asher fusco

I wonder if Andrew Wiggins will be as good for KU as I hoped DeShawn Stevenson would be. That sentence should not make any sense to sane individuals, even sane individuals who followed Kansas basketball with ritualistic intensity in the late 90s,  which, I guess, might actually make them insane, thus placing me squarely into that camp. Oh well.

But back in the late 90s, DeShawn Stevenson was the shit, which also makes little sense. Stevenson these days conjures up two distinct, incredibly awesome images.

 1. His tattoo of Abraham Lincoln

2. His in-kitchen ATM

 *It’s worth noting that, if not for his Lincoln tattoo, he might actually be remembered better for his other really weird tattoo, which is a reverse logo of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ “P” on his face.

He used to be more than tattoos and keeper of an automated teller machine that charges a $4.75 convenience fee, though. Like Wiggins, he was a true phenom headed to Kansas. Roy Williams once said he was the most talented high school player he had ever recruited and this meant something considering Roy Williams had just recruited stars like Paul Pierce and Raef LaFrentz.

I wish I could present you with evidence of Stevenson’s past ability, but his senior year of high school came in 1999-2000, that awkward timeframe when Pets.com still existed yet a reliable place to embed and watch videos didn’t. So footage of the high school version of Stevenson is sparse. Just know that he was a consensus top-five recruit and averaged 24.3 points a game. In the McDonald’s All-American game, he had 25 points, and there is a little bit of video evidence of his athleticism in the dunk contest. Fast forward to the 58-second mark.

When he decided to eschew his NBA ambitions and attend Kansas, I remember my dad woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me. This was beautiful. It meant DeShawn Stevenson had finally passed the SAT, which had previously been impossible for him.

One article I just looked up in the KC Star archives from December of his senior year said he was getting ready to take the test for the THIRD time, having failed to previously get a qualifying score. On that test, he did not pass. But in April, the last resort month for kids trying to pass the SAT and get into college, he earned a qualifying score, an 1150 (athletes needed a minimum 820 on 1600 scale at that time). Such a score would have been glorious news if not for this extra piece of information: His score had increased by 700 points.

On his previous attempt, he had scored a 450. To add perspective, someone who answered one question in either the math or reading sections and left the rest blank would score a 400. When his score was recorded, it caught the attention of the Education Testing Service. Yes, DeShawn Stevenson was accused of cheating, mainly because he had cheated too good.*

*I bet 75 percent of the top basketball recruits have someone else take their SAT/ACT for them. Derrick Rose allegedly did. I just love envisioning some average high school kid wearing Vans and glasses while carrying a trapper-keeper walking up to a testing center, using a fake ID and saying “I’m Derrick Rose.”

Without a passing score, Stevenson skipped Kansas for the NBA, and it’s actually been a pretty good ride. Thirteen years, some dope tattoos, multiple arrests (but who’s keeping track?) and one ATM. I can’t get over how wonderfully frivolous it must be to have an ATM in your house. If Andrew Wiggins finds a way to install one of those in his dorm room at Jayhawker Towers, then he’ll have lived up to the hype in my book.

Thomas McDermott won the first Boston Marathon, back in 1897. He suffered from cramps and blisters most of the way and by the end could peel some of the skin off the soles of his feet. He vowed to never run a marathon again but by the next year was back in Boston, finishing a  minute faster. I suspect he must have experienced the same tortuous emotions, the grueling pain that is in fact pleasure of the highest so many marathon runners have experienced at Boston for over a century and hoped to again on Monday.

A little after 3 p.m. I heard the same tragic news we all did. I saw the Vine clip and then started reading Twitter, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t feel like working anymore and not running later this evening, either. I ended up falling asleep aside my desk for a while, popping back awake later, seeing the injury toll rise higher and the details of those injuries grow even more gruesome. My thoughts and my prayers go out for the three who have reportedly died, the many who have been injured and all their families.

This fall I had a conversation with another Penn State writer while we were waiting for our plane at the Indianapolis airport. It was just before the election and we got to talking about politics and then 9/11 and terrorism in general. We agreed that an act of violence that could really screw with our country’s psyche was one that would interfere with our leisure. Here in America our pastimes are really what count. No matter how much I like my job, I like my weekends, my family and my friends one-thousand times more. Diversions are everything. Monday’s bombing cut directly through leisure. The Boston Marathon is a pure spectator event enjoyed by thousands each year, and running and racing are undertaken for fun and fitness by millions. What if this tragedy changes the way we feel at races, games or parades?

The writer Dave Zirin posted a blog about Kathy Switzer this afternoon, recounting a famous quote in which she said, “If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon.” There’s another story about Switzer that is relevant to share. Switzer, of course, is extremely well known as the first female runner to officially finish the Boston Marathon (Roberta Gibb had snuck into the race a few years earlier). She took up running when she was a shy teenager who didn’t know exactly how to fit in. In her autobiography Marathon Woman, she explained that running injected her with confidence, and she felt like a Roman goddess. She called it magic. Running made her feel like she was invincible.

