AL, wolf queen of island Maine
John Phillips, unfinished British expat narratives, and way more about the WBNA than anything else
I’m back from islandic Maine, arriving just in time for the humidity to once again lead me to believe that New York City is actually located inside of satan’s hot mouth (See: Hell Gate). Is it a mistake to ever leave the island? Maybe. I have to keep coming and going to find out.
MUSIC
A few weeks ago, L and I watched Brewster McCloud, Robert Altman’s 1970 psilocybin nightmare/fantasy. Easily one of the most unhinged, destabilizing, but also greatest films I’ve ever seen. I loved it.
The soundtrack was central, as with most Altman films. I guess he was friends with John Phillips in LA at the time (honestly explains a lot), and got him to provide a few songs, which were my favorite parts of the movie (hard to compete with the scenes of the professor slowly and painfully transforming into a bird, but it). There’s also something incredibly special about the final scene, and it turns out, yes, it is the GOAT Merry Clayton singing on the track.
I downloaded the soundtrack immediately after finishing the movie, only to find that the John Phillips songs are only as long as they are featured in the film scenes (about a minute each). There’s gotta be some story about that, but I haven’t hit the right Geocities-era boomer-made John Phillips fan page to figure it out. Instead I’ve just been listening to them back to back to back to form a real length song, if you will.
It occurred to me that these tracks wouldn’t be out of place on some reissue comps like Sky Girl or something (what do we actually call these collections of music, actually?), there’s some kind of purposeful obtuseness to them that my fellow millenial 70s freaks really flock to.
My other thought was — “wow, can’t wait to listen to the actual album John Phillips was making in 1970,” only to later realize that I’ve heard it several times and it’s not that good so I forgot about it (John, the Wolf King of LA) (Yup, that’s the title, it’s not me making fun of it). Sort of like if Ladies of the Canyon were made by a highly embittered 27-year-old man, it’s a musically less-than-interesting and very cynical take on the life of a celebrity folk singer in late 60s Los Angeles. Also, wasn’t his whole thing playing the jazz flute? Where is it on this record? That said, the first and last tracks, “April Anne” (truly a Ladies rip off?!) and “Holland Tunnel” respectively, are pretty good.
And THAT is the most you’ll ever read about John Phillips in 2024!
BOOKS
I stayed up most of the night to finish The Witches of Eastwick in the world’s scariest motel room in Bangor, Maine; partially because I couldn’t sleep due to the motel room being terrifying and partially because I needed the book to end. It turned so incredibly dark about 85% of the way through that I couldn’t just let it sit. I don’t want to completely spoil it because I think each and every one of you would enjoy reading it (and one beloved Al’s World reader has already started!), but I’ll just say that I feel personally attacked as an obvious hypochondriac…
I then started (but haven’t finished) Thin Paths by Julia Blackburn, a British expat to a microscopic Italian mountain village in the late 90s. The book is mostly a loose and non-chronological recounting of her life there; I found out about it because a favorite NTS show used excerpts from the audiobook in a gorgeous sound collage, and it was so alluring.
I’ll say though that the show excerpts pieces from the first third of the book, which describe the landscape and natural history of the area in glorious Annie-Dillard-worthy detail, and is easily the best portion of the book. The remainder of centers of the histories of the families of the area, and the population is aging and obsessed with their partisan resistance past, but gets repetitive.
But between this book and Honey From a Weed, the cookbook/memoir by Patience Gray detailing her life after leaving London for Apulia, the Cyclades and Basque Spain, I’ve been somehow duped into caring deeply about British women’s rarified expat experiences in the Mediterranean. It’s pretty nice life to dip into.
But now I’ve abandoned it to start Mating, by Norman Rush, raised to me by Mike S., who last time I saw him asked if I’d read it because there’s apparently a New York Times trend piece about literary young New Yorkers approaching this book now, even though it was published in 1986. I was flattered and confused, but I’m now so into it. This will be my All Fours, I feel. Incredibly interesting narrative consciousness and voice, and it’s hard not to love a narrator so unrealistically self-aware of her own shortcomings as a moral/ethical actor, and as a narrator. Is this my summer of reading women that men wrote?
