Even if we grant the Warriors a few extra victories because their injury problems have been worse than Houston’s, it would make a prospective series between the two a coin flip, not heavily slanted toward Golden State.

And like the Warriors, the Rockets aren’t simply unguardable as a team: They have a player who has mastered an unguardable manner of playing. Harden doesn’t have the same switchblade release as Curry — he can’t dart around a ball screen and have a shot in the air before his man can turn his head. What Harden can do is get just about any switch he wants, thanks to the level at which he and Paul are running the pick and roll, and then, in isolation, he can walk into his now-trademark step-back threes.

The pull-up three is increasingly a staple of modern offenses, as defenses have adjusted to the off-ball maneuvering that good offenses use to free up shooters. Harden leads the league in pull-up threes per game, taking 8.0 and making 39.0 percent of them. Paul is third on the list, taking 5.2 per game and making 38.5 percent of them.2 As a team, the Rockets are taking 16.5 pull-up threes per game and making 35.9 percent. The next-closest team, the Los Angeles Clippers, takes 10.0 per game. Even if its primary pick-and-roll engine sputters, Houston has an entire extra, independent dimension to carry its offense through dry spells, like Curry’s pull-ups or like Kevin Durant’s mastery of contested shots in last summer’s finals.

Nothing the Rockets could do this season would make them meaningful favorites to most NBA fans against a healthy Warriors team in the playoffs. Nothing the Warriors could do would do that, either. That’s probably correct: There are many things most projection systems, like FiveThirtyEight’s CARM-Elo, can’t spot, such as player injury, which undermine the edge Houston holds by the numbers. Golden State is a dominant champion with what is now a considerable track record of excellence. It’s tough to be favored heavily against that. But there is also now sufficient evidence to declare that Houston is squarely in Golden State’s weight class, just as there was for Golden State when it arrived on the scene.

Check out our latest NBA predictions.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-cant-the-rockets-be-the-warriors/

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epchapman89 · 7 years

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Coffee At The Movies: It

As far as I’m concerned, Los Angeles has only two things: great coffee shops and the ArcLight Cinemas Cinerama Dome. The latter is an enduring relic of a moviegoing culture that has demanded bigger and more immersive moviegoing experiences to stave off the threat of home entertainment’s dominance, which has been chipping away at film attendance since its peak in the 1940s. The former is a recent beverage revolution with design, spacial awareness, and general execution that makes this coffee competitive New Yorker hungry enough to crush these sunny west coasters who are increasingly killing it.

These two Californian wonders should be enjoyed together, in the spirit of excess. And so yesterday, during a brief visit to LA, I snuck a delicious coffee into the ArcLight in Hollywood to bear witness to that terrifying savior of the lagging American film box office, the big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s It.

Go Get Em Tiger‘s Los Feliz outpost is just a few miles away from the historic theater, on a quietly trendy block of Hollywood Boulevard set beneath the Griffith Observatory (and Angelina Jolie’s house). Delicious coffee and food and genuinely warm service is enough to make New Yorker suspicious about why everyone seems so happy. I’m not much for alternative nut milks, but it’s kind of a thing here, and these Angelenos live differently than I do, plunging daily into the murky depths of non-dairy milk preparation with the bravery of children battling psychotic clowns. Wanting to be as fearless as these intrepid nut-milkers, I ordered an almond macadamia milk iced cortado from barista Brent Glanville, who kindly didn’t scoff at my off menu order.

I really need a travel mug sponsor for these acts of coffee deception [Ed. note: we are actively seeking a travel cup sponsor for Coffee At The Movies] but for now, one of my companions was kind enough to stash my sweaty plastic cup in her purse. Together we snuck it past a kind usher; they probably wouldn’t have cared if I strolled in proudly slurping my lovely and refreshing nut milk concoction. As the Dome’s enormous curved screen prepared to test me for coulrophobia, with a fellow diehard horror fan on one side and two scaredy cats on the other, I was ready to be scarred for life.

A seemingly endless two hours and change later, I was still waiting for those scars. Andy Muschietti’s sometimes stylish but mostly loud film is a collection of greatest hits from roughly half of Stephen King’s mammoth novel about a kid-killing entity that primarily takes the form of a circus clown. While King’s chunky tome is an absorbing non-linear deep dive into New England sewer terror, this flick is a straightforward chronological account of children getting the hell scared out of them. (A sequel about their clown-battling adult years is forthcoming.) I found the film’s cast of rag-tag nerds to be sometimes endearing, yet sometimes lost amidst a cascade of dissonant violin cues insisting to us that we should be scared.

Like most King adaptations, It generally suffers from its writers’ and director’s creatively sloppy adjustments to the source material. The kiddie action is moved up from 1958 in the novel to 1988, perhaps as a cynical attempt to capitalize on film and television’s recent 80s fever. If It feels like it’s drawn from the same palette as “Stranger Things,” that’s not by accident—they literally cast one of the “Things” kids for It’s “Loser’s Club“—but the film’s attention to period detail is mostly crummy and there’s no synth in the soundtrack, which is totally unforgivable.

Worst of all, the film’s intended showstopper, Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård), is a huge disappointment. The antique clown getup begs you to be scared while Skarsgård does an act that lands more like sketch comedy about a scary clown. Tilda Swinton was considered for the role and that would likely have had me sweating, covering my eyes, and clutching my cold nut milk in horror. Skarsgård just makes me long for Tim Curry.

Cupping score: 75

Tasting Notes: Moldy and damp cotton candy.

Eric J. Grimm (@ericjgrimm) writes about pop culture and coffee for Sprudge Media Network, and lives in Manhattan. Read more Eric J. Grimm on Sprudge.

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