For a long time, she didn’t tell anyone else about running. She wanted the sport and the magic to be her secret. Then she’d remember back to something her father told her: the best way to show gratitude for a gift is to pass it along to someone else.

So today I think of that advice. Even in the scariest circumstances, our loves, our diversions – they’ll always be worth sharing and certainly never worth stopping.

Defeating the world is not as hard as it sounds, particularly in March. In this awesome month of green beer, spring break and college basketball, the world becomes an opponent of many coaches and athletes, with nearly everyone involved in college basketball regularly declaring that “it’s us against the world.”

Yes, somebody has already said  and will continue to say those exact insufferable words during March Madness, or they’ll say something similar, perhaps explaining that nobody, and they mean nobody, believed in them. Or, if the timing is just right, they’ll say both.

“It was us against the world,” Louisville’s Peyton Siva said to USA Today upon making the Final Four last year. “Nobody believed in us.”

These teams and athletes celebrate this accomplishment by announcing “we shocked the world.”* And if they don’t formally do it then the media sure as hell will for them, as they have thousands of times for Florida Gulf Coast. In reality, the world probably hasn’t been all that shocked. Presumably it must be pretty damn busy trying to keep its polar icecaps frozen.

*The only team that should be allowed to say “we shocked the world” is Wichita State. The only entity that should be allowed to say “us against the world” is North Korea.

But at least Florida Gulf Coast has won games in which it was a serious long shot (and at least they did so by dunking the hell out of the basketball, which is somewhat anti-worldly, I suppose). Louisville, the scrappy, disrespected underdog coached by a future Hall of Famer, featuring NBA talent, was a No. 4 seed. In reaching the Final Four last year, the Cardinals played one opponent ranked higher than them. Siva added to the long list of favored athletes and teams that manufacture doubt and invent enemies, and college basketball isn’t the only offender in this category.

Rudy Gay has a “Me Against the World” tattoo for god’s sake. Last year, when the Miami Heat became a predictable NBA champion, Juwan Howard shouted, “We shocked the wooooorld” at the team’s public parade and then celebrated his proclamation by performing a far more shocking dance move best categorized somewhere on the dance-dance evolutionary scale between the Carlton and the Dougie.

What Siva, Howard and batches of other sports figures illustrate every year is that far too many of them bask in paranoia, deluding themselves into thinking the cards are permanently stacked against them. One textbook-ish definition of paranoia describes how some people who have it craft an ivory tower to separate themselves from the invented enemies they distrust. These athletes and coaches spend the majority of their time together in their plush locker rooms/weight rooms/practice facilities, closed off from the outside world, and then once they’ve completed what we actually all expected them to do they descend to tell us how unbelievable their victory was.

It’s pretty hard to find an official origin for this type of behavior. Notre Dame would seem an obvious choice given its long history of artificial motivational tactics stretching from Rockne to Lennay, but, digging through some newspaper archives, such attitudes were rarely used by athletes or in stories written about sports for most of the 20^th century. Phrases like “shock the world” were used for events like the overnight rising of the Berlin Wall, events that actually did shock the world.

The paranoid mantras of “us against the world,” “nobody believed in us” and “we shocked the world” kicked up in the late 70s and 80s for athletes and have continued since. College basketball is particularly susceptible to hyperbole given the temperament of typical college-aged athletes and the hype surrounding the emotional upsets of the NCAA Tournament. Everyone who watches these games wants to cheer for the underdog and everybody who plays these games wants to assume the underdog role even when they are clearly the favorite.

In the early days of the modern tournament, the mid-80s, John Thompson proclaimed his perennially excellent Georgetown teams were playing against the world. Recently, Derrick Rose said Kentucky coach John Calipari “makes you have that mentality where it’s you against the world.”

Like any deeply set case of paranoia, it seems this desire to suspect and target doubt becomes imprinted on their brain, to the point where athletes become so obsessed with being disrespected that they don’t even realize or care when outsiders actually respect them. Take Kent State for example. In 2002, the Golden Flashes were playing Oklahoma State in the first round. They had won a game against Indiana in the tournament the previous year and entered the postseason on an 18-game winning streak (They also had Antonio Gates, though his name didn’t mean nearly as much back then). Oklahoma State, conversely, had gone 10-8 in its last 18 games. The Cowboys were assigned a seven-seed and Kent State a ten-seed. In the previous three years, the ten-seed had won 75 percent of those games.

Leading up to the game, ESPN bloviators intoned (they weren’t quite as loud back then) that Kent State was an upset specialist, with Dick Vitale crowing in particular about the greatness of Kent State’s Mid-American Conference. By gameday, Kent State was actually favored to win the game by oddsmakers. Predictably, the Golden Flashes did so, jumping out to a 15-point lead in the first half. After the game, senior Trevor Huffman said, “I don’t think anyone actually believed we were going to do it except us.”

At least Huffman was used to an underdog role, and, in his words, he was a “short white guy playing against better athletes.” It stands to reason that adult coaches of tradition-rich programs, say like Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, should know better. On one of his weekly Big Ten conference calls in February, Izzo was asked about the tactic of preaching the “against-the-world/nobody believes in us” message. He said he “didn’t like that attitude.” Hmmm. In January, he was quoted as saying, “That’s why I always say it’s us against the world, and you’ve gotta hone in here,” using the strong rhetoric for a discussion about Twitter. Two years ago, just before March Madness began, he said, “When you’re going against the world, you need each other.” He did the same in 2010.       

