Reel Talk: The Special Santa Edition Of The Corbin Smith Review Of Online Basketball Highlights

(ED NOTE: Since Thursday Night, Corbin Smith, the normal author of this column, has been trapped in a "Star Wars Loop," in which everything he does or doesn't do is a prompting for discourse on the topic of the most recent Star Wars picture. He tried to sit down and write a proper column this week, but the copy was just a picture of a roly-poly droid and the phrase "WILL U BB MY FRIEND MR. EIGHT!?" in a variety of fonts. Thankfully, we received a submission from Santa Claus, a known acquaintance of Corbin's, who found time to write about some ephemeral basketball things.)

"HO! HO! HO! MERRY CHRISTMAS!"

On occasion, I look at it, that phrase, and I think about how the world thinks about me, St. Nicolas, The Grand Vicar of the North Pole. AKA Santa Claus. I am regarded as a jolly man who makes toys for good little girls and boys. I am a fat man, it's fair to say—non-diabetic, thankfully, but not nearly at my target weight. I am a symbol of un-self conscious warmth, the world's greatest craftsman of children's toys. Do I enjoy dominion over elves or, am I a sort of uber-elf, the most human of all elves? People's perceptions on this matter are shifting, unknowable, and mostly uninteresting.

But there is another side to me that most do not know. I am an aesthete, a man who appreciates the great experiences in this life. A fine meal prepared by a master chef, a beautiful violin solo, the flicker onscreen in which Catherine Deneuve sings her words to Guy Foucher, the gas station attendant who was once her lover. The most beautiful things in life are like the warm touch of a lover to me. They're good as hell, and precious.

And, truly, there is no finer thing in life than NBA Basketball. The world's greatest athletes at work on the wood. The grace and the ferocity, the dribble and the dunk, the crowd booing, rustling, eating. To attend even the lousiest NBA game is to see the providence of nature let loose in the human spirit. It moves me to tears whenever I consider it.

So, when my good friend Corbin Smith, whom I first met at the Metropolitan Opera's sublime and devastating staging of John Adams' "Death of Klinghoffer," let me know that he could not attend to his work applying the highest critical standards to NBA basketball, I was happy to step in. I know my prose cannot match his: truly, he is a master craftsman in that regard. But I think you'll find my critical eye is just as precise, and, in some cases, expanded by dint of my extraordinary life experiences.

Onto the highlights:

WILL BARTON IS A GHOST

Five years ago, while I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean on my yearly toy delivery, I ran into a mighty storm. Normally, our spectacular Elf Weather Crew plots out a comprehensive course for me and my reindeer, but, unfortunately, on this occasion, they missed something. EWC was profoundly restructured on account of this oversight. Our standards for excellence in The North Pole are extraordinarily high.

But, in that moment. before I could make the necessary reforms/firings, I had to deal with this. I stood up in my sleigh, looked at the storm, and yelled, as loudly as I possibly could. "WHAT DO YOU DEMAND!?"

The storm kept swirling. And so I closed my eyes and performed a complicated Transmutation incantation, so that I could take the form of pure spirit, and confront the storm as a peer. I entered his domain—the storm was male, as it happened—which appeared to me as a messy office. Transmuting oneself takes you into a realm beyond rational human understanding, but our minds are build to filter and recontextualize the logic of what we confront. I looked around: this storm was disorganized, scared. I could not find the Spirit of the Storm.

I saw a bathroom on the west wall. I opened it up. Inside, I saw a shivering, wet, angry man. He screamed at me.

"WHY ARE YOU HERE, VILE ELF"

I dropped to my knees and grabbed his cold, wet shoulder. "I'm here to help. Why are you raging?"

"I… I am angry, spirit." His transmutation filter was seeing me as a spirit, instead of a flesh and blood man, because he is not used to talking to human beings.

"But, Storm," I said, my warm red eyes meeting with his cold blue, ones, "The ways of anger are not yours. Storms are meant to be cruel, yes, either dispassionate or direct. Your movements are those of chaos. What has made a chaos in your heart?"

"…the …I… I'm… I was made in… anger, I think. I cannot sense my own origin, Elf. I do not know what I am…"

"I will tell you, Storm," I said. "You are the tossed off irritations of the God of Storms. Too sensitive to be like the hurricane, too large and ornery to be of the standard rainstorms. You are the chaotic detritus of the world's weather. You should not exist, and yet, you do."

"What should I do, Santa?"

"The only way to calm the storm in your heart is to break apart. To 'die,' in a manner of speaking. You will dissipate into the ether, reborn as another storm, sooner or later. A more stable storm. A better storm." (This was a lie I told to make advantage for myself: a storm that dies surrenders its spirit to final judgement. They do not reincarnate, in any way.)

The storm wept, and broke apart. I was turned into a physical presence once more, and drove my sleigh through clear skies.

I share this story with you to try and bring this player, WILL BARTON into context. On a basketball court he is chaos and madness itself. Watch the way his legs navigate through a three point attempt. Enormously wide stance and a practiced slowness, all in the service of counteracting his natural inclinations towards the chaos that runs through his body.

Watching him sink several of these three-pointers en route to an extremely productive night is, to me, as disassociating as watching that broken, shivering storm come apart. I can only conjure the sight of "The Thrill" stripping an opponent and streaking out in transition, running a strange, herky jerky pick and roll, diving into the crowd in a mad hunt for a loose ball.

To see him fight his deeper nature and come out of it a sharpshooter, if only for one night? It is an act of will I have nary seen matched in my life. It makes me wonder: on that night when I spoke to the storm, did I make a mistake? Could I have taught him the powers of discipline? Made him my ally? Was I too focused on the task at hand—delivering gifts to the good little boys/girls of the world—that I did not merely abandon someone who truly needed me, but encourage him to stop existing altogether, for my own convenience?

