A Pivot and Reintroduction
I don't have the time to write full-time about basketball anymore, so now I'll write what I know and what I live.
The Pivot
I needed an outlet when I started this Substack in the spring of 2021. I hadn’t received my vaccinations against COVID-19 yet and I was languishing, unemployed, and barely sane in my family’s home in Mexico. Basketball has been a lifelong comfort to me. During the pre-vaccination era of the pandemic, that comfort became everything to me.
In the spring of 2021, I wrote some long-form pieces on the state of the Warriors. During that summer, I wrote season-in-review posts for each Warriors player. The piece that got the most traction was about James Wiseman’s disastrous rookie season. I spent several days gathering the data and video I needed to write that piece. It clocked in at nearly 10,000 words. Later that summer, I’d browse basketball forums and see people quoting my work to me. I got a lot of heat on Twitter about that piece from the Warriors’ faithful.
I spent most of the 2021-22 NBA season bouncing between Mexico, New York, and Southern California. The gainful employment(s) that I had afforded the time to put in 20-30 hours a week watching Warriors’ games and writing about them. During the post-championship glow of the summer of 2022, I wrote pieces on each Warriors player’s season. Several of those, pieces including the ones on Andrew Wiggins, Jordan Poole, and Kevon Looney, stretched to 20+ pages. I can say with complete confidence that you will not find more detailed writing about that Warriors team than what I wrote that summer.
I only felt comfortable offering paywalled posts on Substack when I was putting a high level of work into those pieces. I haven’t had the time to write about the Warriors with the level of detail I expect of myself, save for some occasional blog posts on The Mercury News’ Fast Break Warriors blog. So with all that said, I’ve decided to revive this Substack, but make it more accurately reflect my life and the time I have to write about the things I know.
The Reintroduction
I’ve spent the last year of my life putting my roots back down in Brooklyn, where I’ve spent most of my post-college life. I work at a cocktail bar now — this has been the primary reason I’ve not watched as much basketball as is necessary to write credibly about it — and when I’m not working, I’m usually looking for a memorable meal or playing guitar and bass in various bands. When I cook at home, I listen to WNYC, New York’s public radio station. When I commute, I read. I’m trying to get back into reading books. I’m Terminally Online and it is through Twitter that I engage in The Discourse and find the news reports, articles, and think-pieces that make up my commute. When I’m lucky and have a night off, I watch the Warriors.
The above paragraph is a nice and brief little summary of the things I care about. I like to write what I know, so what I’ll be doing here for the foreseeable future is writing about the things I care about and things that make up my day-to-day existence, consumption, and thoughts. So let’s get started!
The bands I play In!
I play in four active bands right now and a handful of dormant bands and projects.
Kela:
My own music is under the name Kela and I’ve linked to my Bandcamp above. I play guitar and sing in Kela. I’ve been playing some of our songs with my roommate, Tommy, since 2016. The songs and members of Kela have changed over the years. We are now a four-piece band and are scheming how and where we want to record our debut LP. Kela should appeal to fans of Jeff Buckley, Jane’s Addiction, Prince, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Hum. Every now and then, we dip into faux-bossa nova. I sing in Spanish sometimes too. Members of Kela play variously in Toobin, Rabbit, and Marinara. Come see Kela at Gair in Brooklyn on March 10.
I’ve been close friends with and a frequent attendee of Marinara concerts since they played their first show in 2018. Last January, I was lucky enough to join Marinara and play bass in the absence of our friend, Julius Bowditch, who just released his own EP, Brick Hill, under the name Jupie. The bass lines that Julius wrote for Marinara’s debut LP, I Feel Like Dog, are iconic. Marinara’s second LP, The Black Goat, comes out March 1st and I am blessed beyond belief to get to play these songs — which I had 0 part in writing — live. Every time I play Marinara songs, my heart swells. Marinara is a special band and it should appeal to fans of Yo La Tengo, Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, and Built to Spill. But really, the band I think of most often when I think of Marinara are Japandroids. For those of you who ever got to see Japandroids play live in a small club, you’ll instantly recall the camaraderie you felt with the band and the crowd around you, how you roared the anthemic choruses with strangers and felt a deep and earnest joy. That feeling — that’s what Marinara does. Come see us play at Hart Bar in Brooklyn on March 6.
A few years back, I saw my friend Malcolm, play bass for Dog Park at a loft party in Greenpoint. His childhood friend, Henry, was the bandleader for Dog Park and I spent much of the show fixated on Henry’s left hand as he stretched his fingers out for unusual chords and attacked his fretboard with hard pulls and speedy hammers in angular and very hooky arpeggios. I now play bass in Dog Park. As I did my homework for these songs, I was struck by the complexity of these absurdly catchy songs. Playing in Dog Park has been an absolute blast and one of my favorite things about this band is that the name, “Dog Park,” implies a certain level of fun that these songs deliver. Dog Park should appeal to fans of Arthur, Alex Chilton, and Joy Again.