If we want to get all psychological, Craig Wrisberg can help us delve. He’s a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee and has worked with numerous sports teams. He says a coach’s greatest fear is playing an inferior opponent. He frets that his athletes will turn complacent so he seeks a way to narrow their focus in hopes the team will expend optimal effort. Cutting an ulterior enemy from whole cloth is a simple way of accomplishing this task, and it helps the players bond – “me against the world” tattoos for everyone! In this sense, Wrisberg says, targeting the world is a good psychological tactic even if it seems cliché to fans or media.

From my own experience, I can say the media factors into this endless circle of doubt as well. I’ve been to more press conferences than I can count in which reporters prompt athletes and coaches to say “we have an ‘us against the world attitude’” by asking them, “do you have an ‘us against the world’ attitude?” The underdog, as much as the role is favored and sought by teams, is also a trope packaged into a forced narrative.

The story of Syracuse basketball, for instance, is relatively boring year in and year out. The Orange is either pretty good or very good. Sometimes a superstar like Carmelo Anthony or Derrick Coleman will grace upstate New York with his presence and pump life into the headlines. Usually that’s not the case.

For the 2011-2012 season, the Orange was very good. It featured first-round draft picks Dion Waiters and Fab Melo and earned a No. 1 seed for the NCAA Tournament. Rather than hail Syracuse as a team that lived up to expectations because of strong talent and steady coaching by Jim Boeheim, the Orangemen were described as fighters against a world that hated them because of Bernie Fine, an assistant who had been accused of child sexual abuse months earlier and fired. A story considered fishy from the beginning and that probably wasn’t much of a distraction after the first couple weeks of the season was continually brought up again by the media, especially in March when the coverage of college basketball got ramped up. As a result you’d hear Syracuse players saying they had chips on their shoulders. You’d see columnists lapping it up. Boeheim, college basketball’s foremost curmudgeon, even appeared to get sick of this angle, cracking what must have been the first joke of his life: “I don’t think it’s the whole world. Three-quarters maybe. I think there are some people in China that aren’t upset with us.”

With ESPN and other media outlets overplaying and analyzing every sound bite, these messages become ubiquitous. So expect to hear the same phrases this March and every March, but maybe not in a scenario as perfect as one that unfolded two years ago.

Then, No. 1 seed Pittsburgh was preparing to play Butler in the second round. Butler was clearly a good team, having advanced to the national championship game the year before, but Pittsburgh was the consensus favorite. Of course, this fact didn’t preclude Pittsburgh’s Gilbert Brown or the media from concocting an alternate viewpoint. Here’s the conclusion to the Associated Press’ preview for that game:

• Knowing that everyone loves Butler, the beloved little underdog, the Panthers have assumed an us-against-the-world attitude. “It may actually benefit us. We thrive being in an underdog role, when people don’t expect us to succeed,” Brown said. “It plays in our heads. We want to go out there and prove everybody wrong.”

The favorite had become the underdog because it was facing everyone’s favorite underdog. And with that, the enemy of so many college basketball teams was defeated because the world had just collapsed into itself. It wasn’t all that shocking.

I stared down your hollow hall. Lined with what looked like static stars in a sky divided into fourths. Your beams spending summer swelling, spitting beads of sweat from bubbles, an uneven topography.

***

“—,” you said softly, less than expecting a response. I stood and shuffled soles on your pock-marked and dull skin, waiting patiently for

“—,” you interject. Still soft but close. Your breath-hot hands around the back of my neck.

 ***

Your history is well-documented and recorded in detail. Your origin and ingredients are public domain, traced in books and binary. But what happened in your alone is anyone’s guess. What of hours added on hours and all your days spent set? Generation on decade on year on month on week on day on shift on hour of shuttling all comers to a living, to a home or to love. Filling that hollow, hot hole settled under our borough’s running racetrack river.

 ***

What about me, stood in the fountain-turned-flood of time allowed by your leaking roof? Wet, weary and remaining. Waiting for your leading wind or your distant glow. Pacing still in place.

Your signs say stay.

“—,” says my pad away.

A long time ago in yuppie years, I sat in a coffee shop in Dallas, uninspired on a Friday afternoon to complete something or anything that could be considered productive. In moments like this, I reach. I try to read something to pump me up, maybe an example of really good writing or something that just makes me laugh. Or I turn to music, which Brew House colleague Rustin Dodd once-termed a performance enhancing drug for getting work done.

So on this day I set out to create an HGH-Winstrol infused cocktail of music on YouTube, and I termed it “Work Mix.” I remember jamming out to this particular batch of about 20 songs off and on and then I kind of forgot about it. Until today. For some reason I was on my YouTube account and came across the prestigious “Work Mix.”

