Salon.com > Jose Klein

Phil Jackson

Tue, 29 May 2001 19:00:00 +0000

I'm sure there have been many moments. But the one I'm thinking of happened late in a meaningless regular season game against the muddiest of doormats, the 1998 edition of the Dallas Mavericks. Phil Jackson's mighty Bulls were mailing it in -- imitating basketball in a game they would eventually lose. It was then that he entered what can only be called a State of Phil. Rather than resort to the usual motivational exhortations of superego figures, Jackson did something unprecedented in professional athletics: He started clipping his nails. When Jackson achieves Phil, he stands at a universal meeting point where parts become indistinguishable from their whole. He is at once in your face and removed, as if surveying multitudes of you across space and time. The art of Phil is such that even the losses seem by design.

Unlucky 13

Wed, 25 Apr 2001 19:00:00 +0000

For my 13th birthday, my father gets us a pair of great seats for the Clippers. It's a big night for me and I dress accordingly: zebra skin shoes, white lab technician's coat and the authentic rock-watch that my father has brought back from Switzerland. The watch means that I am en route to adulthood. I wear it like I wear my Cyclops hairdo: with pride.

The 1987-88 Clippers are a ship of fools. They are too uncoordinated to play their way out of a paper bag, much less to the top of the Western Conference of the National Basketball Association. But it's OK -- their ineptitude makes them approachable in ways that other professional teams in Los Angeles are not. For one, we can afford to see them play. But more important, they remind me of me. Like me, they are young and out of shape. Like me, they will grow into their bodies. We are the day after tomorrow -- the future's future.

The 1987 draft has been especially fruitful. Three first-round picks -- all of them masters of the college game, and its national tournament. We picked up the athletic Reggie Williams, the "court-sagacious" (read: white) Joe Wolfe and the yeomanlike Ken Norman. Mixing these guys with the Big Man, Benoit Benjamin, and All Star-ish Larry Nance will undoubtedly lead to electrifying results. In the meantime, while the youngsters develop, management generates a little buzz by offering toiletry kits to paying customers.

Bird's-eye view

Wed, 15 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

In 1991, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, confusion fell over the area formerly known as Yugoslavia. It was Babel revisited, as a nation found itself no longer able to speak the same tongue.

A famous photo shows Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, for 35 years the nation's mighty hunter, with his foot on the head of a freshly killed bear. Long after his death in 1980, one still finds it in bars and homes, framed above the TV.

For my friends Maple and Nicole, this is their text. On their own and together, the two aspiring academics have invested a great deal of time moving through it. They are excavating the remains of a monolith, and in many ways, it is the linchpin of their relationship. Since meeting two years ago in Zagreb, Croatia, they have co-written articles and lectured together on the subject of Balkan identity. While Nicole completes research for her Ph.D. dissertation, the two live in Ljubljana, Slovenia. On my way to Amsterdam to get an M.A. in cinema studies, I visit them. It is my intention to see what it is that they see in there.

Who killed literature?

Wed, 21 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

As anyone who's ever had a parent can attest, advice annoys. Even when we know we should take heed, there is something about the lofty heights from which pearls of wisdom drop that make them feel like hail. In a similar way, Carl Woodring's latest book, "Literature: An Embattled Profession," abounds with sound advice for the endangered world of higher learning in the humanities, even though it's all too likely to fall on deaf ears.

Woodring, a professor emeritus in English at Columbia University,
has spent some 50-plus years in the fray of the culture wars. And now,
just a stone's throw from octogenarianhood, he reports back to tell us what
he has learned along the way. The central lesson he wishes to impart is the value of
literature -- its power to enrich lives and elevate the soul. Worried that
this lesson is increasingly lost on a general public that by and large feels
alienated from the ivory tower, he has written "Literature" as a plea to
practitioners of literary criticism to lower the drawbridge for the intelligent layperson.

I think therefore I tickle

Wed, 19 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

As I learned from a recent review in the Nation, there are two ways to plot a slasher movie: "Either you organize a movie around nine decapitations ... spacing them at 10-minute intervals, or else you work up to a single big decapitation at the end." And although philosophy does not follow the same generic guidelines per se, Slavoj Zizek's "The Ticklish Subject" falls into the latter camp. The steps are slow, but Zizek moves the book steadily toward its coup de grbce, a model for the decapitation of global capital.

Zizek's hatchet man is the Cartesian subject, the embodiment of Rene Descartes' notion that rational thought defines human existence. Zizek's championing of Mr. Cogito Ergo Sum seems peculiar, given how many currently fashionable philosophical schools have declared him already dead. Multiculturalism, for instance, argues that no one seminal criterion can explain what it is to be alive, but that the condition of being human depends on the culture from which the person comes. Consequently, the logic of Descartes' "I think therefore I am" may reflect only a narrow, Occidental mode of being.