Scuffed Dimes March Hard
The new year has started, FD's two-year anniversary will soon be upon you all, and there are a few orders of business:
We wants ads.
As of right now, FreeDarko is willing to put paid advertising on the site. We've got no formal rates or parameters, but any interested parties should feel free to approach us. I'm sick of doing this for free.
George Karl and Allen Iverson are kindred spirits.
Walking paradoxes with immense egos. I can't really say much more about it right now, but the Brown/AI experiment makes this more, not less, likely.
The Recluse is readying us for "Blunt Ashes 2."
He was so serious about me mentioning this:
The son of music legend Lou Rawls is suing the son of Motown legend Marvin Gaye, claiming he was attacked by "four large dogs" during a visit to Gaye's Hollywood home in 2005.
I answer the critics.
I swear in this coming year to be less self-referential. Or maybe just less thin-skinned. In either case, as a last hurrah I wanted to answer two remarkably wrong-headed attacks on FreeDarko I found on the internet. Yes, I google my own blog sometimes. No, I'm not embarassed about it.
From the comments section of Reviewera:
When we both know full well, when our brains aren't clotted with 'cho grease and Jim Beam, that FreeDarko is nothing but a whiter, more transparent, more prolific, and wholly inferior version of Chauncey.
Quick comparison:
Chauncey: best titles ever:
"I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker!"
"high like giraffe ass"
FreeDarko: worst sentence about anything ever:
"we're trying to link basketball with Destroyer"
To preface: I have nothing but the utmost respect for Billups, and fully credit him with inventing whatever genre FreeDarko inhabits. Last I checked, however, we were trying to do very different things. Sorry if this is a little too "white" for you, but he's the Stooges to our Beefheart.
People who don't recognize "high like giraffe ass" as a quote have no right to call FD "white." And if you didn't like Destroyer up until Your Blues, you probably wouldn't like FreeDarko.
Which brings me to my other target: some guy commenting on True Hoop, a while back:
I was a huge FreeDarko fan for about 2 weeks, until I realised they epitomise the style-over-all method they constantly rant about (the NBA being a superstar's league, 'domination-through-style' etc.). Unfortunately, these guys don't seem to realise that they, like the Jordan pretenders they so happily mocked a few months ago, aren't Ralph Wiley, and not even Scoop Jackson or Bill Simmons. Like the supposed Jordan-aires, their game is style-over-substance. Quite often, they rant without reason, finding cause for fluffy 2-thousand-word columns that forget their thesis in the hyperbole.
It's a massive shame, because I was really ready for someone to fill Wiley's void, and I feel cheated.
We've always insisted that style the "how" of substance, that one's style is inseparable from the kind of substance they're looking to achieve. A player's identity as a competitor is part and parcel with his style; style is a means of highlighting his approach to the game, of making it explicit and feared.
That's how it should be with writing, too. Sportswriting doesn't really get into this, but plenty of other shit does. If there are ideas you want to convey, you damn well better embody them yourself. Our favorite teams and players are almost all hyperbolic, prophetic, and prone to excess; why wouldn't we write that way? Why would a blog inspired by Nash's Suns specialize in rigor and exactness?
That was shoring up our image for any potential advertisers.
Expect a real post in 24 hours or less.
posted by Bethlehem Shoals @ 1/02/2007 08:21:00 PM
21 comments
21 Comments:
also, when you put quotations around sentences like, "I liked Cat Power like eight years ago," that indicates that it is a direct quotation of something someone else wrote. i didn't write that sentence, asshole. i happened to mention that my primary exposure to chan marshall's music was one song i used to hear all the time on the radio about 7 or 8 years ago in explaining that i was linking to an interview with her not out of some devoted fandom on my part, but because i randomly came across the article while absent-mindedly surfing the net.
[d.d. tinzeroes is still cool with us, but fat contradiction gets a fat dick.]
It seems to me that the true hoop guy totally misread freedarko as championing substance over style - when anyone whos has read more than 1 posting realizes the end all and be all of FreeDarkoness is substance, but with over-riding style.
Wait... what is the origin of the giraffe quote? I think I heard it in a Re-Up Gang 9+ min. freestyle.
Happy new year to the FD fam. May the upcoming google ads be as satisfying as the word verification poetry.
wv: zqfrbi- zydrunas quietly speaks to his furby. it understands him.
def. a little thin-skinned to flare out the gills on these. though I suffer from a similar penchant for wanting to smack the d on silly commenters.
the reviewera notes are more salient and threatening, but quickly subdued with the headnod to chauncey. plus as recluse notes, you can't compare actual titles to paraphrased ideas posited as quotes. well you can, but you can't do it and have anyone actually care.
the truehoops ish is tripe
both are somewhat interesting in they strike me as outmoded forms of criticism, in an old school main stream print media sense. Both critiques seem to rest on FD being derivative, and not up to par with "classic material," which just seems to miss the point.
But speaking of style, is reviewera not biting, errr using, yours? I didn't dig too deep, maybe it was a one-off deal.
hey guys, I'm a longtime reader lurking in the shadows...
I just thought I'd let you know about a great site for finding advertising:
http://www.projectwonderful.com/
its run in part by Ryan from the most freedarko of the online comics: dinosaur comics (qwantz.com)
hope that helps
I hope this develops into out and out race baiting.
