Hurricane Tamanya

I had to ignore her this evening for a couple of hours to write something. When I finished, I found that she had torn a few pieces of tile out of the bathroom floor!

This is not a kitten who accepts much neglect.

Game 6 coming up

When I wake up in Egypt tomorrow morning, Dallas-Miami Game 6 will probably still be going. I hope to see the Mavericks clinch their first NBA Championship. Most people outside the state of Florida do too.

I remember the first year the Mavericks existed, 1980 or so. At that time I had a newspaper delivery job in the early mornings, and I remember looking into the sports section on that cold November morning when the NBA season had just started, and saw a boxscore for a Dallas team, which I didn’t realize was slated to exist that season for the first time. I’m pretty sure they had Mark Aguirre, though.

For a few years they played the drafts as brilliantly as any team had ever done, and improved steadily each season, but then seemed to plateau and even regress by late in the decade.

No, I was off by a little. Their original 1980 draft pick was Kiki Vandeweghe from UCLA, who had a reasonably good NBA career but not a great one.

In 1981 the Mavs had a great draft, taking Aguirre from DePaul #1 and Rolando Blackman from Kansas State #9, a deadly shooter.

In 1982 they blew it with Bill Garnett from Wyoming at #4, their first really bad pick. That summer I was enrolled at Lute Olson’s basketball camp in Iowa City, and still remember the Iowa players (who would hang out and talk with us kids) mocking Dallas for that pick. One of them, whom I won’t name, laughed that the ESPN highlight clip for Garnett was a layup. A layup! This player couldn’t believe it.

1983, Dale Ellis and Derek Harper. Not a bad bounceback, though both would eventually play their best basketball for other teams.

1984, Sam Perkins (solid choice) along with the forgotten Terence Stansbury from Temple. I have no memory whatosever of the existence of Stansbury, and I was a rabid basketball fan in those days.

1985, Detlef Schrempf, Bill Wennington, and Uwe Blab. Their judgment was now starting to fade. Schrempf was solid, Wennington a journeyman, and the other German, Uwe Blab (taking Europeans was considered a huge exotic risk in those days) didn’t amount to much.

1986, Roy Tarpley from Michigan. Tarpley! Tarpley at his best was incredible, the equal of almost NBA center. Substance abuse issues did him in. There was a story I heard once that police were called to his house on some false report of something or other, but smelled something funny and asked if he minded if they looked around a bit. He told them to go ahead, and they went into the kitchen and saw a bunch of cocaine spread out on the counter, and he was arrested. Not sure if that’s apocryphal or not, but it would fit Tarpley’s general cluelessness, which undercut incredible talent in his case. I loved watching Tarpley play at Michigan and even for the Mavericks.

In 1987 they don’t seem to have had a first-round pick, so I’ll stop there.

But by 1988 they had pushed the mighty Lakers to Game 7 in the West Finals. Not bad! But the next year they collapsed and missed the playoffs completely with a losing record. No memory of why that happened, but it may have been a Tarpley injury or suspension.

They missed the playoffs for 10 straight seasons and 11 out of 12, hitting rock bottom in ’92-’93 with a horrendous record of 11-71, one of the worst in history.

In fact, after pushing the Lakers to the brink in 1988, they didn’t win another playoff series until a first-round win over fading Utah in 2001. And they weren’t a serious threat again until 2003. Essentially, they lost 15 years as a franchise– a whole generation.

But more importantly, we all want LeBron to lose this year in particular. He can have next year, or the year after that.

an Egyptian Army source says…

“A senior Egyptian general recently told CNN that the military council is eager to relinquish power to civilian authorities.

“The army can’t wait to return to its barracks and do what it does best — protect the nation’s borders,” he said last month. He did not want to be named due to the sensitive nature of the topic.”

Let’s hope.

However, I think my friends are somewhat divided between those who fear the Army more and those who fear extremist religious forces more. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Egyptian Christians tend even more heavily toward the latter view.)

For my own part, I’m guardedly optimistic about not fearing either. There are still plenty of things that could go wrong, but you have to remember that there are a lot of very smart people in this country, and they’ve been waiting for a long time to put Egypt on a healthy path. Egypt generates scores of brilliant doctors, engineers, scientists, artists, writers, etc., and they’re all extremely serious about politics right now. I don’t foresee all of that mental energy just running down the drain into nothing. True, it could happen. But things feel reasonably promising to me at the moment.

Where I probably differ from the average Egyptian most is that I thought the behavior of the Army during the Revolution was not as neutral as many wanted to say. They did let the thugs into Tahrir on February 2, after all, and I find that hard to forget.

That said, the individual soldiers who are still on the streets (I saw about 15 of them today alone) do have a reassuring, trustworthy presence. They’re not at all scary when you run across them under normal circumstances, and neither are their tanks, which are still parked all over the place.

another OOO art show in Dublin

Not yet on the gallery’s website. This was sent to me by one of the Irish artists I met in Venice.

*****

Time
Friday, June 17 at 6:00pm – July 29 at 6:00pm

Location
Oonagh Young Gallery
1 James Joyce Street, Dublin 1

Created By
Oonagh Young

More Info
Sean Edwards (UK) \ Matt Harle (US) \ Sam Keogh (IRL) \ Adam Thompson (UK) \ Amy Yao (US)

curated by David Beattie

PREVIEW: 6PM – 8PM 17th JUNE

“Humans are primary tool-users. They use tools to mediate their interaction with other human beings and the world.” [John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, (p.89, 2007)]

TOOL-USE looks at objects and their use, from their inherent materiality and usefulness to their use value. The artists revel in the ‘thingness’ of found materials, ready-mades and household objects. While the works in this exhibition acknowledge the objects’ histories, production, form and worth, the materials are utilised in a manner that allows for a discussion of time, space and being. Of particular interest within this is not the deskilling of the ready-made, but its reskilling. Here the artists not only explore the material for what it is, but offer an alternative use. The ambiguous introduction of the alterations of the human hand switches their relationship from product receiver to tool-user.

Although integral to the works in this exhibition, the artists’ imprint is very slight, with the original material or functioning object never completely distorted. Amy Yao’s glass work retains its transparency and fragility; Matt Harle delicately joins pieces of wood with elastic-like paint, relying on the properties of each to hold it together. The framed elements of discarded boards, foam panels and broken plasma screens of Adam Thompson seem to serve as a shrine to their previous use and value.

“The world is an infrastructure of equipment already at work, of tool-beings unleashing their forces upon us just as savagely or flirtatiously as they duel with one another. Insofar as the vast majority of these tools remain unknown to us, and were certainly not invented by us, it can hardly be said that we ‘use’ them in the strict sense of the term. A more accurate statement would be that we silently rely upon them, taking them for granted as that naïve landscape on which even our most jaded and cynical schemes unfold.” [Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (p.20, 2002)]

Rather than taking them for granted as Harman states, TOOL-USE presents us with a world full of objects and asks us to look beyond the material, to consider the world as a set of tools to take up as active tool-users.