NowLoop

LAVAL, QUEBEC — I wasn’t close enough to hear Laura Stacey’s screams last Thursday, but I saw her wife’s panic clear as day. “When one of my teammates gets caught, I get fired up,” Marie-Philip Poulin told LSTW last year. “But when it’s Laura, my heart drops. I want to react and it’s hard not to, but I can’t.”  That Poulin was reacting—bending over her wife who laid crumpled on the ice, frantically waving over medical personnel, skating said medical personnel to Stacey as fast as she could, staying with her the whole time she was being examined, begging for them to call an ambulance, giving her a shoulder to lean on as she wobbled off the ice several excruciating minutes later—made me feel nauseous.  “I knew she was in full panic mode, and I was a little bit too,” Stacey said of the moment on Wednesday night. 

“Autobiography,” the critic John Berger said, “begins with a sense of being alone. It’s an orphan form.” Berger wrote these words weeks after the death of his mother, but he was speaking generally, about the project of remembrance which so many artists take up over the course of their lives. That loneliness—that orphanhood—is a matter of separation, a gap between the self as subject and author. We might approach who we once were, but if we are to describe our experiences with any sense of perspective—if we are to be honest about how we have lived—then we must first leave the person we were behind.   In Blue Heron, the debut film from director Sophy Romvari, these experiences belong to Sasha (Eylul Guven), a young girl who has just moved into a new home on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. It is summer in the 1990s, and her immigrant parents are trying to assimilate into a normal Canadian existence, speaking English with Sasha and her three brothers, and only dipping into their native Hungarian when discussing eldest son Jeremy. The child of a prior marriage, Jeremy has been acting out since he was a child, and the family has made many changes large and small to accommodate his impulsive whims. Now in high school, his behavior is rapidly escalating: He steals, he plays dead on the front steps, he impulsively courts self-annihilation, and he cannot explain why. None of this is lost on the child Sasha, existing not just alongside but actively within her daily life. Nature walks, beach trips, and backyard playdates are so regularly interrupted by Jeremy’s misbehaviors that, for the children, it has all begun to feel of a piece. Their brother can be kind or cruel, indulgent or impulsive, and often all at the same time, his shy, near-wordless demeanor concealing but never containing the violence swirling beneath the surface. As Sasha’s mother tells her, the worst thing is how normal it all seems.

I can't claim that it's surprising to see Mitch Marner playing excellent hockey for a Stanley Cup contender, but it does still feel like a novelty. When Marner entered the attacking zone with the Golden Knights up 1-0, cut waaay to his right, and then salvaged the play with a one-timer set-up back to Pavel Dorofeyev, all I could think about was how much it must hurt to be watching from Toronto. https://youtu.be/gENZH-gJn5A?si=OLn1bY-fbNVSPDuZ&t=276 Marner is no stranger to the playoffs, appearing for the Leafs in nine straight until he signed a fat new contract with Vegas last offseason. This year, however, feels totally different, because he isn't playing for a franchise that consistently blows it in the early rounds. By stepping on the ice for the Western Conference Final, Marner made it further into the postseason than Toronto has since 2002, and if Vegas pulls off the upset against the Avs, he'll be playing for a Cup that the Leafs haven't had the opportunity to win since 1967. From a competitive standpoint alone, Vegas made sense.

