The Indiana Pacers-New York Knicks series, which resumes at 4 pm today, has me again caught up in nostalgia and trying to follow the WCS Looks Forward Initiative, while ceaselessly drumming up the past.
Jalen Brunson’s dad was the last dude on the 1998-1999 Knicks team’s bench and practically a colleague, in terms of our tangible involvement with basketball-related activities. And—as old friends, para-social connections and Substack subscribers, know—near the end of that same season, forward Larry Johnson nailed the profoundly clutch, series-saving Game Six four-point play.
If I’ve ever heard a more explosive burst of ovation and cheering, it blew my mind so bad that I cannot recall it. Both New York and Indy were trying to get championship droughts off their resume, and that Finals run was the last closest any of the teams still playing NBA basketball has come to a championship.
In case you’re following Sean Combs trial, the business perv’s history of being a piece of shit is getting mainstream attention, but the sex trafficking case is nowhere near being proven.
Earlier this week while watching Sarah Silverman’s streamed comedic special about losing her parents, I found myself drifting off to a 1999 MSG media elevator ride, with Richard Lewis grousing about the home team.
How, I wondered, would the famously fatalistic Lewis have taken Wednesday night’s heartbreaking 138-135 series-opening home loss?
When Winning Time, the phenomenal Knicks-Pacers documentary debuted at Sundance 15 years back, the opening short film was Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No. Post-screening and from the stage, Indiana legend Reggie Miller, the star of Dan Klores’ film, said of one poor MSG performance: “Guess I should have taken some of that LSD!”
It’s one of my most treasured professional memories, as longtime readers recognize with increasingly frustrated boredom.
Tyrese Halliburton says he’s seen Winning Time 50 times. On Wednesday, after hitting a shot for the ages, the young Pacer struck the Miller “choke” gesture turned famous by the aforementioned doc and made serious inroads on achieving NBA immortality. Aaron Nesmith may have led Indiana to that epic comeback, but it was the exceptionally-efficient Halliburton who walked out of the arena with a shiny halo of possibility about his noggin.
The Knicks are NYC’s angst repository. They haven’t won it all since I was a small child. (Try to find Larry David’s reaction to the Halliburton shot.) Yet they have the most NBA pedigree of the post-season’s four remaining franchises. The title chase is just that wide open.
Wednesday game was the most watched conference final since 2018, when LeBron’s Cavs took on the Boston Celtics. While the Western Conference may well feature the playoffs’ two most exciting players—Minnesotas’ Anthony Edwards and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of OKC—what’s going on in Manhattan and downtown Indy will not release its hold on the public imagination.
Go to a bar for Sunday’s Game 3 and take in this afternoon’s matchup. I bet that you meet someone there with roots in Gotham. Network television’s late-night talk show hosts are using the series to tee up easy laughs from their audiences of tourists. New York versus Indianapolis is ratings gold and a cultural referendum, to boot:
Hicks against Knicks. One way or another, there’s a little bit of each in most of us, sorta like forever chemicals.
And now back to our times of terror…
One doesn’t have to be a Harvard student or a prole without proper paperwork to recognize the magnitude of this moment. But you might just be an idiot or idiot-adjacent. So:
It’s time to GTFOH, while the gettin’ is good.
Alright then. Here’s an idea: Let’s do 10 this time.
10 About those 1250 land reparations that America granted, then reversed:
A collection of in-depth print and podcast reports discloses how the administration of actual reparations began in the years following the Civil War. The podcasting and articles illuminate ways in which the lives of both ex-slaves given “40 acres and a mule” recompense and the Whites who ended up possessing the land were impacted.
The name of this critical reportage is “40 Acres and a Lie.”
Using deeds granted to 1250 freed slaves, trained reporters acting in good faith explore the generational wealth ramifications of America’s rescinded reparations policy.
Coming the same week the US POTUS revealed that he receives “an IV drip of Stormfront forum posts”—to use columnist Jamelle Bouie’s language— “40 Acress’ the timeliest of looks at the nation’s wimpy wealth redistribution efforts.
