WITH PRESIDENT Obama in the greatest of pickles, politically, concerning the war in Afghanistan; to the point that the core cogs of the administration are regularly engaged in three-hour long strategy and information sessions that intend to clear up the debacle’s fog machine and help develop a decisive strategy and endgame; And with that war’s own, General Stanley McChrystal’s, confidential report to the president leaking to the Washington Post, and him then later upping the ante by publicly recommending more drains on treasure and more soldiers; to implement what he believes to be  a winning, nation-building counter-insurgent strategy, far before any decision has been rendered by the president; Obama is now at the crucial crossroads of his still-nascent presidency. With the news that Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan president, who is accused of stealing August’s pivotal election, agreeing to a runoff after some cajoling by high-level envoys — including Senator John Kerry — there are just too many moving parts for the president to make a decision, right now; who is viewed by some to be dragging his feet on the matter.

But Karzai’s decision to a runoff makes some things easier: for one, any decision by the president on the war will require a legitimate partner in Afghanistan, and August’s disputed election would not allow for it. Karzai’s agreeing to a runoff relieves some of the questions inside Afghanistan (and internationally) about a potentially U.S.-backed illegitimate regime. And two, the runoff buys Obama more time — time which he needs. The Afghanistan decision may determine the bulk of his remaining years in office and what he can accomplish, especially if the war appears more and more like the failing enterprise with no means of escape, that many want to paint it to be, and it drains his political capital. (Especially with Republicans shooting at a larger target.)

All this necessary hand-wringing does not mention the still very hot home-front issues, and the debate concerning the potential governmental run health care system, and an economy that might as well be in “false recovery.” (Especially if you pose the question to Joe and Jane Q. Public: “Whether or not the recession is over?” ) Also, there is the other problem of his own left-wing constituency’s expectations; looking for him to create what they believe to be real “change” — a somewhat personally arbitrary qualitative assessment –  which in their mind was to happen from day one, minute one, all based on the hopes that they had pinned to the marketing and imagery of a man who may or may not be the picture of progressive idealism. (War to many of these folks, no matter what kind of war — and how different the objectives — is not change. Despite Obama basically saying throughout the campaigning season that: “Afghanistan is the good war,” and up until recently most Americans had shown that they agreed, in electing him.)

But unintended changes have occurred. Within Obama’s own party and the larger left-wing, support for the war is eroding. August brought the bloodiest month in the Afghanistan War’s history and the conflict hit the eight-year mark post-9/11. Palpable fatigue has begun to set-in. Now no one envies the decisions Obama faces. No one. Even as he is a great student of history, the situation lined-up before him has to be some of the worst set of conditions a newly inaugurated president has ever faced. The history-nut in him has to think that much of this “President thing” is now a fool’s errand at best.

Any information President Obama can leverage to navigate through the labyrinthine dilemmas he faces, he now most likely exploits. Therefore I expect that William Maley’s The Afghanistan Wars has been part of the Obama team’s internal dialogue in the strategy sessions, and in the president’s own facile mind. While intelligence of the here and now matters and emissaries and commanders on the ground play a vital role in painting the picture, there is the needed element of history. (As Obama pointed out yesterday in a White House lawn speech honoring Vietnam veterans and making a comment about lessons from “that day in the jungle.” Though the overall Vietnam-Afghanistan media-favored parallel is a bit off, aside from the asymmetry of the conflict, and the drain both wars became.) Since fighting a war where you know very little of the complicated nature of the people, their history and their general patterns of behavior, is equivalent to going into a boxing ring never knowing anything other than your opponent’s physical characteristics. It’s plain dumb and will — if the opponent is aptly skilled — lead to quick-work on their part. Seeing as the last administration took their attention off of the golden egg once it was found — that being a swift victory in the nation — toppling the Taliban in days, the lessons of Afghanistan’s wars of the past now becomes crucial as the pattern of long-drawn, insurgent conflict that is so particularly pathological to the nation reshuffled the deck and made for a new game in 2003.

