13 May

Porch Refuge, Reading With Minnie. Me And Michael Jordan’s “Air…”

by Jon Katz

Our MO seems to be to work madly and feverishly on the farm and its chores and gardens during the day, then winding down to read or watch something on the Iphone. We don’t have a television, and I doubt we will ever get one.

I was out for hours tending to my new flowers in the garden beds; Maria was planting vegetable plants in the vegetable garden. We’ll soon be eating them.

Afterward, she sat on the porch to read. Minnie, who hangs out all day on the back porch, sensed she was there and found a nice place to curl up and sleep while she read. I love that picture.

I’m hooked on the new Netflix movie “Air,” about the company and people behind Michael Jordan’s bold and now legendary sneakers brand victory – it turned the sneaker industry upside down and made a lot of Nike people wealthy.

It also upended a lot of assumptions about sports and who buys sneakers to run and who buys them because they love basketball.

It stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and judging from the first 20 minutes, it’s very good.

I’m not a big sports fan, but the movie is as much about American corporate culture as anything, which interests me. There are enormous amounts of money, careers, and popular culture behind celebrity endorsements, cultural change, and recognition.

Young basketball fans, many of them people of color, drove the great Jordan sneaker success. It turns out that sneaker scouts scour the country for potential celebrity sneaker endorsements even more than professional scouts do. The movie is on Amazon Prime.

We are a strange country; corporate money has now affected almost everything and distorted it beyond all recognition. Athletes like Jordan are business savvy as well as talented. I’m curious to see the rest of it. I’m onto a new mystery writer, this one from  Denmark.

____

I have some lovely flower photos I took this afternoon – I have some new flowers – I’ll post them tomorrow. I need some sleep. Later.

5 Comments

  1. We watched Air last night.
    A fun and “feel-good” movie!
    And don’t forget Viola Davis as MrsJordan. She was fantastic!

  2. I’d love to know about the dynamics of a conversation between good people discussing a book they’ve both read, like The Chinese Groove, by Kathryn Ma, which Maria is reading in this photo shot.

    I grew up in a family where my mother was so traumatized by her father who insisted that reading was for lazy people who did nothing, that she established a nuclear family culture where no one in our family ever saw one another reading … and to actually *talk* about your reading? Horrors!

    I have no idea what it’s like to be in a milieu where people love to read and love to talk about their reading … what are the possible dynamics and aha moments? What else happens? I know what happens when one person reads an intensely spiritual and mind-bending book, but what happens when at least two people read a book, even a less than supremely transformative one, a book that just was worth reading?

    1. Nancy, we just talk about what we felt, it’s not very dramatic or complex ..I don’t really have time to explore the dynamics of it here.

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