WCS 35: Keeping It Real in Tukwila

Even my book tours have been real fuckin crazy

Fans of somewhat structured and mostly informed NBA talk, please peep Monday’s NBA podcast special with Tommy Tompkins and—from Mexico City—Mike Wise, right here.

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As this brief trip was taking shape, one of the strangest episodes in my writer-ish life popped unexpectedly into mind. You can get with that ep, too. Look 16 years into the past and picture me living in West LA.

My second book had just hit, so I’d jetted up to Seattle to boost its visibility. My co-author and I and a lineman from the Raiders promoted the book on some hip hop radio shows, pointing people not only toward our Barnes & Noble event the next day, but also to a nighttime after-party on a golf course located halfway to Tacoma.

I don’t remember meeting Gary Payton on this mini media tour, but he was somewhere in the mix.

On Saturday, I hit my marks at the sparsely-attended B&N reading and signing, then flew back to Los Angeles. That after-party, I have since read, was extremely well attended. Two people got shot, one died. The news stunned me the next morning. I became loudly focused on making editors remove my fucking name from the early newspaper reports.

DonnellAlexander.com traffic blew up, and this is what popped unexpectedly into mind while putting together this latest newsletter:

If only I’d had a good follow-up ready.

Here are some images from the Sojourn introduction that I spent hours on before abandoning for the above anecdote.

Hollywood’s Indimex Eats & one of the thousands of Serve robotics creations who wants to serve and advertise @ you

I used to go to a lot of clubs around here, back when going to LA nightclubs was my actual paying gig.

The neighborhood has come a long way. Anyway, my discarded take was too inside and stoney and pointlessly complicated. Even for me.

Now, here are this week’s 10 potential barbecue topics and their Lil sidekicks. These items work at weddings and birthday parties, too.

10 Chargers make the NFL its Sim City

With a glamour coach and prime time QB, the junior LA team is bound to be more compelling than the Rams. Heads-up on that big fall adjustment.

After last week’s Sims-style rollout of the 2024 schedule, rooting for the San Diego transplants just got incrementally easier.
Los Angeles Chargers

(Go to YouTube, it’s fine; I trust you’ll be back)

Lil Hits

• A tennis player at the level of Zendaya’s character in Challengers would never have gone to Stanford, Madeline Hill confirms.
  Impersonal Foul

• In the production of his expensive and polarizing new film, Francis Ford Coppola

  has been trying to kiss extras and supposedly smoking hella weed.
  Variety

• Jack Boulware clarifies why columnist Herb Caen was as strong a San Francisco flavor as The City had through the last half of the 20th century.
  What Jack Boulware Fails to Realize

I want Jaylen Brown to succeed, because we look like we could
have been kidnapped from the same tribe.

9 Nikola Jokic & the Wypipo Memory Network