bds92

Thoughts and prayers

Revisado: 09-28-21

The execution of an idea is generally more useful than the idea itself - except, of course, when the idea IS its own execution. A prayer doesn’t need follow through like a jump shot, but an audiobook does. Much like Kyrie Irving’s own minefield of expression, this audiobook sounds like it knows what I want, but it doesn’t quite deliver. It is very difficult to read between the lines of a text message or Instagram post, which is a problem we all find ourselves facing from time to time. The narrator’s performance grates upon “Death Row” group texts like a tone deaf journalist from the Ivy League. Sure, the content is wildly expansive, and Matt Sullivan’s research is Robert Caro-level, but it would take someone who doesn’t understand the story to deliver certain casual texts with such aplomb. This story doesn’t have an ending at all, happy or otherwise, and the narrator’s lack of nuance ultimately speaks to the tone deafness of our age; better to speak loudly and not carry a stick than to not speak at all, he seems to say.

The audience is unlikely to judge a story by the timbre of its narrator’s voice, but it is interesting to hear the overtones nonetheless. It’s as if the narrator was picked for a millennial consciousness, rather than a universal one. We tend to judge history by its last minute, rather than its last decade or century. From afar, everything seems equally minute or gigantic, but upon further review we are subjected to the inequities of time and place. Context, be it racial, environmental, economic, social, or historical, is big enough to swallow content whole in almost every scenario of life. And so we find ourselves glued to the minute, to the millisecond, waiting for more stories when we could realize they were set in distant realities. This underpins the performance here; we are as beholden as we want to be to time, to fame, to justice, to Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving or to whatever master(s) we serve. But context does not spoonfeed us; we must go to it, or it will elude us in perpetuity.

Has calificado esta reseña.

Reportaste esta reseña