And holy shit, I wonder what kind of drugs I was on, performance-enhancing or otherwise, that day. This mix is the worst/best collection of songs ever compiled. And I’m now in the second go-round of listening to them thing from beginning to end. And now I am going to share it. The greatest/most eclectic/this guy is huge weirdo/is there seriously a Miranda Cosgrove song on here?/ performance-enhancing work mix ever concocted.

Sometimes it gets bad and goes wrong and the walls press in close. The air is cold in spite of the sun and the wind whips through three long-sleeve layers.

What is it you require?

***

Ride south on a road you’ve never seen before past towns the back of your brain recollects faintly from the news. 80, 85, 90 and you loosen, hazy and feverish and shivering under your coat, but alive. Too much caffeine and too little water takes you out of your body to watch your life, a slow unspooling. Exit the highway and slow your way across the bay to the barrier island.

The beach is stacked high against the end of each eastbound street, sand where sand wasn’t and shouldn’t be. Each parking lot looks like the moon or something Hollywood Soviet. Buildings are boarded up and disused on account of the season or the surge. Pull up, hop out and crest the hill. The ocean is sitting there, pushing in against the sand. So peacoat and boots and chinos be damned, you run. It’s the only thing you can do to laugh like you can’t remember laughing and water at the eyes from the wind and your heart.

On the way back to the city, the radio waves straighten out and come to rest in 4/4:

“That morning sky gave me a look / so I left while you were sleeping — that’s all it took

I chalked a line south down the coast / going where my thirst was open for the things that I don’t know

Going where I wasn’t paying for the hurt that I owe …

That wind is calling my name / I won’t wait”

None of this brings her back. None of this changes anything. All of it means so much.

I hate many things about year-end lists. For one, I hate the phrase you see when you encounter a list —  “It’s that time of the year” — which is really code for “OK, here’s a list because we need to provide something to click on while everybody goes on a two-week holiday bender of eggnog and Christmas cookies.”

But I also love many things about these lists. Sure, they’re gimmicky and lazy. But they’re also important. Life is fast, and hard, and busy. And sometimes, we need people to remind us what happened. I have been doing this list here for a couple years now. And I’ll go ahead and recycle what I wrote last year. Sure, it’s lazy. But then again, so are lists.

When I think back to (2012), I know I won’t think of one monolithic theme or narrative. Life doesn’t work that way. Not for me. But I will remember certain moments… and certain songs. So here we go, finally, the 12 songs I will remember from 2012.

12 Civilian — Wye Oak

***

11 Same Love — Macklemore and Ryan Lewis

***

10 Swimming Pools — Kendrick Lamar

***

9 Hold On — Alabama Shakes

***

8 The House That Heaven Built — Japandroids

***

7 Take A Walk — Passion Pit

***

6 Ghost Fields — Murder By Death

***

5 Live and Die — The Avett Brothers

***

4 We Take Care of Our Own — Bruce Springsteen

***

3 Harlem Roulette — Mountain Goats

***

2 Bigger Than Love — Ben Gibbard & Aimee Mann

***

1 The King of the World — First Aid Kit

It’s been a while since our last Diary of a Bad Movie. Blame it on my lack of cable in State College. In Dallas, I could choose, on demand, from a list of nauseating mediocrity. I’m not so lucky in the east.

Thankfully being home for the holidays has allowed me to catch up with a true stinkbomb of a film, New Year’s Eve, on New Year’s Eve nonetheless.

Going into the movie, other than knowing it will not be any good, I know Seth Meyers is in it. All I know about Seth Meyers, as my dad reminds me, is that he is not even enough of a screen presence to be featured in Saturday Night Live skits. And he is in this movie. This movie.

This movie, of course, contains a jumble of characters, like the regrettable Valentine’s Day, whose plots and thus lives are somehow intertwined and interrelated. Yes just like the world. In the same way the actions of a rice farmer in Japan extends to sales of wheat futures in the United States or something, the pain of Ashton Kutcher being a hipster will lead to Jessica Biel giving birth to a baby faster. Yes this math does compute in the mind of a studio exec.

Selecting from On Demand: It turns out this movie is one hour and 58 minutes long. A test of endurance. I’ll see if I can get through. Here we go…

9:36 – Katherine Heigl is in this movie. Of course she is.

9:38 – The voice played over the beginning title promises magic. I can’t recognize the voice. It might be Drew Barrymore. I don’t think it is Penn. Or Teller.

9:39 – Hilary Swank is in charge of dropping the ball on New Year’s Eve.

9:40 – A guy who likes like a cross between Colin Farrell and Jeremy Renner appears as a bike delivery guy. I can’t tell the actor.

9:41 – Seth Meyers sighting! He is an expecting father. A hospital is offering 25 G’s to the first family that gives birth. And an actress just said “hoo-hah.” Get it, you guys? Code words for private parts are always a riot, says studio exec.

Meyers is married to Jessica Biel, and he needs the money to pay off a student loan. In real life Meyers did attend Harvard, so he’s going to have some serious loans to be paying.