The Afghanistan Wars is one of a cornucopia of critical texts concerning Afghanistan, and for those interested in foreign policy, considering our last twenty-five plus years in the region and the more recent bloody eight, it should be a very good primer. I, myself, am just now beginning to read it. What’s important to note in all of this debate, and the problem for the Obama administration, is the conception of “Afghanistan is a backwards doomed to Hell country, that has always been at war.” That’s not really true. In fact, during King Mohammed Zahir Shah’s reign from 1933-1973, Afghanistan was a fairly moderate nation that had a parliament, free elections, was a  member of the forerunner to the United Nations, the League of Nations, allowed women to vote, and it was actually quite governable. While the nation was never on the level of the developed-world and Western scale, its more moderate Taliban-less time is a far cry from the Afghanistan we now know and the draconian state of “Talib” rule. And while that may or may have no bearing to the present, this should be noted. As a recent discussion in the New York Times has also mentioned, [this is unsourced for now, until the article can be searched for]: if Afghanistan is not able to be governed, then what exactly has the Taliban been trying to do? They certainly believe that it can be governed and would like to install Sharia throughout the land.

I happen to think that “no more war” is good policy almost all of the time, but Afghanistan sits in a very delicate region, in a very delicate time, with heightening global tensions and an inequality that breeds exploitable discontent among its young, hungry and poor — and I don’t know what we should do. What is the right answer? Do we double-down at the poker table and lose more kids to recreate King Mohammed Zahir Shah’s Afghanistan? Or do we just leave now?

It is argued by many, that us doing nothing there to support a moderate political climate, is what has led us here, making the country a safe-haven and fertile soil for Jihadist recruitment and training. Therefore, so goes the argument for fighting, if we can educate the population and especially the girls and women — in order for them to be personal firewalls against extremism within their family units — and provide opportunities besides narco-trafficking, save the locals from the nasty rule of the Taliban while rooting most of them out, we’d be on our way to success. Except that sounds arduous and costly, especially when factoring in that this has been an eight year struggle. As many note, this is going to have to be Obama’s war, good or bad, when many of this operation’s problems lay in Bush no. 43, and how he didn’t finish the fight: not providing enough troops to hold the nation’s security for the time of the Taliban’s eventual re-grouping and recruitment of soldiers, and for the locals themselves who should be free from fear of the Taliban.

The already-won-but-now-have-to-win-again state of this war is just another indictment of the last administration. It truly appears that the entire cabinet had no understanding of the globe and history. They were a hammer when a “War on Terror” — a tactic, mind you; not an enemy — needed a surgical scalpel, and perhaps the information in The Afghanistan Wars , along with some critical thinking and dot-connecting. For President Obama, however, in hoping to fix this mess and restoring an Afghanistan that once was, the path to Hell may be filled with good intentions.

Limited preview of William Maley’s The Afghanistan Wars at Google Books [Here]

Card Vitals:

Michael Jordan

1991-92 SkyBox, “SkyMaster,” # 253

I WAS in love with this card from the moment I saw it. It was just so Jordan, so very much how he played, above the skyline and player crowd — above the fray of mortal, earthly-bound men. It was the perfect synchronization of the shared early-Jordan experience and the understanding he had with his fans: He was to be a Concorde or a classic fighter jet, cutting through the sky, and in return, his fans would champion him, even as he was struggling to find his way to a championship. (Pardon the corny pun.) What’s important is that the photograph isn’t even of him stuffing a shot down the cup after a whirl of zig-zags and his barreling down the lane. And I actually believe I recognize the play in this photograph: it was an in-bounds save, I think. I can even see the frame’s following sequences: of his giant hand actually stopping the ball’s rotation mid-flight, with his legs churning for a second, for him to extract just a couple more milliseconds of hang-time, then spot a receiver and deliver the subsequent pass.

