"I thought of that old joke, you know? This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken.' The doctor says, 'Well, why don't you turn him in?' The guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; you know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, but, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs."- Alvy Singer
* * *
1st Quarter
The Knicks are in a permanent state of decline.
Every long-time, true-blue, diehard Knicks fan knows this to be fundamentally true. We’re currently on a five game winning streak but none of us are fooled. All of those games were played at home, against teams we’re supposed to beat. Our team is finally healthy now and if we can’t pull together a string of wins against inferior teams at home, then we might as well pack it in. Don’t get me wrong, we’re glad this streak is happening; it’s just that this feels more like the pendulum merely gaining momentum to swing the other way. You can’t let your guard down when you’re a Knicks fan. Never.
When this season started, we were supposed to be garbage. We let Jeremy Lin go and signed an overweight Raymond Felton and an over aged Jason Kidd in his stead. We built our back-up front line on the remnants of the 1999 Knicks frontline – Kurt Thomas and Marcus Camby – which would’ve been nice if 1999 didn’t happen 14 years ago. Then, we signed Rasheed fucking Wallace. Who retired two years ago.
To the shock of pretty much everyone, we started the season 6-0. We were hitting our threes, Carmelo Anthony was playing well coming off his stellar 2012 Olympics stint, and our Lin replacements – Felton and Kidd – were running the offense very well.
Then, Felton got injured and everything went straight to hell. Amar’e Stoudemire returned from injury to the chorus of everyone saying “holy shit, he's done.” We got blown out by Lin’s new team, the Houston Rockets, got beat by a dysfunctional Lakers team at a time when they couldn’t beat anyone, got beat twice by a Derrick Rose-less Chicago Bulls team, and got beat by an old, decrepit, your-wife-tastes-like-honey-nut-cheerios-desperate Boston Celtics team.
And now the whole gang’s back together: Felton’s making the offense work again, Tyson Chandler is playing out of his mind, Iman Shumpert is back and giving us defense and athleticism at the backcourt, and Amar’e Stoudemire is playing like the best sixth man in the NBA right now, shooting something like 67% on post-ups, put-backs, and mid-range jumpers, AND playing well alongside Anthony and Chandler when every basketball expert on Earth said he wouldn’t. As of this writing, we’re a half game behind the Eastern Conference leaders, the Miami Heat.
And this – all of this – makes me very very nervous. Being a Knicks fan is a lot like being Sisyphus: the closer we push the boulder to the top of the mountain, the closer we get to watching it fall once again.
I already turned my back on this franchise this past off season (as well-chronicled in this blog) after almost 20 years of heartbreak. I thought the last one was the final nail in the coffin, because it was self-inflicted, because our owner basically threw away the first organic feel-good story the franchise has seen since Pat Riley’s early 90s teams, and not to mention the greatest NBA underdog story in like forever. As the weeks went by, the anger never receded, yet I was faced with the realization that rooting for the Knicks ceased to become a choice that I could just redact. It was sort of depressing, actually, realizing that you’re stuck in an abusive relationship. Ridding myself of my fondness for Madison Square Garden; the Knicks logo; the orange, blue, and white of the uniforms; the sound of the MSG organ; the sound of Noo Yawkahs chanting “DEEE-FENSE” in unison; was like committing self-amputation. It was too painful, too grotesque, and too unnatural. And so here I am, stuck with the Knicks, in a perpetual state of decline.
I fell in love with the Knicks in 1993, not only because they gave the Chicago Bulls (who I hated) their toughest series, or because John Starks dunked on Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen, or because Anthony Mason and Charles Oakley could bully Chicago’s bigs like no other frontline in the league; but also because they were New York’s team. And in 1993, I was already in love with New York and decided it was my favorite city in the world and that I loved everything about it and wanted to love everything in it. Gustave Flaubert once wrote:
“My native country is the country I love, meaning the one that makes me dream, that makes me feel well.”
New York is my native city. And I have yet to step foot in it.