9:42 – To confirm: Ashton Kutcher is in this movie, continuing his streak of appearing as an under/unemployed artisan in every bad movie made since 2001. He plans on doing nothing on this New Year’s Eve because doing something would actually make his character interesting. When told his friend will call him back, he says to not do it, to save his minutes. Doesn’t he know smart phone to smart phone is UNLIMITED?

9:44 – Sooooo many characters. This is exhausting already. Here’s a quick run through of the plots introduced already: a couple has just gotten married, that couple’s friend, Josh Duhamel, met someone on NYE last year and they bring it up and he says there is no WAY he’ll see her (or him?) again. Kutcher is a louse. The baby contest is going on. A clumsy woman, a surprisingly un-catwoman-like Michelle Pfeifer, has stumbled into the trash. Katherine Heigl is playing Katherine Heigl. And Hilary Swank has to drop that ball. I think I’ve only missed four or five other plot points.

9:46 – A guy is playing his guitar on the couch. “Jon Bon Jovi?” asks my dad. Yep, dad is right. Kudos to him to sitting through this movie while reading. Of the stars presented so far, he says: “I’ve seen a lot on the B-list. There isn’t one on the A-list.”

9:47 – Bon Jovi, playing a singer named Jensen, enters the kitchen of a restaurant where Katherine Heigl awaits. She has warned him not to come. She slaps him. Just like an episode of “Chopped,” or “Grey’s Anatomy.”

9:49 – Ashton Kutcher’s buddy, the Jeremy Renner/Colin Farrell hybrid, who has promised to call him back and waste all of his precious phone minutes, is trying to secure tickets to a super exclusive party.

9:49 – Here are the tweens! Yep, fill in those demographics. This young tween might be getting her first kiss tonight. But I won’t give her too much trouble. Her mom in this movie is Sarah Jessica Parker (a dance instructor?), a devastating burden for anyone to deal with.

9:51 – Josh Duhamel is traveling to New York, and doesn’t know how to get there even though he is supposedly going to the City to give a speech for his job, meaning he doesn’t know how to travel to the city in which he is employed. He uses his GPS and it is confusing New York with New Brunswick and New Haven, and he crashes his car into a sign. The air bag explodes, first on the passenger side and second on the driver’s side because that’s funny. FYI, it costs like $5K just to replace those bags.

9:53 – Diversity check: Ludacris has entered the movie as a security guard of sorts for Hilary Swank, the NYE crystal ball dropper. And in another scene in which Heigl slaps Bon Jovi, we meet two fawning, thick-accented Hispanic friends (one of whom is Sofia Vergara). The wheels are spinning just right.

9:54 – John Lithgow, whose last acting gig was the 1-800 Collect commercials, is here as the boss of a record label.

9:56 – The plots have not ended. Robert DeNiro is hooked up to tubes, to life support. (Insert crummy joke about his career being on life support after this role riiiiiiiight – here). He is about to die. He tells the doctor who looks an awful lot like Carrie Elwes (please, please be Carrie Elwes….D’oh IMDB confirms it is not him) that all he wants to see before he dies is the NYE ball drop one more time. He has presumably already skydived, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, swum with great white sharks, eaten at McDonald’s and seen the movie Valentine’s Day.

Also, Halle Berry is the nurse. That’s another plot.

9:58 – Oh my god, you guys. Ashton Kutcher is pissed that he receives community texts from friends who say Happy New Year to everyone. The injustice.

9:58 – Lea Michelle from Glee has just stepped onto an elevator with Kutcher. Per requisite of every 80s sitcom script, the elevator is stuck.

“They’re going to hit every lame plot device possible in this movie,” says dad, “and you got two hours to see it all.”

10:00 – Meyers’ and Biel’s midnight baby plan is being thrown out by the doctor, who says no way and then says Meyers is “dangerously close to a rectal exam.” I have a feeling that’s as close as we’ll get to a joke the rest of this movie, unless we get more cryptic words for genitals. Why do I think this will happen?

10:02 – Sarah Jessica Parker won’t allow her daughter, the tween, to stay out late in Times Square. Daughter says she wants to start “living,” really living in this world. Says that SJP used to. And she’s right. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw did have a lot of stilettos, didn’t she?

10:03 – Uh-oh, Hilary Swank is afraid of heights, making this ball-dropping task a little tougher. Or will it? Doesn’t she just have to press a button? I sincerely hope she doesn’t have to climb on top of the damn thing.

10:04 – Roughneck tow truck operator tells Josh Duhamel that he can’t help him out too much because he plans to drink a 12-pack and watch porn with his wife tonight because all blue-collar employees in movies must do blue-collar things like drink 12-packs.

10:07 – Now we know why Katherine Heigl hates Bon Jovi, other than for the fact that the song “It’s My Life” sucks. He proposed to her last year and then cut off the engagement. For now, though, they are calling a truce because he has been booked to play at her restaurant.

10:09 – Bon Jovi and Heigl have first “serious” conversation of the movie. You know the type. If this were Full House that slow, whimsical would be playing and Danny Tanner would be sitting down on a bed next to Deej.

Bon Jovi wants her to come on tour with him. She says I’ve lived your life long enough, meaning she has lived on a prayer, possibly the “Our Father.” Yes, it is her life (last Bon Jovi song joke, I swear).