Reveal / Mother Jones
“In the century and a half since the enslaved gained freedom, their descendants have fought to find home. We’ve clustered in colonies and cities, pooled our resources and talents, and aspired to a safety and security still elusive in this strange land where we were brought. It’s been made too easy to forget that so many of these efforts found success, that within years of this nation recognizing our humanity—if not our full citizenship—under law, Black Americans were acquiring wealth, building homes, and establishing thriving communities,” writes Wesley Lowery, who was nailed for problematic sexual behavior this week.
Hella suspect timing in that last clause, am I right?
Essentially, this enterprise is journalistic busking. Tips are acceptable and even encouraged.
Lil Hit
Alison Bechdel will be at Santa Cruz’s Rio Theatre on Wednesday. The graphic novelist says the test named for her is “just like the basic principles of feminism.” But she’ll take it regardless.
Good Times
9 Inside the Seattle Immigration Court horror show
Deep within the pending massive Congressional bill that balances gigantic tax cuts for the wealthy on the backs of poor people is a funding mechanism to build a deportation and imprisonment machine whose advent will initially shock.
Then your stankin ass will retreat back into complacency, I guess?
At the Seattle Immigration Court, masked ICE agent have been waiting outside of deportation hearings and arresting migrants who have just had their cases dismissed. Consider this naked fascism as a preamble to your own future.
Fuck around and wake up with yo ass in Djibouti.
KUOW
January’s new guidelines authorized Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to bust migrants at courthouses and fast-track the deportation of folks who have in the country for under two years.
“All of a sudden,”said attorney Eilish Villa Malone, “what that means is that they can be on a plane out of here in three hours.”
Look, y’all: Everyone knows that the President’s idea of beauty is off-white, at most. The aims of his Whites House couldn’t be more transparent. Don’t pretend to be unaware of what this moment is about.
Lil Hit
Anyway… next weekend’s Bay Area Book Festival brings writing workshops, big-name writers, six indoor stages, and a BART station block party to Berkeley. If you meet a comrade there with whom you can commiserate, feel free to mail me pics.
Bay Area Book Festival
The Full Herb Caen
Possibly the very worst part of listening to Trump reports on national newscasts is that a report’s very last sentence often features the most bone-chilling data…
It can’t be said enough: Entertainment looks to be the death of our species, while art art can transform us…
Finally consumed the spectacular third season of White Lotus last weekend. As almost always, the Black characters came across as underwritten and obligatory…
The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis epitomizes the talented mainstream journalist who’s going to figure out the new stakes far too late, that refereeing is irrelevant at this juncture…
This group will have a higher suicide rate than most…
I point this out as a Press Box fan…
8 Consider being disappointed in Medhi Hasan
Never thought I would say it about the august TV presenter, a sharp-minded veteran of the BBC, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, and now Zeteo, but… This fuckin’ guy.
In under two minutes, this clip’s early look into the (suspect) acting chops of Hasan manage to erode a decade of credibility. Then, dude gets into the weeds of his active X account and the hemorrhaging of integrity gets really hard to watch.
Hasan Minhaj
Looking at such a smart, savvy journalist wrestle with getting off Former Twitter shows what a tough drug it is for journos to kick.
Medhi: X runs on people. Please check your ego immediately and stop tweeting.
Joy Reid is among the most culpable and discredited public figures from last year’s “Biden’s fine” boondoggle, the one who tarred astute observers with the “panic” label. She interviewed her former MSNBC coworker for Zeteo, without offering a full and explicit apology. I shan’t be forgiving either one of these fuckers for that omission.
Lil Hit
The former Maryland Social Security Director who is likely to head up the DEA continues to jerk everyone’s chain on the matter of federal weed legalization.
Marijuana Business Daily
Severed
The Nation brings us an emotional new short film about Mohamad Saleh, a teen from Gaza who has lived through five major assaults on The Strip. Please share.
7 LSD @ UCD: Psychedelic enhancement, minus all that pesky trippin
So. Some University of California, Davis scientists posted some findings in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They had been toying with LSD atoms when it occured to them to do a “tire rotation.” The scientists swapped the position of two atoms in LSD’s molecular structure. Next thing you know, on their hands was a form of the drug that improved the mind and saved the psychedelic drama for ya mama.
No one asked for this, and yet… I’m glad it’s here?