This is the effect of watching so many games, checking the press clippings the next day from all the various newspapers and then later, catching either the WGN highlights packages on the Chicagoland 10 pm broadcast, which aired at 8 p.m. for me since I lived in California, watching Sports Center and reading the Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News or Sport magazine’s of the month. When one gets into a pattern of that kind of barrage of information, they start to see that the same shots from the same people tend to be sourced, whether by NBA Entertainment — who would use full-video of the same play– and/or a recycled still image from one of those print outlets.

And so many times for me, the images became recognizable, and were tracked to individual games. Those images still stay with me now, from video of his hanging turnaround fall-aways with him landing out-of-bounds after being raked across the arms — and this is far before he became known for the fall-away that became his piece de resistance late-game weapon — to just the less-memorable lay- ins. These still images always seem to match to the video of the moment in the mind’s eye and or the corollary: the video assisting me to help remember the image and the memory attached to it. Media exposure reinforcement. (My term.)

I also just happen to love this card’s front image, because it was Jordan in the white home jersey, which was still somewhat rare in his cards from the early ’90s. The traditional Bulls’ red road uniform is how most remember Jordan personally and it has been transferred to most of his hoops media fare, but not me. While I watched many a Bulls’ game either on the-then enormously packed-to-the-gills CBS, NBC, TNT and TBS NBA schedule, it seemed that the real totemic Bulls’ fan cathode ray tube experience was WGN’s home games with that raucous Chicago Stadium crowd chanting and gasping, yelling “threeeee!” as Jordan or Pippen drove and kicked to Hodges, Armstrong or Paxson in the corners or at the top of the key, and Bulls color man, Johnny Kerr, being such an unabashed “homer.” (Kerr was such a home team guy that even Johnny Most would probably be embarrassed with “Red” Kerr’s unseemly rooting for them Chicago boys.)

Also, there was this kind of complimentary piece that I attached this card to. It was a poster of Michael in the Chicago sky at night, with the original image of the “canvas rotated” 90 degrees — to borrow an Adobe Creative Suite term — to make Jordan appear to be flying horizontal like Superman. It just seemed to be from the same school of thought and even graphic designer. The poster’s publisher, Costacos Brothers, even printed that poster during roughly the same year, just eight or nine months later. When I used to burn notebook and blank-white computer paper with my mechanical pencil drawings, with no regard for our rain forests, I would often try to draw the above image of Jordan from the backside of the card: with him hanging almost near-sideways attempting to get that jumper off.

I WAS back East a couple of weeks ago, and I overheard a conversation about Baltimore by some run-of-the-mill white-flight types, and invariably once I heard the “Charm City” come up, I knew what was to follow based on my own admitted assumptions: A kind of city-oriented ethnophaulism about B-More’s blighted homes and denizens of a stripe unlike the conversation holders’ own. The subtextual ciphers of the dialogue being replications of the stereotyping of unnamed “chocolate-cities” and the black underclass elements that translate to Avon Barksdale and the stories in David Simon’s work such as The Wire. And that is actually what happened. Sadly, that is Baltimore’s legacy to most who know little of the DC, Maryland, Virginia area known as the “DMV.” (An area I admit I am only somewhat familiar with, myself, having friends who hail from the region, and my father who used to deliver mail on its mean streets.)

But Baltimore is so much more than Simon’s depressing but brilliantly drawn city and the portrayal of an institutional framework of failing schools, hard-boiled childhoods, dubious political machinery and struggling informational outlets. And because just a few could see the city’s diamond in the rough qualities and promise, it has recently begun to see the edges of a rebirth, perhaps not in spite of, but in fact because of, the Simon-sketched image in the popular mind: Since artists tend to not be afraid of such waywardly defined lives and “close to the bone” existence in towns such as those portrayed in the city’s signature show. It’s also important to note that this ruggedly urban idea of Baltimore existed far before The Wire; seeing its foundation in Simon’s early to late ’90s critically-acclaimed crime drama, Homocide: Life on the Street (which was based on his book Homocide: A Year on the Killing Streets), and another earlier Simon work of the same time: The Corner.