* * *
2nd Quarter
New York is in a permanent state of decline. That was the case in the 60s, when a financial, architectural, and cultural golden age in post-war New York City faded into an era of economic crises resulting in poverty within the inner boroughs and a spike in crime rate (see: Mad Men, AMC). That was the case in the druggy 70s, the crime-infested 80s, and even in the much-improved 90s of Giuliani’s New York, which was still widely considered to be a dump. The city has been declining for so long that it has become its default state.
To this day, the most enduring iconography of New York is not Frank Sinatra’s post-war Manhattan, nor is it the 60s bohemia of Greenwich Village – it is Woody Allen’s New York in decline, the late 70s iteration.
“Chapter One: He adored New York City. To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture,” Allen’s Isaac Davis loudly narrates in the breathtakingly simple opening sequence to Manhattan, which is basically a series of lock-cam shots of the city. “The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams…(trails off)…how hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by drugs, loud music, television, crime, garbage…(trails off again)…”
Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall is the anti-New York: she’s fresh, sprightly, naïve, and blissfully Midwestern. She meets Alvy Singer – the quintessential New York intellectual, liberal, neurotic Jew – and they drink wine at her terrace where concrete towers of urban decay engulf the entire skyline behind them and the image is so beautiful. Watching this scene again recently reminded me of Jeffrey Eugenides’ description of the Paris skyline in his novel The Marriage Plot: “The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline…the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.” Conservatives may be right: New York is un-American.
Annie Hall eventually ditches Alvy and his pessimism and the car fumes-smoked concrete grimness of New York City for sunny California. “What’s so great about New York?”, she says. “It’s a dying city.” Woody Allen’s Los Angeles is perfect, but like the dumb couple Alvy approaches on the street back home, its shallowness is the secret behind its happiness. L.A. is antiseptic juxtaposed to New York’s dirty, more textured colors and stone buildings. Alvy comes back from his vain attempt at getting Annie back and walks along the Hudson River, with the skyscrapers on the background. The image feels more tactile. It feels like home.
Annie Hall is universally considered as a romantic tragedy, yet the tragedy that stands out for me the most is Alvy’s doomed attempt at conquering Annie with his New Yorkness. Alvy is an intellectual who hates intellectuals; he finds them insufferable, pretentious, and obnoxious (in the words of Alvie quoting Groucho Marx, possibly quoting Sigmund Freud: he doesn’t want to belong to a club that would have someone like him as a member), yet he wants Annie to be more intellectual. There are so many levels of failure in their romance that it spans the realms of touching, funny, and heartbreaking.
* * *
Halftime Analysis
I’ve always wanted to be more intellectual. My pop culture influences are mostly Britain and New York-heavy, but while the British music I was exposed to was generally faceless, New York constantly filled my canvas with its sophisticated imagery. In my mind, the cool world of the avant-garde held the dimensions of CBGBs, its dingy interiors reeking of punk history, and the seedy streets and alleys of The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth. Modern art was to be found in the walls and found objects of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The great writing I aspired to achieve was in The New Yorker, the poetry of Frank O’Hara, and the films of Woody Allen.
My self-New York-ification is still an ongoing process, and judging from my age, possibly a certified failure. I am filled with wants and aspirations that confuse me and disappoint me because, as much bullshit I have digested about New York being a “state of mind”, it is still ultimately a place, and a very far and inaccessible place at that. Manila and Quezon City have the urban decadence of New York, I assume, but its cosmopolitan spirit is confined within shopping malls that lack the organic otherness of New York’s virtual Italys, Parises, and Colombias. It still feels insular here most of the time but I’m aware that this is my own fault. My New York influences have set me up for this weird kind of alienation that didn’t require an expatriate, half-breed life to form. All it took was a cable subscription.
I adopted the Knicks at a time when New York was the undisputed capital of American TV comedy. In the age of Friends, Seinfeld, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Late Show with David Letterman, Mad About You, and Caroline in the City it seemed like the funniest, most interesting lives were happening in New York City.
It was also fast becoming Championship City. The Rangers won the Stanley Cup, while the Yankees won the World Series for the first time since the late 70s. Enter, the New York Knicks – a perennial loser for most of the 70s and the entire 80s, and now a growing championship contender, the heir apparent to Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls.