Give them haters the gas face!
yes, FD should poll its readers on what race they are. I mean, just to help with the adverts
Are gas faces still given? I hope that somewhere they are, in secret rooms and in hushed tones, with no public declaration.
Form following function is not a rule because someone thought it was nice, but because it works. Whoever sees an incongruity of the two on this site is, for practical purposes, illiterate.
For your polling purposes, I'm half-Filipino and half-white. My Filipino relatives just call me half-white, though. I would like to see more ads for fermented shrimp paste.
i don't quite get how this turned into a racial roll call, but suffice it to say that FD is not lacking in the diversity department. i am myself am the kind of jew that makes people remember we're an ethnic minority descended from the cradle of civilization.
If I may be serious for a moment, I think the TrueHoop comment is indicative of the way in which SABRmetrics and fantasy sports have changed sports for the worse. (I'm not necessarily prepared to say that they are net bad things, merely that there are negative consequences.)
When the games are reduced to numbers, the aesthetic experience is irretrievably lost, and the reason that pro sports even exists is as entertainment, and what is more entertaining that the idiosyncratic?
For some reason, I'm reminded of discussion overheard when "Shine" came out, where people who would know were of the opinion that Helfigott was a perfectly competent pianist, but much more artisan than artiste, playing by-the numbers and never really transcending the notes.
This site exists to celebrate that ineffable something which exists somewhere between the game and the scoresheet which you can't really measure.
FWIW, this is why it sometimes surprises me that those FD'ers who have spoke to the subject don't really like soccer, because that is a game which, to enjoy, you simply have to observe the game on a meta-level due to the paucity of reliable performance metrics.
Overheard on ESPN radio - Riley taking leave of absence from Heat...
This is probably clear to you all, but just to make doubly so: I didn't write that comment on TrueHoop. It wasn't part of a blog post. It was a comment.
And I like FreeDarko. If I have a beef with it it's my same beef with the New Yorker and YouTube. There's too damned much of it. Life is too short to get to it all, and I feel guilty for missing some. But, ah, whatever. Good work.
henry--sorry about the ambiguity. it's been edited away. and in case anyone was misled, true hoop is one of the best sites in the universe.
Can someone direct me to the post where you link basketball to Destroyer. I'm deeply interested in that link.
I get a fat dick? Neato! As a gay, that's the sort of thing I like. Thanks, Brown.
Shoals, what could you possibly mean by positioning: Chauncey:FreeDarko::Stooges:Beefheart? Beefheart predated the Igster and his cronies, after all. ('67 to '69.) So, there can't be a historical argument here. (After all, on FD, there never is.) If you're trying to say you're artier and more free-form, more fluid--all things I'd say about the good Cap'n over the Stooges--then I might, uh, disagree. Anyways, I'm not trying to be bitchy, I'm simply not understanding yr analogy, and I wish I were.
The faked Cat Power quote was lazy, you're right. I looked for the original, I swear I did, but I get bored easily with shit like that. You know, shit like...research. I'm done with college, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. My bad, Brown, and a most effective chiding delivered, TAN.
Lemme ping-pong back to Shoals, for a second. Far be it from me to correct a reader, but the comment you excerpted was explicitly in the context of a conversation about What We Owe FreeDarko. An attempt to trace out the historical roots of how and why DDT and I think about basketball the way we do. On balance, as that conversation actually shows, we think we owe FreeDarko quite a lot. And I think we both like FreeDarko quite a lot (me, more than him, probably). I got home and felt bad that I'd forgotten Chauncey, so I fixed that omission, with just a tiny dash of hyperbole.
Come on: didn't it make you laugh, even a little?
-Fat
i personally hate beefheart except for "lick my decals," and think that "fun house" is the best avant-garde rock album ever made. so i understand your concern. the basic point, though, was that billups/stooges is deceptively profound, whereas beefheart/fd uses pretense as just another way of being goofy and primeval. really, i just want to cheer like the next man--unfortunately, it comes out all funny.
On a pragmatic tip, isn't Chauncey defunct at the moment? Or is he posting somewhere I don't know about?
basketball and destroyer? genius! but why divide time by "your blues?" yes, the album is probably the worst of Mr. Bejar's career, but Rubies is possibly his best.
let not the haters bother you, Mr. F Darko--the internet needs your blog's gusto and verve
I'm a little scared and sad that someone -- at any point -- confused the writing here with some sorta neo-Ralph-Wiley-ian sportswriting. I don't even think of this FD stuff as sportswriting, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm not sure I've found a classification that makes sense to me, but it's sufficiently well-considered, cultured, literary, funny and thought-provoking to make me alter the way I look at what happens in and around our beloved Association.
... and all this time i thought "Beth Shoals" was some trying to be cool ("ish" is such a childish thing to utter) garden tool from alabama hoping to get some nba cred!
... ralph wiley and FD? whatever. man, in all seriousness Shoals, write what you write and don't let anyone attempt to alter your style.
critique the substance of a given post? sure. then we're talking about facts. but for anyone to attack your style is just hater-play...
chauncey returns: gabesaidwereintomovements.blogspot.com
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