Great art often makes you wonder whether you are the monster you most despise. Will Barton is such an artist.

RATING: NICE

CHRIS BOSH DOING THINGS

(ED NOTE: Santa disclosed to us that he and Chris Bosh are both members of several supper clubs around Miami, and have been known to take in a movie together from time to time. Santa would not go so far as to say they were "Friends" but "Fellow travelers on this Earth, indulging in all of her delights as compatriots.")

Yet another masterpiece from Chris Bosh, the most underrated craftsman of pure, authentic folk-art inspired highlights in this sleek, modern NBA. Steph Curry is impressive, but his whole thing—three pointers ahoy, actively priming his children for future success—has, for me, a simulacra's chill, as if he were a machine enacting a computer program for success in the 21st century. Take, for example, this wonderful mix of Our Man Bosh beating on the sadass Portland Trail Blazers as they sink into the Pacific Ocean.

Once, while I was on the old yearly run, I stopped by Chris's house to deliver some presents this children and saw that, thoughtful as he is, he left a bottle of 1998 Pétrus, one of my favorite wines, with my customary cookies—Tollhouse recipe, a knowing wink to Chris's love of High/Low culture combinations. I am not a straggler, by nature, but I was running a little fast that night, so I went into his kitchen, quiet as a mouse—quieter, actually: I am a magic person and so making my own steps silent is nothing to me—found his bottle opener and a glass, and I enjoyed its notes of red soil, dark chocolate, and lesser game birds.

As I sat in Bosh's kitchen, my mind being subtly altered by this sensations of the wine (and maybe the alcohol, too!), it occurred to me that its delights were not unlike those afforded by the man who gave it to me. Robust, for certain: a 20 points and 10 rebounds wine, paired with the gentle notations, his knack for turning his body into a powerful set of simple lines during a jump shot, tiptoeing gently around the court as if his roots were planted in a cloud. Watch our man drive on Ed Davis at about 2:00: the power of the drive leads to an act of aggression from Davis, but Bosh, brilliant, subtle, twists his arm like a mushroom in the soil, imbuing the grape with the power of its terpenes and finishes over contact.

True craftsmanship. Not like the sort of thing that passes for excellence in Northern California, be it Napa Valley or Oracle Arena.

A stray impression: I like that Chris Bosh was interviewed by a bald man with a silky voice at the end of the mix. I like bald men. They are nicer than hair'd men. I am bald myself. It gives you character, I believe. Richness. Depth. Age. Baldness.

RATING: NICE

MICHAEL JORDAN IN HIS GLORY

There are not many people on this Earth who are both entirely human and entirely symbolic. I am one, of course: a symbol of the yule tide season and also a flesh and blood man. Michael Jordan is a symbol—of a sort of will-driven athletic success, and of his own adventures in the world of capital—but he is also a real man, the beleaguered owner of the Charlotte Hornets, a bad jeans enthusiast, the sort of person who would indulge in the folly of growing a Hitler mustache and then refusing to shave it for an undershirt commercial.

Late at night, after a hard day, I often return to his highlights, as a way of putting my own life and predicaments into context against his own. He is one of the few people on Earth who can really understand what I go through. Take this, from 1998:

An average person, not accustomed to the sort of personal excellence that MJ and I have pursued all our lives, watches this mix and can cannot see beyond the symbol. The Man, as he lived in this time, has been burned out of their brains with a poker that sports an "AIR JORDAN" shaped tip. His fadeaway, the preferred shot of our hero's later career, is silky and fragrant, evoking a taste that one has never tasted before, as if the beauty of a pink summertime rose was diffused into an essential oil and lightly drizzled over a toro sashimi in one of Tokyo's finest sushiya. Refined, but bold. A complete flavor that is still endlessly novel. One of the truest masterpieces of the basketball medium, or, if I may suggest, ANY medium.

But when you are as accustomed to excellence in your work as I am, you can see the mis-strokes in even the finest of paintings. When I saw Marcus Camby stuff MJ's layup attempt at about 2:14, I remembered something that happened to me, during a delivery.

I was in Wisconsin, and I had a little bit of extra time and an enormous need to take a dump. I used the toilet in the house: I don't, normally, but I REALLY needed to go. All of a sudden, I heard the pitter patter of children's feet. Another one! I had never been caught, but here I was, pants around my prodigious ankles, right in the middle of the dirtiest of deeds. I tried to reach for the button that locked the door. Too far to reach. I couldn't stand up. The doorknob turned. I looked left, and right, and up, and down anywhere there might be an exit. The door opened. I froze. The child saw me, screamed, and shut the door. I panicked, and plowed straight through the wall of that poor family's bathroom, pants still around my ankles, leaving behind a fat, elven shaped hole in the wall and an enormous coiled turd in their toilet.

No child should have to see the Michael Jordan of ANYTHING, much less holiday cheer, on their family toilet. I was getting old, and I didn't have a proper sense of my limits. Just know, that, like the mighty MJ, I have also altered my game to deal with that sort of nonsense. In an earlier time, I wouldn't have needed to go, mid-delivery. Much in the same way, a younger Jordan would have simply risen above Camby, taught him a lesson about challenging Gods, and sold a million posters.

But as age comes, and the myth teeters, you learn to fade-away.

RATING: NICE

Thank you for joining me on this wonderful journey. Corbin will be back next week, I hope. Contact him if you have a highlight to suggest: I suspect it will help him out of his unfortunate present state.