We gave them their toughest tests during their championship run. That’s what all Knicks fans proudly say to this day because that’s all we can really say in hindsight. At the time, though, it killed us. We couldn’t fucking beat the Bulls. We just couldn’t. Mason could intimidate the living crap out of Scottie Pippen like no other NBA player in history, Oakley could out-rebound Horace Grant and make him look useless, Ewing could regularly destroy Cartwright/King/Perdue, Starks could guard Jordan for as long as any human can possibly guard him, until he inevitably eats people alive in the final 5 minutes of any game. Jordan stepped on our ceiling: he was the great force of nature that prevented New York from ruling the world, or at least America, in the early 90s. He single-handedly stopped a New York renaissance that seemed primed to happen. He killed my dreams. Jordan fucking ruined my adolescence.
It was this same disappointment that fueled my Allenesque romanticization of the Knicks.
“He adored the New York Knicks. For him, they were a metaphor for the decay of modern NBA offenses.”
We could play all-world defense, protect the paint historically well, pull down rebounds consistently, but man, were we terrible shooters. It was literally painful, watching the 90s Knicks try to score. Their attempts at breaking Phil Jackson’s signature full-court presses with Mason and Starks were recurring Greek tragedies. Their offensive sets were predictable and often ended in a difficult Ewing fade-away jumper, a Starks 25-footer, or Oakley flying into the stands, trying to save a loose ball. But there was a certain beauty to it all. Their struggles were almost poetic in their impossibilities. Jordan was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – elegant, grandiose, and sublime. The Knicks were The Velvet Underground’s The Black Angel’s Death Song and Sonic Youth’s Titanium Expose – shambolic and beautiful; while also as defiant and tough as Public Enemy’s Fight the Power.
I haven’t quite figured out how to “like” this current iteration of The Disappointing New York Knicks yet. Carmelo Anthony’s Knicks are failing in a way that’s too amorphous, it actually creates a new layer of disappointment over the ostensible one. The 90s Knicks had a certain concept album-like wholeness to them. I like how Ewing, Oakley, Mason, Harper, and Starks seem to be molded from the same New York street grime; they had a singular grubbiness and grit that looked symmetric as they walked together onto the court.
This current team still looks like a custom team that was auto-built by NBA 2K13. Jeremy Lin left town, taking with him an organic identity we could’ve latched on to and plastered over the albatross lavishness of Carmelo and Amar’e. The Chandler-Lin pick-and-roll of last season was like the punk movement rendered in internet time; it was too good, too real, too fast, multiplied by a hundred. Now we’re three months into the current season and I’m still grappling for something, anything. Our Chandler-Melo-Amar’e-Shumpert-Kidd-Felton core is now finally healthy and clicking. I should probably give them more time – along with Shumpert’s Kenny Skywalker/Patrick Ewing 90s nostalgia of a high-top, Kidd’s sage-like aging, Amare’s pseudo-intellectual basketball goggles/redemption story, and Melo’s messianic promise – to grow on me. What is romance, after all, if not the inevitable decay of truth within the avenues of our memories?
One of my heroes of intellectualism, Jonathan Franzen, has a certain memory of New York that has shaped the ongoing lament on the deterioration of modern life palpable in his writings. In his essay collection Farther Away, he talks of a New York that is “no urban, no rural…just a wasteland of shittily built neither-nor”. He might as well have been talking about the 2013 Knicks.
He’s nostalgic for the New York of his youth, specifically his first visit to the city in 1976 – one year before Annie Hall came out. “The first time I saw her (New York), I was blown away by how green and lush everything was,” Franzen writes. “The Taconic Parkway, the Palisades Parkway, the Hutchinson River Parkway. It was like a fairy tale, with these beautiful old bridges and mile after mile of forest and parkland on either side.”
Franzen, a loud and proud tree-hugger, fell in love with the inner city as well, the same concrete lushness that hovered over Alvy Singer and Annie Hall when they first met. He writes:
“The hazy blue-gray sky with big white clouds drifting over Central Park. And the buildings of stone and the doormen, and Fifth Avenue like a solid column of yellow cabs receding uptown into this bromine-brown pall of smog. The vast urbanity of it all…the self I felt myself to be that day was a self I recognized only because I’d longed for it so long. I met, in myself, on my first day in New York City, the person I wanted to become.”
