ΨΚΝΔ ΛΙΦΕ

Michael Jordan’s Gambling Problem & The Death of My Childhood

Childhood takes on a life of its own the moment you become an adult. It becomes an animal you chase, a thrill you seek to recapture. Like everything with a life, it dies. Slowly but surely, it dies. And your childhood, since it was indeed yours, forces you to sit in the best seats in the house and watch it as it gasps for air, it makes you take mental note of every single one of its agonizing final moments before it’s no longer an animal or a thrill. Childhood becomes a ghost, something you stop chasing, not because you don’t want it back, but because you know you can’t have it.

Childhood dies when your idols die. And idols die when they die, but they die in an even worse way when they become human.

Michael Jordan was every urban black American boy’s hero. Even if he didn’t play for your team, you watched every Bulls game in awe. A bad game for him was a good game for your team’s best player. A good game meant a thrilling battle between one of the greatest sports teams assembled and whoever they played that day. A great game for him meant agonizing defeat for whoever was unfortunate enough to wear the other uniform that day. I was born in 1988, and I wasn’t named after His Airness. My mother had no idea who the wiry but strong, gold chain wearing shooting guard for the pro team in Chicago was. More to the point, she, like everyone else with the possible exception of Dionne Warwick, had no idea what he would be.

Growing up in the 1990s with the first name Jordan was probably like to growing up in France with the first name Napoleon in the 1790s. I referenced 23 whenever I was asked how my name was spelled, and learned to grin and giggle when teachers and other adults told me my name reminded them of a basketball player I may have heard of, or asked me if I was going to be the next MJ. Corny jokes aside, my first name insulated me from the taunts me last name earned me. Lebeau, a morph of le beau, or the beautiful in French, meant a lot of name calling. But the ace up my sleeve was that my mother named me after Michael Jordan (false) and your mom named you after…..someone vastly inferior to my namesake.

Beyond my taunt trump card, I loved basketball. It ran in my family. My sister held state records with her girl’s varsity team. my uncle coached a city league team, and my two older cousins helped. My mother taught me how to dribble on the sidewalk in front of our house when I was six or seven, and once I had played Madden ‘94 into submission, NBA Jam was the only game I played when I returned from school. On weekends, I’d head to my friend Kenei’s house across town, and we would head to the court and play two on two games with whoever challenged us, granted, they were between the ages of seven and 10. I was The smaller, faster, often traveling Jordan to his refined, smooth shooting Pippen. We played until it was dark and then ran home to watch the Bulls play whoever was unlucky enough to draw them on that given day. I had posters, jerseys, cards, sneakers, pajamas, lunch boxes, hats, action figures, and even notebooks bearing Mike’s number and/or likeness. My room was a shrine to his accomplishments until the age of 16 when Jimi Hendrix reigned, and even then, I had saved all of my posters and cards, hoping to pass them onto my son.

Being a child with an idol in the 90s meant more than it does now. The media was far less rabid and invasive then, and we knew far less about the lives of our favorite athletes and stars. So long as they kept their noses clean, didn’t kill anyone and performed on the field, all was right with the world. Michael Jordan managed to do meet all of those requirements, and even went the extra mile to be media-friendly. He was in commercials and movies and on television shows, he had achieved ubiquity in a way that no athlete before him had ever done, and I was there, sitting in front of the television in my Bulls Starter jacket and Space Jam t-shirt, loving every waking moment of his larger-than-life-ness.

Michael Jordan, in reality, wasn’t the smiling, friendly chap he seemed. He was a philanderer, a gambler. Some allege he was above reproach even to the league itself. He was an obsessive competitor on and off the court, and this strained some relationships with teammates and others. Sure, the fight in him led him to becoming the greatest to pick up a basketball in the greatest era of basketball, and the gambling can surely be traced back to his love of sport and competition, but the other accusations leveled against him paint him as drastically different than he portrayed himself. None of this takes from his accomplishments in any way. None of this makes him any less great. All of these things (and his Hall of Fame speech), however, relieve him of his duties as an idol. They also strip my childhood of meaning and relevance. I now know that I was imitating, and running back to my best friend’s house to watch, an unfaithful husband, and what some claim was a wayward father. I had a room dedicated to a man with teammates who greatly disliked playing with him, in spite of their winning ways.

Childhood gasps for air, and since I cannot change who Michael is now, nor can I go back in time and do so, all I can do is watch.

