Co-Written with NBA champion Andre Iguodala, The Sixth Man spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and made Barack Obama’s list of year end books in 2019.
“This is a very special book—a sports memoir for the ages.” -Booklist
In 2021 Nina Renata Aron asked me to write about Los Angeles as a companion to a short film directed by Miranda July for the now-defunct Departures travel magazine. I was given a handful of locations — Will Rogers State Beach, Los Angeles Flower Market, and Bob Baker Marionette Theatre — at which Miranda might be filming and told to go forth and multiply the words. What resulted is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written — a beautifully chaotic journey through memory in a city that frankly bleeds with the stuff. I wrote it a day after i finished the first draft of my book Another Word For Love, In the prior sixty-three hours I had written approximately 30,000 words and taken approximately one nap. Safe to say the gates were open
I ask if his sudden and breathless celebration by white people ever makes him feel like a... I’m searching for the words. “A way to relieve pressure for people?” he asks me, stirring his tea. “Like a kind of peace offering? I accept it as a possibility. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s what it is.… As long as what you’re doing as an artist is resonating with people, I’m not as concerned about if that’s convoluted or not by their own prejudices, because at the end of the day you gotta accept people on their terms.” (more…)
“This is what makes Khan a different kind of activist. They are here to change policies, for sure, but the sermons and talks and writing go far beyond the basic arguments for why there shouldn’t be racism or transphobia, the crisp infographics on how to be an ally. What they are advocating for is a greater sense of wholeness for all people. In Khan’s view this means being prepared to challenge everything we’ve been told. “To assimilate into a system that we didn’t design...is to forfeit a part of yourself,” they tell me as the day stretches into early afternoon. “And I don’t think that people really understand that that’s the trade-off. You can’t fully know who you are if you assimilate and disappear yourself into a set of conditions that you didn’t design.” (more…)
“This is the world I let be created. Under my watch. They know this. They blame me for it. They are right. It hurts my heart. Also, would you like dinner? What movie should we watch? Tell me about your day. Parenting, like life, is heartbreak followed by reality, followed by love, followed by loneliness, followed by despair, followed by jokes, followed by exhaustion. If this is what you are experiencing, you are doing it right. If you are returning over and over again to watch the simple miracle of growth, you are doing it right.” (more…)
“Who is this person? If he is a predator, then there is no way that anything else he did, no matter how moving, can be honored. But what if he is simply a person who believes completely and desperately that genuine and honest love is the only important thing there is? This is what makes us obsess over the horror of Michael Jackson. We must know whether he is an angel or beast. The concerts in front of millions, the humans reduced to tears at the mere sight of his hand, the way his voice can soften the hardest and most frightened parts of us—these things convince us that he is the former. But maybe that version of him is simply too fanciful, too naïve for us, mired as we are in the muck of our human struggle. Maybe we cannot or will not accept the existence of the kind of unblemished love he claimed to represent.” (more…)
There is just one trick. It sometimes happens that to move toward love — true, active, life-affirming love — means to move toward death.” (more…)
“This is the apogee of Monk’s vision. Music that’s insane and gorgeous, droll and dire, ardently crafted to be so perfectly wrong that it robs you of your predictions and replaces them with ever unfolding alms of unexpected rapture. The harder you fight it, the more frustrating it is. Maybe the life work of Thelonious Monk was to crack apart and invert the rusted shell of the piano and open a portal into the bedraggled contradictions and breathless off-tempo grind of being black in America. This was his power over you and over the world. He reveled in confusing the outsider. And when that outsider has enslaved, beat, hung, dragged, murdered, raped, starved, and excluded your people for centuries, then it’s more than a game of intellectual keep-away. It’s an effort for spiritual freedom. But, of course, it’s a short one. Because everything you make will eventually belong to someone else. This is the American Way.” (more…)
“We are ready to recognize the humanity of those who were victims of an unequal system; the film’s poise forces us to recognize, as well, the humanity of those who served as executioners. “Let It Fall” maintains a remarkable balance, laying bare how deeply the system was designed to oppress some and privilege others, and still portraying all the players in that system simply as flawed human beings. Ridley tells a story in which there are no winners, just losers of varying degrees, mostly determined by race and class.” (more…)
“The photo on her next studio album, 1996's One in a Million, saw her defiantly staring down the camera, dressed in a power jacket and silver-rimmed glasses that once again hid her eyes from ours. The look is pissed-off and unbreakable, not unlike the aggrieved spouse of a politician caught in a sex scandal. She was 17. Aaliyah always had the gift of presenting as a woman even when she was a teenager. The curse was that she did so in a world that doesn’t know how to separate womanhood from sexuality.” (more…)
“Most people who work for the City of Oakland know the town as it exists in space. It’s about 56 square miles stretching from Alcatraz Avenue in the north to Durant and San Leandro Creek in the south, from Skyline Boulevard in the east to the Alameda Channel in the west. But Betty Marvin knows the city as it exists on a map of time. From its founding in the 1850s to its industrial growth in the first half of the twentieth century, through the radical explosions and riots of the 1960s to the crime waves of the 1980s and the tech influx and gentrification in the 2000s. More than anyone in the city, Ms. Marvin is aware of the passage of time, how everything is forgotten and only sometimes remembered again. She sees documents and draft cards and unravels the mysteries of the dead. She plumbs the depths of our paper trails, canonical, and dry and often the only thing left behind after the full, whole and messy life is gone. She sees how random it is; what dies, and what is chosen to live on. So maybe to her it makes perfect sense that a writer would come in trying to tell the story of an address the very day after she happened upon it. It was Homer Williams’ time to become one of the remembered ones.” (more…)
Should you step on the floor to oppose him, you are agreeing to receive this intensity in profligate doses. You might as well sign a waiver.” (more…)
“There was something about the room itself, appointed as a sacred space, the album cover propped on an altar and surrounded by candles, the Byzantine paintings of Coltrane as a saint with his horn in one hand and the Scriptures in the other, the light of God rising from behind his head. There was something about the melancholy gaze of his face, the hollow and determined resignation of his eyes. A saint is someone who didn’t mean to be a saint but had no other choice. A saint was a kid. A saint was an addict. A saint was in the Navy. A saint detoxed in a pool of sweat and tears and God came to him. A saint dies at 40. A saint makes music that makes teenagers he will never meet cry on buses in the San Fernando Valley. There was something about all of this that made it safe for me to become lost in the swell of this music. There is something about a saint that makes it safe for all of us to get lost in the swell of being human.” (more…)
“Sometimes you and I talked on the phone, and I was always doing fine. You were always doing fine. It was always great to hear from one another. It was always time to go.” (more…)