Franzen looks back at 70s New York and sees none of Woody Allen’s romantic decay. All he sees is the romance.
* * *
3rd Quarter
I still have vivid memories of Linsanity. At a glance, it seems like the classic modern, social media age sports miracle that was instantly infused with nostalgic hyperbole right as it was happening. I was there, and though it felt like it was being made up as it was transpiring, like it was being exaggerated by some lazy Hollywood scriptwriter, I was witnessing it in real time and actually saw a kid literally come out of nowhere and shred the Lakers for 38 points and hit game-winning shots like he’s been doing it for the past 10 NBA seasons and suddenly pump back life to a Knicks team that was becoming increasingly depressing, even by their own standards.
So when moronic Knicks owner James Dolan kicked Lin out of town, Knicks fans everywhere were ready to storm his office with torches and pitchforks. I wasn’t there of course, but social media made me feel like I was in Manhattan; I had complete total strangers from other countries replying to my angry tweets with their equally angry affirmations. Articles spread all over the internet of fans and writers coming to grips with this betrayal; others choosing to disavow the Knicks completely in exasperated dismay.
This was when I started to seriously contemplate switching my allegiances to Brooklyn. I knew I was done with the Knicks, but I also knew I wasn’t done with my love affair with New York. By rooting for the newly-relocated-but-still-too-recently-New-Jersey Nets, I figured I could tell myself that I never really left New York; only that treacherous Knicks organization. But weeks went by and I couldn’t bring myself to root for the Brooklyn Nets, which is basically a construction, much like hipsterized Brooklyn.
I got to know Brooklyn through Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Crooklyn and through Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude. Their Brooklyn was the stuff of urban epic poetry filled with images of graffiti, boom boxes, thugs, brownstones, hip-hop, street games, and drugs. It was a Brooklyn teeming with danger, creativity, and anger that burgeoned in the neglect of the 70s and 80s. It was a Brooklyn that lacked morality, but didn’t lack character, or an integrity that can only be built in the face of moral (if not actual) bankruptcy. Today’s Brooklyn has vintage bikes. And cool cafés.
HBO’s Girls is set in a Brooklyn that doesn’t quite feel like New York or at least the “New York” of my mediated memory. Everything looks so neat and folksy; as if all those hipsters transplanted little bits and pieces of Portland and Austin to create some sort of small town innocence where there previously was none.
Carmelo Anthony is from Red Hook, Brooklyn; the old Red Hook, Brooklyn, Spike Lee’s Brooklyn, pre-hipster takeover. He’s the real deal. So it’s infinitely weird that a New York fetishist like me who’s never even been to New York would feel detached from a Knicks star who grew up there. Outsiders like Mason, Oakley, Starks, and Lin feel more New York to me somehow. Melo’s from there but he doesn’t fit the myth. And from my view here in insulated Quezon City, all I can see is the myth and the romance. The truth feels more fabricated.
* * *
4th Quarter
Louis CK is really this generation’s Woody Allen. His TV series Louie is the new New York romance ground zero that Allen’s films once were, and it’s just as gorgeously shot and neuroses-filled. Louis’ New York is still decaying and gives shape to his pessimism, yet it is captured by a cinematic beauty that becomes a source of hope, a warmth, and an enduring belief in humanity: the cabs, the old delis, the pizza places, the subway that houses the city’s filth and grandeur all at once.
Like the city, Louie is defined by its extreme opposites. The series sways jarringly between hilarious absurdity and genuinely heartfelt pathos so frequently, it actually feels graceful now in its shifts. The constant co-existence of contradictions is a very New York thing indeed, but the comfort and normality that this co-existence has attained feel even more local post-9/11.
The 9/11 tragedy was the worst thing that ever happened to actual, physical New York and the best thing that ever happened to its modern pop culture zeitgeist. Critics can whine about Millenial Irony all they want but the three most relevant New York-centric TV shows today – Louie, Girls, and Mad Men – are throbbing with a yearning sincerity totally absent in the New York comedy golden age of the 90s, a vain quest for meaning and authenticity that becomes all the more touching for its awareness of its own vainness.