My childhood is not an outlier, neither in terms of when it occurred or how I went about it. Most all of us can look to one or a few figures who we loved and even idolized as children, for any number of reasons. All of us can attest to the myriad ways in which that relationship we forged with that person, regardless of their actual proximity to us, shaped our lives. I talk to friends about this often. Slowly but surely, we all find out that our gods of old are just as human as we always have been. We see them through adult eyes, and we realize why our parents were worried we would like them a little too much. We grow up and realize that in order to be that good at whatever we loved them for, they may have had to have been very, very bad at things we mortals take for granted. And when we see that, the childhood portrait of them, painted in our minds eye, is replaced with an image of them sketched in numerous shades of gray. My childhood was robust, it was fun, it was relatively innocent, and Michael Jordan was king.

The older I get, the more I realize that the greatest player to ever play, when removed from the court, is as human as I am. My childhood dies a little every time I realize that the Jumpman played spades and the night scene about as hard, and as often, as he played hero on the hardwood.

(A post from May of this year.)

This new blog, I hope, in a few ways, is a bit more like my life now: Scatterbrained, increasingly consistent, displaying potential and actively seeking direction.

I named it Les Chandeliers for a specific reason. When I was a kid, no older than five, my mother took me to a function in what I remember to be an extremely fancy, beautiful establishment. Smooth jazz music played in the background, the sun was shining through long windows with drawn curtains, and it had a wonderful chandelier. Having never seen one in person beyond the dusty, unused, mismatched ones at our church at the time didn’t count, it was mesmerizing. I remember the hors d’oeuvres table being directly beneath the chandelier, and me hanging out around the table, munching on a carrot every so often to not look out of place (I’m attributing very adult behaviors to my 5 year old self, aren’t I?) to the onlooking adults.

Since that day I’ve loved chandeliers. They’re amazing to observe, surely, but my love has to do more with what they’ve come to represent for me.

Chandeliers are a an extravagantly beautiful way to do a very simple thing: light a room. At the time of their invention, where electricity was not used to power lamps and lights, candles were placed in holders. In that time, many candles would have been needed to light a room of substantial size. As electricity has made it easier to light a room with use of less visual space, however, chandeliers are used for their grandeur. Chandeliers, for some time, have come to represent a lifestyle in my mind.

I’ve scraped together some dope chandelier shots. There will be one for every blog post. No less than twenty-four, or two a month for the year. Consistency in blogging, like life, is key.

Lately, I’ve come to grips with the fact that my head will always be flooded with ideas. I’m not bragging, it’s daunting to really sit back and consider. At the most inopportune, inappropriate and random times, I have an idea that demands my immediate, undivided attention. Laying in bed, riding the bus, or eating a meal are easy times to stop and pay attention to the little voice in my head. Taking a final, arguing with a significant other, or giving your undivided attention to another idea, however, prove to be troublesome moments to have another amazing idea. This problem, however, has recently allowed me to start doing something I was never able to before, that is, to regulate the stream of my ideas from my head to the pad or keyboard or phone. I used to have fewer ideas, but each of them demanded attention as it arose. Now, more come at a higher rate, but not all make it out. Some die, some come back as better ideas. This blog is an example of the latter.

I’ve decided to use this blog as a structured arena for my ideas on various topics. The subject matter of this blog isn’t really that far from that of the last, it’s just organized in a far more focused manner, which, I believe, counts a great deal.

Fashion has changed rapidly for me in the past 6-9 months. I was in a relationship with a person to whom fashion meant nothing. And though I continued to profess a love for fashion, it became less and less a part of my life due in no small part to my then-girlfriend’s often cynical take on all things concerning fashion. This isn’t an insult, she explained her reasoning and it was sound, it was just strange to me. The deterioration of that relationship allowed me to view my appearance and attempt to alter those things about it I no longer approved of. Fashion is important to me, and always has been. Fashion, like music and sports, is one of the few things I can say both my parents played a part in fostering a love for. My mother was always best dressed on Sundays, and one of the few things my father gave, showed, and spoke about to me consistently was suits. From the time I was 7 or 8, my father brought me to a home with a closet full of Polo and Calvin Klein suits for me. How he got them? That’s for God and the authorities to figure out. Even as a loud, hyperactive child, my hatred of dress clothes was quelled by the fancy suits my Dad showed me every so often. Most of them were too big, the rest were too small. But every once in a while, one fit, and they were great gifts to have.

The ideas that deserve immediate attention concern four areas: Fashion, Music, Travel, and Women. For continuity’s sake, we’ll stick with fashion today.