BASKETBALL FEELINGS
I missed the first week or so of the return to the WNBA season while in Maine without a TV or stable internet connection (it was also pretty important to me to not watch any TV for 10 days, which is very easy to achieve there). However, I’m catching up now.
My beloved Liberty were first to clinch a playoff spot, and are fighting to keep their number 1 seed, but signs aren’t amazing given their chaotic loss to Connecticut earlier this week, and then the most insane upset wherin they lost to the LA Sparks on Wednesday. A lot of W heads can’t shut up about the Lynx right now, and most are bullish for a Lynx ring this year (or Connecticut, to which I’m like, I’m sorry, are you crazy). It’s true that the Lynx beat the Liberty handily for the Commissioner’s Cup in July, and Napheesa Collier is a force of nature, but like… as a New Yorker… it just feels like people don’t want to say anything nice about a New York team! They have the best record in the league by quite a lot! And, like, have you seen this? [I would link here to a YouTube compilation of 2024 Sabrina Ionescu floaters, but it doesn’t exist. Misogyny tbh.] Maybe no one wants to say it because it feels obvious, and it’s long felt like the Liberty’s season to lose, but it seems relatively ridiculous to this Liberty stan to say that a bet against Stewie/Sab/JJ is a good one.
You know what does exist, is this clip of Sabrina Ionescu getting her own rebound and then making a shot from the floor, after falling down in the game against Seattle on Friday night. This has to be on the all-time highlight reel of her career. I can’t believe what my eyes saw. It’s probably true with all players, but with Sabrina I feel like I can clearly see the moment when she decides to actually exert maximum effort in a game. It happened sometime in late in the 3rd quarter of the Seattle game on Friday for her, and the timing was everything.
To further my point: I’m far, far from an expert on these things, but I’m a firm believer that the Liberty lost last year because the a) the Aces are basically a super-team of superhumans, or at least they were at that time and b) Sandy didn’t care to develop her bench players, like at all, and then was shocked when her all-star starting 5 were gassed by the finals. Stewie in particular was playing like 38 of 40 minutes through the playoffs and the finals. Like, is that normal? It looks like Sandy has learned from that experience, though, and now we have Leo, the indubitable Kayla Thornton, Kennedy Burke, and Nyara Sabally (back from injury), all of whom play like they could be highly reliable starters on a slightly less star-studded team (and KT and Leo have in fact been starting subs for many games this season, to great effect). And my humble inexpert opinion is that the deepest bench wins. You saw it with the Aces for the last two years, and I think you’re going to see it with the Liberty now.
Also Courtney Vandersloot is showing up! I think she should keep wearing the mask, I think it’s working for her! I’m so pleased that she’s been proving the haters wrong lately.
However — is Leo slightly injured? This would be a disaster. The losses to the Sun and the Sparks this week was the first losses for the Liberty that she played in, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Apparently she is 28 for 30 shooting from behind the three line, which is absolutely insane.
Truly loving the absolute girl Benijah Laney-Hamilton coming back after her surgery over the Olympic break and ripping. She was fabulous in the game against Seattle last night, her defensive energy was everything.
The Liberty uhhhhh totally fell apart against Rickea Jackson’s LA Sparks when JJ was out with an illness. If you’re skeptical about what JJ does for this team… come see me. I swear, I just wanna talk.
I watched the game between the Sky and the Aces the other night (the one that actually happened on 8/25) and holy shit. I’ve already listened to what feels like 45 podcasts specifically about this game, but if you’re not aware, Hardest W Player Chennedy Carter made a highly unlikely 3-point shot with .8 seconds left on the clock to tie the game for Chicago (in Chicago!). After an Aces time out, .3 seconds were added to the clock, and WITHIN 1.1 SECONDS, Chelsea Grey passed in to A’ja Wilson who made a clean layup off a hard-ass screen by Kelsey Plum to win the game. I hear a lot of “Oh A’ja’s tired, she’s mad, she’s carrying her whole team by herself,” but I’m sorry, the greatest basketball player currently playing did not make that play on her own. Everyone had to “do their jobs,” as A’ja herself would say, and they did, for literally this one second, which is somehow more impressive than a full minute — there’s no time for error, no time to make anything up. I don’t see an Aces threepeat in the cards this year, but I also don’t think they’re cooked.