But even more so than the entwine of Homocide, The Corner and The Wire, there may be another more traditional artistic media element involved in Baltimore’s growing embrace among some sectors; John Waters and his films. It was Waters who first told of Baltimore’s strangeness and especially odd circumstances. He did so in Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Cry-Baby and Cecil B. Demented, making off-beat and camp a part of Baltimore’s softer, quirky side that rarely gets mass media run.

But now it seems the cultural cognoscenti are coming back to Baltimore for affordable spaces to make their art or write or design. So much so, that a recent New York Times‘ travel article on spending a weekend in Baltimore cements the city’s growing artsy identity in the mind. As of  last week the Times‘ “36 Hours in Baltimore” was the most E-mailed article in the travel section. So Baltimore is in fact, to now use a morphing-to-derisive term, being “gentrified.”

And while I generally have a cynicism towards the social phenomena of white upwardly mobiles and those either from upper middle class stratas, or soon to be, coming into the “hood” to slum it up and bolster their bohemian image or prove something to themselves about their authenticity, social understanding and privilege, this is the glowing upside of gentrification; cities are given a new lease on life. Their downtowns are made vibrant again, over time, and while some lower-income or sometimes many lower-income folk who called these hard luck areas home for years or decades are displaced by the rising rents determined by realtors who hype the new, aesthetically friendlier clientele, the city itself attracts more opportunities and business because of its newfound magnetism. According to the Times:

Once rough neighborhoods like Hampden and Highlandtown have been taken over in recent years by studios, galleries and performance spaces. Crab joints and sports bars now share the cobblestone streets with fancy cafes and tapas restaurants. But against this backdrop, there are still the beehive hairdos and wacky museums that give so-called Charm City its nickname.

Read the NY Times’ “36 Hours in Baltimore” [Here]

Visit the article’s media supplement [Here]

By now, the Veyron’s stats are legendary: 1,001 horsepower from a mid-mounted, 8.0-liter, 16-cylinder engine that gets air stuffed down its ravenous gullet by four massive turbochargers. All-wheel drive. A seven-speed, dual-clutch transmission that switches gears faster than a state staffer ducking questions about the Appalachian Trail. Depending on how you define “production car,” it is the fastest in the world. In the quickest Lamborghini ever produced, the Murcielago LP640, you can hit 60 mph in 3.2 seconds. In the Grand Sport it takes a hair under 2.5. How does it feel to command that pace? Godlike.

-“Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport,” Wired

I HAPPEN to believe that cars are the ultimate status symbol, aside form the less accessible private jet, or I guess, the private submarine. (Come on, a sub? That’s status! There’s not even a real market for them.) For one, cars are sexy and imply freedom, they’re also a prop for a person’s persona. And who doesn’t remember any one of their list of particularly intriguing characters with which they identify, and the automobile they owned? Here’s just a short run-down: Batman? The Batmobile. Inspector Gadget? The Gadgetmobile. Speed Racer? The Mach One. Agent 007? Any number of finely-tuned Euro whips. (And for young girls:) Barbie? That hideously pink Corvette. The list can go on. And for us all cars are like relationships, they have to be maintained; memories are tied to them in ways other inanimate objects really aren’t, and they — like relationships — cost us money.

Which is why cars, though they have no true value other than getting one from point A to point B, can still fetch robust sums from suckers or those with money to burn, despite bloated pricing for their “luxury” when it needn’t be that serious. Because the truth is, like any major consumer good, we like what cars say about us, how they make us feel, and they are actually part and parcel to the current marketing world’s “new and improved” sales pitch. It was the car after all that began to be updated yearly for no reason whatsoever, and that truly made consumers feel inadequate; made them feel a need for something they already owned and wrapped a sense of self-worth into something that shouldn’t apply to one’s value.