10:12 – The boy interested in SJP’s tween daughter tries to convince her to let the girl go out. He can’t. Says SJP fights dirty. Matthew Broderick is shaking his head somewhere.

10:13 – All right, here’s a plot point I have so far neglected. Michelle Pfeifer has created some weird sort of bucket list/resolutions in which she wants to do things like visit Bali in one day and has promised the bike messenger Colin Farrell/Jeremy Renner guy to have two tickets to a super awesome party.

10:15 – Jessica Biel is eating anchovies in hopes of inducing labor. Look, I know this movie sucks and doesn’t deserve to be looked into seriously but what a stupid, stupid thing to do. We shouldn’t celebrate a woman for trying to have her baby really quickly, possibly endangering the child’s life.

10:17 – SJP’s daughter claims her mom is a bitch because she has no man in her life. You mean Sarah Jessica Parker is playing a single, urban woman in a Hollywood production?

10:19 – DeNiro reminds the nurse, Halle Berry, he MUST stay alive until midnight. I hope she doesn’t tell him that Dick Clark has been dead for a few years and Ryan Seacrest has taken his place for the NYE countdown.

10:20 – SJP’s tween daughter, Haley, sneaks out. When SJP discovers this, she says, to herself, “I fought soooo hard for custody.”

10:22 – A song with a chorus of“It’s a New Year” tailor-made for this movie begins playing in the background. Probably by Bon Jovi.

10:23 – OK, what’s so hard about dropping a damn ball? It has dropped every year for Lord knows how long. If it was actually tough and worthy of being a plot in a movie, even in a movie that sucks, someone surely would have devised a way to create a crystal ball that has no problems dropping from the sky.

10:25 – My dad and I are trying to figure out who is playing the bike messenger, the guy who seems a cross between Collin Farrell and Jeremy Renner. We settle on the actor who looks like Conner Teahan…Zac Efron.

10:28 – Jessica Biel has entered labor…too early. Those anchovies.

10:29 – Halle Berry says that Robert DeNiro is her hot date. He is barely conscious, meaning he is still a better date than Ashton Kutcher, who is, yes, still stuck in the elevator with Lea Michelle. Quiz question: Which cliché ending will happen between Michelle and Kutcher? Will the elevator become unstuck right at midnight, or will they fall in love and decide to just stay inside the elevator even as midnight comes?

10:32 – This. Is. Exhausting. And Penny Marshall has just entered the movie, ladies and gentlemen. There will now be a plot involving Laverne (or was she Shirley?).

10:35 – Diversity check: A man with a Russian accent has been hired to fix this malfunctioning crystal ball. He probably smokes. My readers who have seen the excellent Thank You For Smoking know that the only characters who smoke skags in movies these days are RAV’s: Russians, Arabs and Villians.

10:35 – The plots that we have already forgotten are now starting to weave together. This strange, likely smelly Russian man has to fix the crystal ball or DeNiro will be pissed off when he dies. Lea Michelle was a backup singer who was meant to sing in Bon Jovi aka Jensen’s band. After that I’m lost.

10:39 – Josh Duhamel is hitching a ride with a nice fella to New York City. He says he won’t find his mystery lady. The nice fella says he must, that this is serendipity. Sorry bro, Serendipity is already a movie.

10:40 – More plot connections. Conner Teahan/Zac Efron is the brother of Sarah Jessica Parker. SJP has contacted him to see if her daughter has called him.

Intermission 10:43 – I’m calling it quits for the night. Holy cow this is tough. I’ll pick up on the afternoon of the real New Year’s Eve. I’ll close for now with commentary from my dad, who is reading Michael Lewis’ The Big Short right now: This guy made CDO’s and all these complicated concepts more interesting and more understandable than that crap.”

5:02 – I’m back! Back to the pregnancy pact or whatever it is. A male nurse just used the word “va-jay-jay.” Why oh why did I turn this movie back on?

5:04 – Bon Jovi, aka Jensen, has a song playing, about having a little faith. The music is transposed over all the scenes, the elevator, the hospital bed, to the guy searching for the girl he doesn’t know the name of and of course, right in the face of Katherine Heigl. I have faith that one hour from now I can forget I ever did this.

5:06 – Robert DeNiro is now confusing nurse Halle Berry with his daughter or wife. I don’t think it matters.

5:08 – Resolution list now involves Michelle Pfieffer hanging from a cable on the stage of a broadway play. It is very typical for a delivery boy to have access to stages of broadway theatres.

5:09 – Lea Michelle has now convinced Ashton Kutcher to have a faux NYE party on their elevator with her. The cover is $80. There are no free champagne flutes.

5:11 – Which cliché did you choose earlier for the elevator couple? Hopefully option two, which is closer to what happens. The elevator is fixed, right as Kutcher and Michelle are about kiss. Kutcher lets her leave but based on the awkward three minutes of total conversation they have shared in the eight hours they were trapped I’m sure she won’t be able to wait to reunite with him.

5:12 – Turns out Lea Michelle forgot something. A woman, forgetting something, so they can meet up again, magically… in a movie? Naaaaah.