Sugar Mama:
I have been playing guitar in Sugar Mama for two years now. Our music has not yet been recorded, but this band has been one of the more challenging and rewarding projects I’ve been a part of because it has brought me out of my musical comfort zone. Sugar Mama has notes of funk, city pop, and R&B. While funk guitar and the variously textural and over-the-top shred of city pop are something I am mostly comfortable doing, the minor-y movements and the restraint of R&B are not natural to me as a guitar player. We recently finished the basic tracks for a single we want to put out soon and it is a fucking ride.
In the worst days of the pandemic, I got to watch my dear friend, Quinn McGovern, record the guitars, pianos, vocals, and drums that eventually became his EP’s, I Hate it Here Pt. 1 and I Hate it Here Pt. 2. The songs on this pair of EP’s capture the full range of human emotion: love, rage, disorientation, fear, dissociation, joy, acceptance — you get the picture. It’s only fitting that Quinn’s songs shape-shift with these moods. Sister James does massive, blown-out guitars in both sludge and post-hardcore moments, delicate finger-picked guitars weaving with muted electric guitar and piano, playful and child-like synth swirls, and pedal-steel flourishes over Americana-hinting anthems. I was lucky enough to contribute a few ideas to some of these songs and two summers ago, I was set to play guitar in Sister James for their first show since February of 2020, only for the plumbing at TV Eye to get utterly fucked and close down the entire venue. TV Eye has yet to deliver on the promise of re-booking said show. Sister James should appeal to fans of The Microphones, Smashing Pumpknis, Refused, Radiohead, Wild Pink, and James Blake.
Other friends and bands of note:
An onslaught of tight and percussive riffing with sneering and infectious vocals.
Earwormy hooks and playful, fidgety guitar playing from the kindest band in the city.
My former genius roommate, Avi, can become whoever he wants to be musically in any given song.
Avii and Maraya Fisher make intricately layered shoegaze that occasionally glances at industrial.
A pair of West Coast transplants + Tarek do punk right.
Clever guitars and vocals that swim together in synchronicity, backed by a rhythm section with unexpected and restrained metal chops.
What I’m drinking:
The bar I work at is blessed to have an excellent selection of rum. I am a relative novice in the service industry, but I bartend sometimes now and have developed a burgeoning taste for rum-based cocktails. My recent kick is the Daquiri. The Daquiri is a humble and endlessly tweakable drink. I’ve been trying different white rums with this Daquiri spec to see how they imprint different flavors upon the Daq. My college friend and fellow bartender, Nic, taught me the recipe I now use:
1 oz lime juice, 3/4 oz simple syrup (1:1 boiling water and sugar blended), a pinch of salt, a lime wedge, and 2 oz white rum, shaken and served up in a coupe glass.
My favorite rum I’ve used in a Daquiri is called The Funk. For reasons I don’t understand, The Funk is very reasonably priced — Google doesn’t show a listing over $30 a bottle — and it lives up to its name. The Funk is distilled in a heavy potstill with molasses and it is unaged and 100 proof. This is to say, it’s strong as shit at 50% ABV. The Funk will add some overripe and very boozy notes to your drink. Sometimes I get the slightest hint of banana.
What I love about the Daquiri is how it reveals the essence of the white rum in the drink. The Daquiri is not unlike a simple slice of cheese pizza and how it reveals the competence and essence of your local pizza shop.
What I’m eating:
Last year, I made a single taco for breakfast for 97% of my mornings. This year, I’ve pivoted to chilaquiles. I’m on a salsa verde kick, but I have yet to perfect my sauce. I like eating the same thing each morning. I feel a real sense of accomplishment when I make a breakfast that is notably better than other ones that week. Small tweaks and improvements are a constant and I’ve got my workflow down to an exact science.
But as it gets nicer out — it’s uh… nearly 50 degrees in February in New York at the time of writing — I get antsy about spending too much time inside. I like to get out of the house in search of a meal. I work in Dumbo, Brooklyn’s lamest neighborhood — and not coincidentally, the former home of Kevin Durant — and I’ve found that I love taking the ferry to work, even if I have to take a longer commute to do so.
So every few weeks, I gather as many friends as I can to join me on a walk that begins at the Lorimer stop on the L train, passes through McCarren Park, and deposits us at the back of the line of Taqueria Ramirez, which is just a 10-minute walk to the Greenpoint ferry terminal. Taqueria Ramirez will have a line, but if you time it right — say, 4:30 PM — you should only wait a few minutes to order. After much consideration, I’ve determined that the star of the show at Ramirez is not the taco al pastor, but rather the campechano, which combines their spiced pork sausage and beef confit.
What I’m reading:
Democrats Have Themselves a Victory in New York. But They Also Have a Problem.
Slate’s Alexander Sammon roasts the New York State Democratic Party for their uselessness in the special election to fill the congressional seat vacated by George Santos.