Vice / PNAS
“That tiny change turned it from a powerful hallucinogen into something that can regrow brain cells in mice and mend neural pathways without launching your consciousness into the cosmos.”
Lil Hit
Deschutes County Sheriff Kent van der Kamp has been barred from testifying at trials due to the false information he’s given from the witness stand.
Central Oregon Daily
West Coast Sojourn 86: True Grit
Inside Substack statistics say that very few of you received last Friday's newsletter. It wasn't one of my better ones, but here are those dated piles of letters and punctuation marks. Please enjoy.
6 Guess who’s pitching this weekend!
The Dodgers are in Queens this evening, playing the powerhouse New York Mets in a rematch of last year’s NLCS. And that’s perhaps the second-most compelling news LA has to offer between now and Sunday night.
ESPN
Both teams have been in and out of first place through the season’s first portion and can reasonably be expected to face each other in the fall.
Shohei Ohtani is expected to face live pitching on Saturday, a first since injuring his pitching-arm UCL nearly two years ago. The Dodgers had him lay off his progression ahead of the season opener. The idea being for the base-stealing power hitter to reach his pitching peak in October. The whole world’s gonna be watching that insanity.
Lil Hit
In a savvy preemptive move, Oregon’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make housing discrimination based on immigration status a crime.
Oregon Chronicle
The other Vancouver, upended
New sidewalks taking shape downtown as part of the Main Street Promise Project’s comprehensive street redesign.
5 Now that PDX has some distance on its iconic protest summer…
As I reminded readers of Rian’s Dundon’s Protest City, George Floyd’s family thanked the people of Portland for helping to keep the cop murder victim’s name on the nation’s lips. In the moment, that reclaiming felt like one of this century’s monumental social achievments.
Donovan Scribes (aka Donovan Smith) reminds that, in the seasons that followed 2020, “the largest demonstrations for Black liberation in world history had immediately been spun into the Boogeyman responsible for the mass homelessness, crime, and the hollowing out of downtowns.” Here is how we got from here to there.
Portland Mercury
Scribes and The Mercury offer a compelling mix of prose, conversation, and poetry in “BlackOut: A Five-Year Retrospective on Portland’s Racial Justice Movement.”
Black Portlanders wrote the package, which has been widely distributed about town.
Lil Hit
LA County—the rare Cali jurisdiction which remains financially loaded—just offered free downtown storage space to artists, an ongoing need that’s been exacerbated by this year’s wildfires.
LAist
Caen I kick it?
Kudos to Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley for being among the protesters outside 4557’s golf club crypto corruption bacchanal…
If you are over 40, weren’t acknowledged as a knower of things before 2015, are presenting yourself as a knower of things, and were not in college for roughly half of that period? You are probably part of The Problem…
In case you’re following Sean Combs trial, his history of being a piece of shit is being given mainstream attention, but the sex trafficking case is nowhere near being proven…
The idea of America being a less influential nation is not completely unsettling to me…
Feel free to feel insulted when stories about the autocrat include headline allegations such as “spiraling” and …
The most corrosive aspect of Trumpism is how the lies of others become normalized…
4 Pets will suffer if Cali’s proposed THC ban takes hold
On May 9, the Department of Cannabis Control proposed regulations that would all-but ban THC in pet CBD medications. The agency said that while THC “appears to be well-tolerated in healthy dogs,” the risk that animal consumption of it “may result in acute toxic harm, adverse effects, and death.”
People who actually know how cannabis works in pets say that the proposal goes against emerging evidence of how THC and CBD interact.
SF Gate
The one milligram THC limit “undermines legitimate medical options for California dogs and cats struggling with cancer, arthritis, seizures, and neurological conditions,” said Dr. Trina Hazzah, the president of the Veterinary Cannabis Society
Lil Hit
Jared Shaw is a 34-year-old former center for the Santa Cruz Warriors. He’s now in Indonesia, where possession of cannabis gummies is a capital offense, and facing possible execution.
Associated Press
Near the end, there’s talk of a Les Grossman film
Remember when it was fashionable to dislike Tom Cruise. That was weird.
What were we thinking?
This egotistical autodidact loves the shit out of cinema. Give this lil nigga his due, goddamnit!
3 Who wants to be the greatest hero in the history of incarceration?
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