5:13 – Is it just me, or have birthing scenes become more commonplace since Knocked Up? I don’t remember any births before then, aside from the movie Hook and it wasn’t really a birth scene as much as little Jacky being propped in front of Robin Williams like he had just been released by a stork.

5:15 – Diversity check: Katherine Heigl now has an Indian assistant we are introduced to. He is not played Aasif Mandvi, which would possibly enhance the value of this movie.

5:16 – Holy hell! You know how I made that Matthew Broderick joke earlier? He’s in the movie. In stomach-turning fashion, his character is named Mr. Buellerton.

5:18 – The plots are starting to come together. Bon Jovi, who plays Jensen the rock star, is late to his show at the ball dropping. He is late because he loves Kathy Heigl, maybe. His backup singer, Lea Michelle, is also late because of the elevator fiasco. She has now kissed Ashton Kutcher, who is going to stick around and watch – if the ball drops. It might not drop because Hilary Swank is panicking, and if the ball doesn’t drop then Robert DeNiro will die a very sad man, presumably as sad as someone who signed on the dotted line to appear in this movie without reading the script beforehand.

5:20 – So to sum up, this little world revolves around this tiny dropping ball, the crystal ball that New Yorkers would prefer to stay millions of miles from from on NYE. I’m serious. I know very few New Yorkers and they loathe the concept of crowding into Times Square with a bunch of filthy Midwesterners like myself and watching that thing fall. Yet this movie is about love for that ball and that entire scene.

5:22 – I’d feel slightly bad for just automatically classifying Ashton Kutcher as a douche, but he is the one who chooses to appear in these kinds of movies as these kinds of characters year after year after year. It is a guarantee, like spring starting every March.

5:23 – Here’s how they could have made this movie good: Instead of having this Russian repairman trying to fix the NYE crystal ball, they should have cast the guy who played Slippery Pete on that Frogger episode of Seinfeld.

5:25 – Or, they should have Hilary Swank fall in love with the wily old Russian repairman. Aye, comrade!

5:26 – In a movie of forgettable plots the most forgettable has to be the one of this stooge Josh Duhamel searching his lost NYE love.  Duhamel has given a speech to his stock company because we all know how much people want to listen to speeches when they are wasted on NYE, and he is still searching for this random NYE woman as two other women offer their condos to him.

5:27 – Oh, Christ. The big twist is revealed. Hilary Swank turns out to be the daughter of Robert DeNiro. ZOMG, ZOMG, ZOMG. Seriously, what am I doing with my life?

5:29 – Halle Berry has released DeNiro to watch his beloved ball. Another nurse asks if she should look for him. Halle responds, “No, I’ve sent him away into the frigid cold on top of a large building that is quite susceptible to strong winds all so he can watch a ball. This is a perfectly reasonable decision for a  professional caregiver responsible for another person’s well-being to make.”

5:30 – Military and diversity check. Halle Berry is now skyping with her black boyfriend who is overseas.

5:32 – Bon Jovi, as Jensen, announces he is canceling the tour because of Katherine Heigl. This is the third worldwide tour indefinitely postponed on behalf of Heigl. The first two were Korn’s Family Values Tour and Dr. Dre’s Up In Smoke Tour. I had tickets to both.

5:34 – I am now convinced this isn’t Robert DeNiro. It can’t be. It just can’t.

5:35 – Midnight. Lots of kissing. The ball did drop. Lea Michelle has inexplicably become the lead singer of Jensen’s band. She is singing Auld Lang Syne. “Schu” would be so proud.

5:36 – I’m not entirely cruel. Let me give two seconds of credit to this movie. The tween daughter tried to approach the boy she had a crush on and saw that he was kissing someone else. She then runs and finds her mother, SJP, in the crowd and embraces. A legitimately sincere moment.

5:40 – OK, I’m off my sentimental horse. Josh Duhamel’s search for the NYE chick has taken him to an abandoned Italian trattoria, exactly where I find all of my dates.

5:40 – What? The tween girl has already forgiven her boyfriend figure who was just kissing someone else a few minutes ago. Erase what I wrote about the legitimately sincere moment.

5:41 – Cue the life is cyclical ending. DeNiro has died. Babies are being born. Louie Armstrong is playing in the background.

5:43 – Well, it turned out Josh Duhamel’s secret NYE love was SJP. Damn. I was seriously hoping it would be the woman operating the garbage truck that scooped all the confetti off the ground in Times Square.

Intermission 2 – a quick one – only a few minutes left but I gotta help a friend real quick!

5:58 – Back! The movie ends with the narrator, who I swear is not the same narrator at the beginning because the voice sounds like a man’s, says “New Year’s Eve to me is hope – and a great party.” In that fashion, I’m off to a party that will hopefully be great, unlike this movie.

The closing credits contain more scenes, the bloopers, the outtakes that are only enjoyable after an enjoyable movie with an enjoyable cast. They are played to the music of Pink’s “Raise Your Glass,” the second-worst song of 2010. Definitely an appropriate ending.