After 50 seasons, Survivor is both a cultural touchstone and a lumbering giant exhaustedly searching for its final resting place. The compellingly nasty, scrappy, oftentimes chaotic "social experiment" in 2000 on the island of Borneo has become a machine that turns a month of competition into a baker's dozen of television episodes that all feel and function more or less the same. The magic of Survivor, which is strange but distinctive and real, occurs when that format and that repetition gets upended. This is often the result of a handful of players who want more from their experience on the show than just a slow march to a predictable ending; the human element, not any kind of clever production trickery, is what makes Survivor different. That magic is why I and other Survivor sickos can name moments like the Black Widow Brigade's kill of Erik on Micronesia, or Parvati Shallow's double-idol play on Heroes vs. Villains, or Jesse Lopez blindsiding his closest ally on season 43, or Operation Italy on 47. There are many others like this—few TV shows offer quite as rich a Remembering Some Guys experience—but what these moments have in common is that they amount to an escape from the mold that Survivor, due to the realities of reality TV but also because of choices made by its producers, has imposed on itself and its players. This is what drives a lot of entertainment, of course. Moments of random chance or real transcendence during the monotony of a 162-game baseball season, for example, or a 24-episode season of television. Survivor isn't quite a sport and it's definitely not a scripted television show, but it has seemed increasingly confused about what its value proposition is in recent years, and felt especially at war with itself in its 50th season. Over the last 10 or so seasons, the show seems to have pit "good TV" and "good competition" against each other without ever quite settling on the balance that made Survivor good in the first place. Instead, it has become obsessed with the fabrication of Moments, instead of emphasizing the sort of openness and chaos that have created them organically throughout the show's long run. What, then, will I remember from season 50, the so-called biggest season ever, the one that was In The Hands Of The Fans? Is there a moment of pure thrill or joy to rival any that came in the 49 seasons before? I wouldn't say so. Instead, season 50 played out as a slow-moving horror story in which the villain was the show itself and stalked its victims in a Jeff Probst mask. It's fitting that the most memorable morsel from Wednesday night's finale, in which Aubry Bracco completed one of the worst winning games in Survivor history and won $2 million plus a car for some reason, wasn't a bit of gameplay that happened in Fiji. It wasn't even a funny or entertaining answer from one of the players at the live show. No, it was Jeff Probst, veteran of TV and of Survivor specifically, spoiling the results of his own show to the confusion and chagrin of everyone involved:

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Justin answers a question about the choice to have or not have kids.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. Have you heard the bad news? Drake has been forsaken: by his rap peers, by his label bosses, and worst of all by the listening public. He has been strung up and nailed to the cross. He has been stabbed in the back by all parties. And yet he has risen once again, bearing three tablets—er, albums—to let us know that we must pay for the sin of not liking him enough. After two years of stewing over losing a rap beef with Kendrick Lamar, being aired out by seemingly the entire rap industry (which had clearly been sick of his shit for quite some), suing his own record label, and getting sued for his shady involvements with his gambling-company sponsor, Drake has made a splashy return with not only his long-awaited album Iceman, but two more bonus albums, Habibti and Maid of Honour. All in total we have 43 tracks, two hours and 30 minutes of music, all essentially based around the same theme: “How DARE You?!?!” https://youtu.be/bpD-JVy2zV4?si=-1RorFWQez81yJ6i

The Spurs have a ball-security problem. It was possible to overlook it in Game 1 because of Victor Wembanyama, and because Dylan Harper had a breakthrough performance, and because they won, but it was there: The Spurs turned the ball over 21 times in the victory, and the Thunder scored a whopping 28 points off those turnovers, including 16 fast-break points. The Spurs were even looser with the ball Wednesday night in Game 2, turning it over another 21 times and allowing another 27 points off turnovers, but in 10 fewer minutes of basketball. Wembanyama was less amazing, Harper looked more like the rookie that he is, and the Thunder evened the series with a 122–113 victory. That's the whole blog. Good day to you. Well, OK, it's not quite so simple. San Antonio was down an important ball-handler in the first two games of this series. De'Aaron Fox can be a bit zany as a lead guard, but he enjoys game-breaking athletic advantages over many of the only people remotely qualified to guard him, and he is in fact not really a big turnover guy. Would it fuck you up pretty good, would it singe your ear hairs to be told that Fox has averaged fewer turnovers per game in his career (2.7) than John Stockton did in his (2.8), and while using a lot more of his team's possessions (28 percent usage to 18.9)?

“Grogu is dead. Grogu remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this dead too great for us? Must we ourselves not become Grogus simply to appear worthy of it?” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (paraphrased) The reviews are in, and Grogu is dead. His movie, anyway. The toyetic little critter popularly known as “Baby Yoda” co-stars with Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian and Grogu. A theatrical spinoff of a Star Wars television show, one that way fewer people watched than any given Star Wars movie, was always going to be a heavy lift. By most accounts, director Jon Favreau and his co-writer, Disney Star Wars honcho Dave Filoni, have dropped it like Luke Skywalker trying to levitate his X-Wing. 