NY-03 Special Election Tests Jacobs’s ‘Long Island Strategy’
Luke Goldstein of Prospect.org lays out the perils of trying to win over Republican voters by being a Republican-sounding Democrat, which is the preferred electoral blueprint of Jay Jacobs, Chair of the New York State Democratic Party.
When a Silicon Valley Taqueria Assembled the World’s Largest Burrito
Need I say more?
What the Israeli Public Doesn’t See
Jewish Currents, a magazine, “committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left,” examines the post-October-7 media landscape in Israel that mostly ignores Palestinian deaths and suffering.
Jonathan Kuminga’s Drive to Stardom
Swish Theory’s Charlie Cummings examines Jonathan Kuminga’s recent breakout and the drives to the hoop that have fueled it. The short of it: Kuminga is blending efficiency and volume not just on drives to the hoop, but midrange jumpers, and his numbers on those play types compare favorably to the NBA’s premier power wings.
What I’m thinking:
Chris Paul is set to return to the Warriors after undergoing surgery on a broken left hand. This concerns me. Paul is small and old. When Paul was healthy, Steve Kerr liked to close games with him because Steve Kerr likes risk-aversion from his ballhandlers — a likely overreaction to nearly a decade of high-wire boom-or-bust playmaking and shot selection from Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. But earlier this season, opposing teams figured out ways to scheme Chris Paul deep into the paint where he would be forced to protect the rim on drives and rollers. This went badly. Paul’s return will eat into the minutes of a few players, Klay Thompson, Lester Quiñones, Brandin Podziemksi, and Gary Payton II among them. His return may even affect Jonathan Kuminga’s minutes. When the game is close, I fear that Kerr will turn to Paul as a safety blanket at the expense of the Warriors’ defense. This will also likely mean Steph Curry plays off-ball in crunch time in favor of Paul handling. I don’t always have an issue with Off-Ball Steph, but Chris Paul can’t create shots without great effort anymore and teams can overplay his passes. It’s all concerning and this Warriors’ team does nothing but stress me out.
Yesterday in Washington DC, active Air Force member, Aaron Bushnell, self-immolated and lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy. Per videos and the reports of some independent journalists, Bushnell’s final words were reportedly “Free Palestine,” and before his self-immolation, he explained that he would no longer be complicit in the US’ aiding and supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Bushnell’s last words are notably absent in this NPR report on his death. In fact, neither Palestine nor Gaza are mentioned. Instead, an NPR reader reads this: “Andrew Leyden, a freelance journalist based in D.C., told NPR on Sunday that he saw burn marks near the Israeli Embassy's lawn, where the embassy had placed flags to represent the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.” How curious! I’ve seen predictable discourse on Twitter from centrists and establishment liberals condemning Bushnell’s actions or painting them — without clinical evidence — as proof of mental illness. Makes you wonder how the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government would be received today, huh? The discourse around “sickness” is what I keep thinking about. If self-immolation is viewed as an act of protest guided by sickness and irrationality, what then, would you call Israel’s exterminationist campaign in Gaza? The Biden administration’s refusal to do anything more than polite tut-tuts in the general direction of Israel is embarrassing and offensive. This iteration of the Israeli government is its most extreme to date. Its finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, is a self-described “fascist homophobe.” Its security minister, Ben Gvir, used to keep on his desk a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli terrorist who entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs mosque in Hebron, and killed 29 worshippers and wounded over 100 people. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has proudly rejected the two-state solution that the Biden administration believes — for some reason — can be brokered between Israel and Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has vowed to continue attacks and airstrikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah even if a ceasefire is reached with Hamas and Israel. This is despite Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, vowing to adhere to a cease-fire in the South of Lebanon if one is reached in Gaza. If Aaron Bushnell was a sick man, then what are Smotrich, Gvir, Netanyahu, and Gallant? What other words are suitable for the men who have commanded and supported their armed forces in the murders of tens of thousands of children? How hard would it be for the Biden administration to simply recite facts about who the Israeli government consists of and the “sicknesses” that they represent and say, “We will not give weapons to a government led by these people.”
I’m reading Liu Cixin’s trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, right now. I’m on the second book, The Dark Forest. A few days ago, I was taking a bus down to New Jersey to record guitars for an upcoming album by recent friend, Esther Hermiz. I was lost in the book for most of the drive. But at one point, a funny thing happened. Liu Cixin described Earth from the perspective of an alien species whose planet is environmentally hostile to life — their entire existence is one of survival because their planet is unpredictable and inhospitable — and his description of Earth was so beautiful. “This is a paradise,” I thought to myself, ‘What a miracle it is to live on a mostly safe planet.” I thought of the clear water and white sand beaches I have walked on in Cuba, I thought of the rocks I’ve climbed in Joshua Tree National Park, the cedars whose shade I sought in the mountains of Lebanon, and then I looked up from the book and saw the most American of things: a big, ugly mall just to the right of the highway with not a tree in sight, just cars and beige concrete. Paradise indeed.
See you all soon!
Wow!!