6:02 – In these bloopers, they show an outtake of the Valentine’s Day Blu-Ray disc coming out of Jessica Biel’s womb. The universe has just collapsed on itself.

Thanks for reading!

Bill Walton served as the color commentator for the Missouri-UCLA game on ESPN on Friday night. It was Walton’s first time on air in some time — he’s apparently been battling health issues — and it turned into a perfect symphony of basketball and poetry.

Walton, calling a game in the same building in which he played in college, was in rare form. Missouri guard Phil Pressey, who had 19 assists, was, according to Walton, a breathtaking savant of basketball genius, a sight to behold, a glorious revelation of playmaking and poise, a gift for all-time. (OK. That’s sort of what he said.)

It all reminded me of the greatest call in the history of basketball… ever.

Bill Walton on Boris Diaw:

-fin-

His name is Mac Lethal, a rapper. He writes fast little rhymes. He posts them on YouTube. Sometimes, they go viral.

It happened again this week.

On Tuesday, Mac Lethal published his latest creation, a video titled “Oh My  God! You Need To See This!” (Or at least, I think it was titled that for a while. And then I guess it changed.) It (was) a fantastic title, especially for a video that, presumably, was made to go viral. But the content of the video isn’t all that important. In this case, this was a screed rap against the lunacy of the Westboro Baptist Church, an emotional outburst of words and beats in the wake of the wounds of Newtown, Conn.

But this post isn’t really about Lethal’s latest video, in and of itself. This is more about Lethal, or what he represents, or what talent and ambition represent in today’s free-store culture. I’ll pause to note that these thoughts are incomplete, these ideas bloggy and undeveloped.

But let’s start with Lethal. He is a Kansas City native. Put out a few albums. Raps about the Royals. A year ago, he was living in a somewhat crappy apartment in Overland Park. The kind of place any late 20-something would live.

And for me, this all makes him interesting. He’s been around the KC rap game for years, showing up at shows in Lawrence, hosting shows on the radio, playing a cultural character in a Midwest city with too few of them.

He is not famous. No, not in that way. But if you live in Kansas City, you may have HEARD of him, and you might think you should know who he is, and in this odd Internet age, that can be part of this bizarre realm of not-really-famous fame.

“Hey that’s Mac Lethal. He’s the Kansas City dude who raps insanely fast and writes sort of ironic songs. I guess I’ve heard of him”

Maybe if a Kansas City rapper would have made it big; maybe if Tech N9ne had produced a best-selling, top-40 single, the environment would be different. Not better, mind you; but different.

Last fall, Lethal released a YouTube video of him in a kitchen, spitting out some of the fastest lines you’ve ever heard, an ironically goofy cover (at least, that’s the way I took it) of Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now”.

The fact that this YouTube video now has more than 27 million views is important to our overall thesis here. But it is, perhaps, just as interesting (although maybe not all that important) that Lethal could gain such click-ified success by rapping lines like: “Gotta butter up another one, and put it  on the skillet, another couple minutes until it’s done-done / ain’t nobody fucking with this kid, so tell Jerry Sandusky I’m gonna kill him with a stun gun.”

But all this Internet fame, all this viral success, all this bizarre creation of art, well… it leads to few questions.

What do you do after you create a video with 27 million views… and then go viral again? And has Mac Lethal passed a threshold … an invisible barrier of internet fame, never to return again? I guess what I’m saying is this: If Mac Lethal has ambitions, dreams about being an artist who supports himself on his work… does becoming an Internet sensation hinder this pursuit?

Part of Lethal’s appeal, part of what makes him unique, is how home-made it all feels. He creates a beat on his iPhone, he sits on his couch, he spits out a perfect rhyme on the “first” take, and then he turns the camera off. This is not Rebecca Black, we’re told, or some methodically planned lip-dub proposal; this is hip-hop in its purest form.

And it’s quite brilliant, in its own little way. But here’s the question: When you get 27 million views while rapping about flapjacks, can you maintain authenticity?

***

Seattle is a music city. This is the rep, anyway. For years, a young rapper named Ben Haggerty plowed away in the local hip-hop scene. He performed at local shows, appeared at Seattle sporting events, and earned thousands of clicks on YouTube.

He was not famous. But he was notable. A white rapper from Seattle with a little bit of talent. If you asked people around  the Seattle scene, they might say something like… “Yea, I’ve sort of heard of him.”

But how does somebody like this break through?

Earlier this year, Haggerty released a song called “Same Love”. It was a serious song about serious stuff.

Within a few weeks, it viral. A few weeks later, it went to No. 1 on iTunes.  At some point during all this, Haggerty performed on the Ellen Show with his producer, Ryan Lewis.

She introduced him as her hero: His name is Macklemore, a rapper.

I thought off Macklemore the other day when I watched Mac Lethal’s latest creation. Maybe it was the similar names. Or the thought of two underground musicians taking on an admirable, emotional issue.

And then I scrolled through the “About” section on Mac Lethal’s Westboro rap.

It had the lyrics, and some info on Lethal’s facebook and twitter pages. And then it had this  message:

“Please send this to Ellen Degeneres ASAP!!!!”