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1. Ikea’s Expedit is the standard, affordable option for record storage.
2. Most places I’ve ever lived in either have floorboards or are slightly off-center, meaning the Expedit doesn’t line up flush with the wall.
3. This creates a gap between the wall and the edge of each “chamber.” If a record is pushed too far by accident, it can ding the corner of the jacket.
4. This could easily be solved by mounting a large piece of plywood, preferably painted to match the Expedit unit, upon purchase. However, that requires nails.
5. I have zero aversion to horribly rounded or missing corners but once-dinged corners are terrifying to me. Everybody loves imperfection but that’s different than liking NO LONGER PERFECT.
6. I now have a near-toddler, who sometimes pushes against a chunk of records and sends them all the way back.
7. Here is the easy solution.
8. Take record mailers of various sizes. Fold out the larger flaps away from the inside until they form a u-shaped bracket.
9. Insert the mailer into a “chamber,” with the insider of the mailer (flaps closed over some cardboard) facing the wall. The larger flaps secure the mailer; the other side serves as a buffer with some give to it.
10. Put a chunk of records in and carefully push back. Check to make sure there isn’t still a gap. If so, use a bigger mailer. If they records are hanging over the front, use a smaller one.
11. Everyone will now be safe until the end of time.
12. Alternatively, just keep bangin’ until the wall-facing corner has been rounded down and breathe a sigh of relief. That sort of erosion can take a while, though.
13. Enjoy what you came here for!
The FreeDarko Imperial Outlet is back in effect. Shirts are raining down like heaven itself. The Stephen Jackson for Mayor? Its time has come again. The Classic? That too. And a new one based on the cover for The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History. Dig in this holiday season. You won’t regret it!
I’ve always wanted to understand athletes as humans. Even if only superficially, or symbolically, they’ve been at their most compelling to me when they reflected something basic about being human.
Playing sports isn’t life, it’s bits and pieces of life reassembled in heightened form. Your league is not exempt from the human condition. And yes, it’s possible to have a fiction, or a smokescreen, that still speaks to what athletes really mean to us—why they have resonance, why we stop and pay attention no matter what the score. Why we watch press conferences, for Christ’s sake.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. It’s a view of things that dabbles in hagiography, delusion, and self-serving invention, while at the same time pouncing on shards of candor as if they were the key to an entire forbidden city. Above all else, though, there’s no time for heroes. Heroics, sure, and the strain of exceptional circumstances. A priori heroism is both a burden and object of fascination, but never cause for a parade. Acts and actions, gestures on and off the court. These are the bits and pieces I’ve always relied on in understanding sports. Aura is either terrifyingly earned or gleefully shallow.
All of which is a long way of saying that Great Athlete Narratives have never meant shit to me. Redemption is personal, never political, and sports should be no exception. Look no further than KG, who saved his legacy only to morph into a psychotic jerk for all the world to see. Recovery from injury, or the split-second Willis Reed references, are less about easy templates and more the lasting power they have for us down the line. Twitter’s instant judgment, while endlessly amusing, could not be further from fixing memories in place. You did it! Now what happens? That’s how stories should start, not end.
However, Royce White’s tumultuous pro career, young as it is, has already made me realize one major rupture in all I’ve laid out above. While sports are always somewhat alien to me and thus endlessly easy to twist to my own needs, there are certain subjects—mental illness among them—that I don’t have that luxury with. You can guess my diagnosis if you want, but suffice it to say that I take a ton of meds and have problems conducting myself in an orderly fashion, especially in any remotely professional setting. I sulk a lot and also am given to extremely irrational outbursts. Case closed.
When it comes to mental illness and possibly drugs, I turn into the worst kind of Sports Shouting (or drab Romantic) fan. White has only ever been so interesting to me. I’ve been eager to see him to succeed, one damaged brain to another, but compared to Delonte West or Ricky Williams, White, his situation, and his diagnosis are—at the risk of sounding like the worst person on Earth—a little too familiar, too relatable. If we want athletes to provide us with something to look up to or scoff at from above, then White, whose workplace drama and solid skill-set are a far cry from Williams walking away from football because he felt like it; West, a versatile and charismatic guard, riding around on a Rascal with a submachine gun like he saw on Storage Wars; or even the chronic outbursts of Sheed or DeMarcus Cousins.
White is no anthem or metaphor. Nor does readily lend himself to mythology, however dark. He’s a dude trying to do his job with a condition that makes it hard for him. Courageously, he has decided to push back instead of knuckling under and causing himself untold amounts of psychic hassle. It’s activism for the mentally ill in sports, a template for persons more ordinary, a throwback to liberation movements of the days when such things really worked, and perhaps a preview of what the inevitable First Gay Athlete will look like.
What Royce White isn’t, though, is a caricature, an exception, or the kind of singularly self-destructive being whose rise and fall we talk about for years. He succeeds or fails on remarkably practical terms. It’s unlikely White will ever achieve on-court immortality. And for now, his struggle is being pitched very much like a stand against the system, not someone already driven to extremes by its proscriptions.
But still, I can’t help but fixate on those other athletes, the ones who make my life seem bigger and more unpredictable as opposed to White, one whose life serves as some reflection of my own. That’s the problem with nearly all sports-watching, and the escapist/happy tribalism excuse only ever answers so much. At bottom, we should watch because we find ourselves, or the world as we know it. If sports belongs only to knights and robots, we are that much closer to a video game universe and entertainment (or community ritual) becomes that much more dehumanizing—for audience and participant alike.
The problem is, there’s a gulf between what it feels like to watch sports, unencumbered, and all the baggage we bring to it. It should be ourselves. Instead, it’s the pregame and the nonsense cant of jock wisdom. In those terms, White is a nuisance, not a character. Which isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with characters. Only that, when there’s something very real on the line, we would do well to remember that sports belong to the world, not the other way around. I would do well to remind myself of that. That’s what I meant to say.
I need this explained to me.
I wish there were a book of 60s/70s Far East soul 7” covers.
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It’s the 10th anniversary of Clipse’s Lord Willin’. Inspired by my brother’s piece about the album in its time for Stereogum, I dug up this essay I wrote for The Philadelphia Independent on “Grindin’” and drug lingo. It’s not online, so major thanks to B. Michael Payne for this rather unorthodox reconstruction. Click to enlarge and read.