Fashion is something I’ve always tried to be knowledgeable about. I know quite a few people who you could consider “fashionistas”, (God, that’s an overused word) but, by and large, I surround myself with people who are no more concerned about fashion than the average American. I’ve had a lot of ideas about fashion lately, more than I ever have in the past. Years ago, before the world of small t-shirt shops and companies became the gold rush it is now (plenty of suitors, not enough space, originality or money) I had a bunch of well intentioned but terrible ideas. I, like many of my peers now, was simply following what I deemed to be popular or eye-catching at the time. “Name+Name+Name” T-Shirts. Simple text over black was the name of my game. I meant well, I wasn’t in it for the money, I had researched the process and thought it a safe assumption that I’d make somewhere south of $0 at first. I wanted to be a part of the new scene I had been introduced to, and this was my way in. I had the means, but the ideas were lacking, and Oliver from Bodega let me know this in the most tactful way possible.

Nowadays, while still wearing T-shirts 7 days a week, my fashion ideas are far removed from them. I, however, have zero formal fashion training. This doesn’t stop my brain from operating as if I did, but the fact remains. Garments are pieced together in front of my mind’s eye if I focus for long enough. Color patterns are chosen and thrown on generic-cut suits of my mind’s invention. Knowing nothing better to do besides quit college and head to fashion school, I’ve decided to make an effort to immerse myself in the world of fashion as deep as would be healthy. Again, I have no formal fashion training. Neither did Ralph Lifshitz.

The barrier to my full entry to the world of creativity is my desire to do things to the best of my ability. Friends and acquaintances of mine are very bravely entering arenas I wish to enter long before I do. Their work, however good, is flawed in ways that would stop me from allowing other people to experience it if it were indeed my own. This isn’t an insult or a backhanded compliment. Some of our most lasting icons in many areas have done the same, and I’ll continue to encourage and hope the best for all of them. I, however, can’t be happy with something creative unless it is the best it possibly could be, and anything less serves as little more than the impetus for another trip to the drawing board. I don’t want to follow the advice of friends and “get over” this fear of poor self-representation. I’d rather scarce and iconic than prolific and very good. So this blog, in terms of fashion at least, will serve less as a place for updates on the progression of the idea I have, but as a depository of that idea and all of the thoughts and ideas surrounding that central idea. I hope to never again slip into the false gratification that is the discussion of plans. I plan to tell people as little, and show people as much, as I possibly can. In fashion, like life, people want results, and we should demand the same of ourselves.

Men’s fashion seems to deal in extremes. Men’s fashion went from extremely garish, eye-popping (and not in a good way) designs and styles to a more refined and adult version of itself in the past four to five years. This, however, nobody should expect to last long. If I know one thing about fashion, I know it’s fickle, and anything can become all the rage at any given time for any given reason. I’m speaking on this because looking back now, it seems that I’ve made this same transition in stride with Men’s fashion as a whole. I’m not patting myself on the back, because this was done completely unconsciously. I look at pictures of myself from two or three years ago and cringe at what I wore. Not the cuts – t-shirts and jeans are pretty standard issue for me, but the color combinations and the ways in which I wore what I wore. I know that to a certain extent, fashion is just the art of hating what we used to like, but now more than ever this has become true for me. Maybe I’m becoming a fashion-addict. Maybe I’m just maturing in step with the rest of the fashion world. Or maybe I truly did dress like a doofus. I don’t particularly care why it looks stupid, I just know that it does. With that said, I should say that I don’t give much of a damn about a lot of what Men’s fashion is about right now. Some of it I just can’t get behind. But that’s fashion: it’s relative while being hard and fast, it moves to a new spot in the room, only to nail itself to the floor.

My relationship with fashion is deepening. I have a greater understanding of its importance, its spoken and unspoken impact on our everyday lives. It fascinates and interests me for the same reasons it used to irritate me. Not only that, but my opinions about it have changed. No longer am I the hard and fast streetwear wearer. Never will I be the mainstream label-addict (again, I’m not patting myself on the back), but there’s a happy medium there that when achieved personally can lead to some great fits, and when achieved by a brand (which it currently is) can lead to really great pieces.

I love Ralph Lifshitz (Lauren).

I love Damir Doma

I love Kitsune, and Band of Outsiders, and Bape, and Gucci, and Yohji Yamamoto

And I love Chandeliers.

Part I: Fashion, and why I’m slow to act on ideas.

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- ME (FROM MY EPONYMOUS WORDPRESS BLOG)