The Colorado Avalanche are not an easy team to root for. They are a deep, übercapable team with few weaknesses. Their star scorer is a weirdo but not in a particularly endearing way. They have their Cup already. In any other year, in any other matchup, I'd be pulling for someone else to have their turn. But in this Western Conference Final, the Avs might as well be Team North America, for all the hopes and goodwill of the hockey world they're carrying. Over the next week or two, I want very badly for them to kick the Golden Knights in their golden nuts. I'm not sure if a professional sports franchise can be ontologically evil, but if one can, I know which one it is. This is not, as Vegas fans insist, a matter of pure envy because they keep winning. Or at least it's mostly not that. Sure, the Knights have been immutably successful over their limited existence, and no, their loyal supporters have yet to pay the Suck Tax, which is what truly bonds fandom. But lots of teams win. Few do it with such mustache-twirling cartoon villainy. Even without their track record of circumvention and cutthroatery, they're remarkably despicable at the moment, in ways ranging from the odious to the petty. They signed Carter Hart, who was cleared of criminal charges but not his actual actions in the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal, when no other team would, and of course he's thriving as their starting goaltender. Following their second-round clinch, they refused to speak to the media over some imagined slight or other, drawing a startlingly robust penalty from the NHL that was clearly a reward for their collective body of asshole work. They're currently denying their former coach Bruce Cassidy permission to interview for another job after they fired him in March, a move pretty much without precedent and which has drawn the ire of the NHL Coaches’ Association. If It would do any good I would emphasize the hypocrisy involved, given that their current coach, bespectacled grump John Tortorella, was that hated media until just two months ago, and was only able to guide the Knights to the playoffs because his last team gave him the permission to interview. But accusations of hypocrisy carry no weight against unrepentant scoundrels.

The post-retirement track record for your hyper-competitive, multiple-champion GOAT-class athletes is not necessarily one you'd want for yourself. So often they seem stranded, often surrounded but generally quite alone, peering down from atop a mile-high butte of money and notoriety at a world that is much too far away to recognize; the people moving through and within it, to the extent they are visible at all, have a busy and eminently squashable ant-like aspect. We can probably assume that we look roughly as strange and unreal to them as they do to us. There is something alien about this type of person that goes beyond their superhuman and highly public accomplishments, and that is true even before wealth and fame shove them further and further into abstraction. That otherness is sort of spiritually hypertrophic, in the way that tennis players tend to have one really strong arm and one comparatively normal one, but mostly just a reflection of how lopsided this sort of lifetime spent in relentless pursuit tends to leave one's being. As any/every sports biography or feature profile can tell you, this is just What It Takes. Everything combustible enough to serve that all-consuming pursuit gets consumed; it becomes fuel, and things that might be necessary later in life are chucked into the furnace in the moment to keep the engine stoked and burning. The more distance that time puts between these champions and their old glories, the more that deficit tends to come into relief. There's a type of feature story about this, too, and it's common enough to be a sort of genre unto itself. Sometimes the dramatic action is someone who has burned what these people burn wondering where everything went; think of Michael Jordan telling Wright Thompson, in 2013, "I drove myself so much that I'm still living with some of those drives. I'm living with that. I don't know how to get rid of it. I don't know if I could." Sometimes, usually but not always in instances that require writing around an uncooperative subject, that incapacity for insight is the story. Think of Tiger Woods clearing rooms in a Navy SEAL "Kill House" training facility and wrecking his body in an attempt to better understand his domineering and rapacious military father, also in a Wright Thompson story. Steve Kerr, a much more enlightened and insightful being than Jordan or Woods, presents a different version of this protagonist in a much more recent Wright Thompson story, one who is trying to figure out what his existence might be like without the old rhythm of competition and camaraderie, and with nothing but his own very full life to fill it.