Thus, I’m ambivalent to the hyper-engineered $2,000,000 USD, Bugatti Veyron, Grand Sport. While I love cars, especially those of the high-performance variety, like any male brainwashed into thinking manhood had some oblique link to the performance of a machine, this Bugatti Veyron is the essence of overkill. Still knee deep in a global economic recession — or “The Great Recession” — and a world having a hard time reconciling how much should be given to those with so little to thwart the darker side of capitalism: creating unquestionable winners and absolute, destitute losers, all pulling from the same pie, there is this piece of machinery that drives the point home, quite literally. It is however beautiful, stunningly sleek, a joy to look at, and is as sexy as Rachel Bilson, without having to go overboard aggressive, like Megan Fox. Despite its price tag, the Grand Sport is somewhat subtle in its design, not looking like a $2,00,000 dollar ride, but more like its affordable cousin the Audi roadster model, the “TT,” from the side, and it sports no ostentatious badging and design elements that say more than they already do or need to.

The Veyron Grand Sport is as claimed in Wired, “the greatest gasoline-powered vehicle that has ever been, or will ever be, built. Seriously.” And that may be so… It is also, as the same article points out: demanding a hefty sum of money to pay for a car, regardless of its “get laid” magnitude, and this car’s measure of “get laid” factor, an indices scientifically formulated on my own, I might add, has to be 1,000 x infinity, to the tenth power, cubed. Still, Wired makes the point that in this continuing down-turned economy the 2.1 million dollars to be exact, that a billionaire would dump on such a superfluous purchase, could be used for good or in the case of many billionaires, evil, by giving that same amount of money to the political machine and becoming a “one-man special interest group.”

The speed performance specs on the Veyron are equivalent to a leading American military attack helicopter, the Hughes AH-64 Apache, though minus the forward looking infrared, laser-target painting, strategically accurate GPS satellite and real-time computer link to the American forces’ database, it really isn’t as interesting. Its top speed is as fast however, clocking-in at 253 miles per hour. Though in convertible mode, its top-speed is only 217 miles per hour, so you know, it’s slow. (Best to leave the top on I guess, since you never know when you may have to go up against Racer X while on the 101.)

The first Veyron is an engineering marvel. That’s the one with the massively reinforced roof that helped keep the rest of the body from deforming into an amoebic tangle of graphite composite and exotic metal under the joint stresses of lateral acceleration, horsepower and wind. It stands as one of the greatest achievements of the petroleum age. It required the intellectual might of one of the largest and arguably smartest car companies in the world to birth a car that was not only faster than anything on the road, but easy enough to pilot that anyone could drive it. (“It killed my husband” is not the kind of country-club buzz that sells cars.) To make the Grand Sport, Bugatti’s engineers had to do the same thing, only with a giant hole in the middle. It was like designing a picture frame to break rocks.

And this is the second Veyron. The first was also a tour de force, but it didn’t have the much desired convertible feature that the Grand Sport provides. (It turns out, when you pay that much money for something that fast, you’d actually like to feel the wind in your hair and sun beating on your head.) By reinforcing its doors, B pillars — the point where the back edges of the windows rest — and floors with copious carbon fiber and turning the frontside air scoops into structural supports for potential rollovers; Bugatti has said to have made the most-rigid convertible in the world, structurally, which is good to know since the car is going to be driven fast.

Read more about the Veyron Grand Sport at Wired [Here]

I SAW The Wizard again, over the weekend. It was a late-night, just out of a semi-catatonic state, kind of gem. Seeing that snobby, punk character “Lucas” and what was basically an extension of Fred Savage’s “Kevin” from The Wonder Years, set in the ’80s as opposed to the ’60s, and him still pre-Stanford and adulthood, was an awesome trip down memory lane. The film also reminded me of how unsophisticated I was about conspicuous consumption and blatant marketing. The flick’s products reads like a cavalcade of late ’80s latchkey youth product placement. To which, I was a hyper-proud member of that consuming class.

• 7-Eleven? Check.
• NES and all its peripherals? Check.
• Universal Studios? Check.
• Nintendo Power publications? Check.
• Vision Street Wear? Check.
• Super Mario 3? Check.
• The Power Glove? Check.