Although my beloved Jackie Young is, actually, looking tired. I simply want the best for her (but not against the Liberty). It’s worth noting that a lot of the Olympic stars were looking gassed coming back to the WNBA season.
And there’s some kind of alignment, I feel, between the “ugly” win (again, A’ja’s words) in the Olympic gold medal game against France and this Aces win over Chicago. Both hinged on slightly miscalculated 3-point shots being slightly miscalculated. The second half of the Aces/Chicago game was incredibly riveting, but in the first half, and especially in the first quarter, I was feeling something S said to me while we watched the gold medal game: “It really bothers me that this is going to be the most-watched women’s basketball game this year,” because the game was nearly unwatchably rough and messy, and really doesn’t represent what play typically looks like.
This is very old news at this point, but I was saddened and sort of shocked that Marina Mabrey was traded from Chicago to Connecticut last month. I guess I’m fully out as a Sky fan, and I liked her on that team. It seemed to suit her extremely mouthy personality, and she now has to be teammates with her arch-rival, my favorite player for the Sun, DiJonai Carrington (Carrington, the only guard that seems able to give Caitlin Clark any real trouble, AND one half of the W’s most talked about “are they or aren’t they” couple with Nalyssa Smith of the Fever). Although apparently Mabrey did not like being on the same team as the all-star rookies in Chicago and requested a trade to a team that seems much more likely to go on a finals run… I was in pain watching her sink seemingly endless threes against the Liberty on Sunday…
I have a lot of thoughts about Dearica Hamby’s discrimination lawsuit against the WNBA and the Las Vegas Aces (she claims she was traded from the Aces to the Sparks in retaliation for getting pregnant in 2022, and is suing for damages). Lots to say, and I hope we learn more details about the case. Why doesn’t it surprise me that Becky Hammon is accused of abusive and harassing phone calls? Is it the eyeliner? I’m sorry, I know I should put more respect on her name, but this is damning stuff. Among many other things, there’s apparently evidence of a phone call where Hamby asked, “So you’re trading me because I’m pregnant?” and Hammon responded (sarcastically), “What do you want me to do?”
I feel like if you were an alien and dropped in the middle of the United States in May and could only interact with the culture by watching/following the WNBA, you would know pretty much everything you needed to know about our country by September. Maybe all sports are like this, being a poor arbiter, basically, for politics, but I really don’t remember it being quite like this from when I followed baseball very closely.
I guess it’s interesting to me that this case is coming up now, in the summer of 2024, when more eyes than ever (including mine) are newly turned to the WNBA, and when our current presidential election rhetoric is centered on an extreme anxiety about fertility — Americans for some reason need to use this election cycle to publicly mete out when, where, and by what means a woman can or should be pregnant. And it’s funny that in a women-run league for women athletes, and under a woman head coach, Hamby was pretty unequivocally punished for being pregnant at an inconvenient time (for her coach) (it’s insanity beyond insanity to me that Hamby won a championship playing in her first trimester (!!!). She then gave birth in March and reported to training camp in April).
She’s incredibly brave for bringing this suit, and I actually think all American workers stand to benefit from it going forward. But it’s a strange inversion of the current collective American freak out about fertility, parenting, and what it really means to reproduce our culture. It’s now all on display in this case in a kind of funhouse mirror of professional athletics in which, not unusually, a woman is punished for practicing reproductive freedom while her bosses publicly claimed to support her choices, and then dealt daggers behind their backs. In terms of cultural reproduction and the costs therein, it’s not coincidental to me that the other major point of contention in this case (apart from the unseemly trade) is that the Aces promised to pay tuition for Hamby’s older daughter (making that agreement was apparently illegal in the first place), and then reneged on the deal.
I too was somehow surprised and really disgusted to hear that Hamby was booed every single time she touched the ball in the Sparks game in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago. But her suit has an important place to go, whether or not Aces fans, not to mention the rest of the country, can go there too.