“We watched the twin towers burn from here”, fictional Louis CK says to a fictionally suicidal Doug Stanhope, narrating his memory of watching the horrible event with his then pregnant wife. When Stanhope tells him his plans of ending his life, Louis is incredulous. “It’s not your life; it’s LIFE!” he says, gesturing outwardly towards the city, the blurred, defocused image of the Brooklyn Bridge behind them. “Life is bigger than you. Life isn’t something that you possess, it’s something that you take part in and you witness.”
The most New York moment in Louie has to be the scene of him alternating between appreciation and disgust at the sight of a violinist playing next to a homeless man taking a disgusting impromptu DIY “shower” on a subway station. In classic Louis CK fashion, he pushes an absurd, almost surreal, yet almost real image to bring out a fascinating observation: New York is always in decay and always beautiful. It is a city weighed down by its extremes but because the space in between is so vast, because there will always be people in between the hobo and the violinist, the Louis CKs and the Woody Allens, the streets and avenues of romance and myth will never run out, and there will always be people who will fall in love in them, and when they sing their love songs and write their love letters and film their odes, there will always be people like me watching.
* * *
Crunch time
This season, Melo is trying really really hard. On the heels of Lin’s departure, Carmelo Anthony was instantly vilified, portrayed in the media as a lazy, overrated, jealous, entitled asshole. This season, he has generally kept his mouth shut (save for the occasional Honey Nut Cheerios-related tirades), has shown a willingness to pass the ball and work hard on defense. Fans now have reasonable cause for optimism that maybe he’ll change, that maybe he’ll finally integrate a New York street toughness to his game, that maybe he’ll be the one to finally save us.
But let’s not kid ourselves, fellow Knicks fans: Melo is a gunner. He’s a scorer, one of the best in the league today. He’s not Charles Oakley and he doesn’t need to be. Our chance at a championship, at that glory that has eluded us for decades, the promised land that continues to be promising and continues to be broken rests on the shooting hands of Carmelo Anthony.
I’ve watched Melo for years as a Denver Nugget, but I’ve never watched his game this closely and this regularly before. And now I’ve noticed something: he has a weird shooting stroke.
It’s not really so much a “stroke” as just a sudden, almost premature release. Patrick Ewing, our ex-would-be savior, had a nice looking flick of the wrist, an exaggerated follow-through that made his arms look like a crane as he suspended his hands in the air a few seconds longer than normal NBA jump shots, mainly for dramatic flair. It looked and felt fluid; as if by watching his hand movement I could already feel the ball rolling off his hand and swishing through the net. There was a transference of sensation then that I still feel whenever I catch one of those old 90s Knicks games on NBA’s Greatest Games. When it went in, it felt good, in a way that all pre-determined things happening as predicted felt good. When it didn’t go in – and it usually didn’t go in during the most critical times in the most critical games – it felt like a stunning betrayal.
Melo’s release feels more untenable. It doesn’t fill me with any false sense of security. It’s always as if he shoots the ball a second earlier than he should and he shoots it with an awkward flip that seems to leave the ball all alone and aimless in the air. I brace myself for the miss that seems inevitable, that when it goes in – and it usually goes in during the most critical times – it feels amazing, yet unrelated to the blunt heave I just saw, like an effect cut off from its cause.
Lately, I’ve gotten more used to this phenomenon – Melo throws up a precarious-looking shot and it goes in. When he gets hot, and hits three straight 3-pointers or three straight pull-ups from the high post, I get lost in the sudden sureness of an unsure shot. It’s a shot that’s starting to look beautiful to me and makes me feel better about the 2013 New York Knicks that has nothing to do with their future success but has everything to do with how I want to feel about them.
The Knicks will continue to win and keep my hopes up and they will continue to lose and frustrate me. I will always be miserable but I’ve already decided that’s okay. That precious moment after Melo shoots the ball and before it meets its fate with either a swish or a clank, that very short moment when the ball is in mid-air, I feel alive.
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