WE LIVE in an increasingly visual culture that is saturated with avatars, both official and unofficial. Our smartphones denote an extension of this in a special kind of technophile, one who is well-connected and who organizes their life in icons, transporting an entire life within a pocket-sized corpus of plastic, metal and wire. And while that archetype itself is a part of a universe constructed by visual cues, it goes deeper. Assumptions gleaned from the shorthand of social experience — a less insidious stereotyping begins —  that can be ventured when in congress with other signs: that person is possibly high-powered, needing to constantly stay abreast of their niche in a hyper-dynamic world, or at least, there is that illusion.

We all respond to these multiple visual cues, now, more than ever. Where once it was just road signs, the written word and branding, we are now more acclimatized to a manufactured shorthand symbology that was further taught to us by Graphic User Interface operating systems and our multilayered, icon-organized video games; all teaching us just how to operate in the real world as if it were the virtual space and vice versa.

The visual cue is powerful. Perhaps that is why short-form bloggers on the popular platform known as Tumblr will interestingly find out that photos of themselves, or of unspecific-but-interesting slices of time, celebrities or works of art tends to provide bumps in their popularity within the platform’s internal community, a rating known as “Tumblarity.” And maybe underneath all of this visual cueing, that is why there seems to be an increasing love in the mass media for infographics? It is likely that something within the culture has changed us and adapted the way we now choose to interpret information.

Years ago, the joke about the daily news periodical, USA Today, was that it is for those not particularly interested in news. The saying was: “USA Today has great pie charts,” a comment that implied that it was for the dimmer set of news consumers. (Like pop-up books for adults.) But now, within the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that the effete publications and especially blogs specializing in social or political data have begun to employ more of the visual tell to augment their texts’ message.

From Information Aesthetics to FiveThirtyEight, Good’s “Transparency” series to inserts in the world-affairs and travel-luxury mag, Monocle, and many posts on the middlebrow-academic blog, Sociological Images, all are employing bright splashes of color with number values in blocks, oftentimes, along with supplemental imagery to primary text, to tell the story that mere words would take a greater effort to tell, and even struggle to do so. And it’s not only easier to editorially employ infographics, it’s most likely more effective when coupled with clear and concise writing; providing a reader a lucid sense of the thrust of data figures and the holistic picture behind a story.

Recently, Information Aesthetics blogged what is another growing section of the multimedia story-telling industry: the animated-infographic. The animated-infographic has often been used in the political realms of late, to convey the tense emotions underlying a “hot” issue, along with corresponding raw data and explications. At times, the animated-infographic will bring in other varying elements, but that is their recent generic formula — coupled with clean, clear, simple illustrations. All, of course, animated. What Information Aesthetics recently pointed its reader’s attentions to was an interesting look at the last eight years in America and the world post-9/11.

The infographic’s title, “An Eye for an Eye,” is extracted from a line familiar to most as part and parcel to Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolent resistance of the British colonial occupation of India. It is a truncation of Ghandi’s famous idiom, which plays on a Biblical passage (Exodus: 21-23:27) that declares proportional retaliation in law: “An eye for an eye,” amending it to: “An eye for an eye, soon leaves the whole world blind.” The animated-infographic strikingly traces the beginning of the “Global War on Terror” / “Overseas Counterinsurgency” and the events that have led America to two wars, thousands of lives lost on both sides, a drain on treasure, terrible global ripple effects and what — to some — may have been a questionable response altogether.

THERE IS nothing more disappointing in my recent basketball memory than the great promise of Grant Hill being squandered and blindsided by circumstance after circumstance; all the result of a misdiagnosis of his seemingly glass-made ankle: Because Hill was the very epitome of a guard/forward combo talent, who channeled everyone from Michael Jordan to Scottie Pippen, George Gervin or Magic Johnson, many nights; raising his game to the level of art.

There have been a great many career derailed by injury; it’s a list as long as the trifecta of Khloe Kardashian/Madonna/Toni Braxton roster of significant others and ex-beaus is populated with those who are or were NBA players. However, Hill’s situation was entirely different than those other derailed careers, because those paths were generally based on projections — all kinds of conjecture — while Hill’s path was already gilded by the time he suffered the injury that led to an abrupt, halted ascension to the final tiers.

At the time of his injury, Hill was already a living-legend; a type-in perennial All-Star, a regular, legitimate MVP candidate, and a triple-doubles leader. And he was absolutely ferocious on the floor and getting nastier day-by-day, all while remaining humble, working hard and improving by leaps and bounds every off-season. (Something that I feel separates him from the other cases of recent promising careers that were hurt by unfortunate health issues, that of: Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway and Larry Johnson, who were both All-Star players, but did not have Hill’s full trajectory or improvement curve.)

I know that what I’ve said about Hill is all well-known, it’s not like I’m uncovering the secret as to why Clyde Drexler waited so long to shave off the rest of his hair, after going bald for so long, but this is a moment of lament, for a guy who didn’t deserve this fate: to be once spoken of in the class of Jordan, and to now just hope for consistently average play and a fairly clean bill of health. And to wish that the whispers that he is soft or was “just collecting a paycheck,” when playing and not producing, are vanquished in the end, while pretending that it doesn’t sting a bit when announcers compliment a great play by saying: “That was the Hill of old, pre-injuries!”

JACK WAS more “gully” than you know. He had to be — prepare for my ridiculous and arbitrary figure and baseless guess — 65% top-shelf (of human distribution) bright, 30% back alley brawler, with the remaining 5% left to heartfelt diplomacy. Don’t let the picturesque, New England prep, “Camelot” imagery fool you.

The guy had a brass pair: through war, campaign trails, sociopolitical and personal turmoil, a failed invasion, extra-marital affairs, a nuclear standoff, and a “Vietnam problem.” There wasn’t a whole lot of yellow in him. Say what you will about his decisions and his trending towards elitism, technocracy and credentialism, but say nothing negative about his possessing a lack of courage and confidence, and his ability to function in adversity. He was also always in some kind of physical pain. Always.

THERE WAS a moment in the 1989 classic, Coming to America, where Eddie Murphy played multiple characters in one scene, as he’d later become more well-known for in The Nutty Professor. The scene hinges on a great debate, and truly hits its stride when an older Italian barber brings up the name Rocky Marciano in a discussion of great fighters in a predominantly black working-class barbershop.

While the scene was played up for laughs and humorously shows the inherent bias that falls along racial cleavages in the particular sport of boxing (as it later somewhat showed in debates about Bird-Magic and ’80s era Lakers-Celtics), the question remains to many: What if a prime Muhammad Ali fought a prime Rocky Marciano? This film interpretation of algorithms based on the two fighters’ recorded performance was created in 1969 for the program The Super Fight, which pitted the great pugilists in a “what-if” match, based on punch-by-punch records of the fighters’ fights. (The two acted out every possible scenario.)

I’m not a doctor or lawyer, but I’m twenty-one with a start.

-Nas, Rhyme and Reason, 1997

I ALWAYS ask myself about the human capital lost in the ghettos and in wars. I miss this Nas; this young kid who was so hungry and fresh and smart. This Nas, this one yet affected by the money and the glamor of his story, was the best version I’d see. His pen’s words still seep through my mind’s eye when I speak of great writers; it was the way he was able to capture all of the frustrations and the truths in such an uncompromised way and mix it with the artistry of “New School” at the time. If the ‘hood had a Hemingway, it was him. He used characters in songs like “One Love” so well — though partially biographical.

I am an only child and so modelling myself after people became a “thing” with me, instead of I presume, like other children who compare themselves to their siblings. I always thought to myself, growing up, reading all the pieces on Nasir that I’d come across in RapPages and The Source and the myriad of good hip-hop journalism, at the time, was that I could have very easily been him.

I felt that the most positive version of me that could rise from the situation like Nas’ or anyone in the projects would be something like him. And not necessarily a rhymer, but a guy with his perspective, heard on that first record. He was so aware and never glorifying the world he saw, so observant of the traps. I also wore a lot of Nautica pullover synth jackets and beanies; hoodies beneath my jackets and the whole nine. Really, it usually wasn’t cold enough to warrant such things. (But I cribbed his style on that front.)