At the last Miami Super Bowl weekend, Johnny Damon and Snoop Dogg were playing Madden in the lobby of The Standard. Good times. Go-’round I’ll be in Los Angeles, hopefully coming off an awesome weekend with my kids. If that’s the case, it won’t be so different from the first time I laid eyes on the quarterback of New Orleans’ Saints.

In the fall of 2001, I’d pulled up stakes in Brooklyn and begun the long drive back to Los Angeles. I was waiting for my first book’s auction to go through and was homesteading with my ex-wife and in-laws at the former in-laws’ place in Indianapolis. It was there that I developed my major jones for Drew Brees.

Every Saturday that season, quarterbacks Brees and Antwaan Randle-El were battling it out for Purdue and Indiana University, respectively. At the time, I believed I was watching cool local talent whose thrilling skill sets wouldn’t translate to the NFL. Both were too small to become big-time NFL investments, and unless the league throws the weight of organizational faith into a young player they fight a force much bigger and tougher than the average blitzing linebacker.

I can remember holding up three-month-old Wyatt and saying, “Look at the guy in red and white run!” and “That guy’s name is Drew Brees!” Both players have ended up with Super Bowl experience. Randle-El became a wide receiver and helped lead the Pittsburgh Steelers to a championship four years ago. Now, it’s Brees’ turn.

The 5-11 QB Texas native just wins, baby. He won with the Boilermakers, despite not being heavily recruited out of college. He next picked up the slack for Ryan Leaf after that highly regarded first-round pick failed to pan out with the San Diego Chargers. Then, when San Diego decided big Phillip Rivers could take the team farther than the little, unheralded quarterback whose only forte is winning, Brees moved on to New Orleans and a franchise as well-known for devoted fans who sometimes wore bags on their heads. In the Big Easy, my man continued his winning ways.

What’s not to like about Drew Brees, except his chances of winning on Sunday? Give me the Colts over the Saints, 45-38.

I am ridiculously into this song, from a band I heard rock the Troubadour in, like 2003. My man Heavy D had a ticket.

That tune, and a semi-obscure Bee Gees song rule my brain. Problem: Lil Wayne is the assignment.

Here are a podcast from TheRoot.com and my slightly dated demo.

I confess to being only somewhat hilarious in person. You know how sometimes, ya just ain’t in the fuckin’ mood? Dude, I was pretty much born that way.

No matter how hard I try to get out (of the funnyman) business, they just keep dragging me back. To make jokes and whatnot.

They are so cruel.

Follow this tweet special from Gary Dauphin, Big Black Networked Brain.

True Story: Disney is reworking Mickey Mouse so as to come off edgier.

Total Falsehood: Corporate never actually issued a memo suggesting that Da Mouse’s character be re-written as such: In the “Brokeback Mickey” flashback, when Mickey makes tender love to Donald Duck, let’s have Mickey murmur, “Leave the little sailor hat on.”

CC Sabathia, a guy I’ve rooted for seemingly forever, does as much good off the field as he does on the diamond. His Twitter feed confirms this.

BTW, hit me up while you tweet!

If you are a friend on Facebook, and not relegated to being a fan, feel free to skip this post. It’s well-traveled turf if you’re in my mix like that.

Tomorrow I go back to L.A., sort of as a changed man. But not really. At this point, I feel more transformed by the shit that went down inside Sundance cinemas than I do by the rather profound shit that affected my career.

Where to begin? A good place might be at the first screening of our animated short about Dock Ellis. That was Sunday, my second full day in Park City. It was cool to chill out with Reggie Miller in the green room.  I got him to sign a promo dealie for Winning Time, Dan Klores’ fantastic ESPN dock about Miller’s rivalry with Spike Lee’s New York Knicks. Ever gracious, Reggie signed the thing for Forrest and Wyatt, who are Hoosier-connected sports fanatics but don’t know a damn thing about the Pacers-Knicks donnybrooks from back inna day. Reggie wrote “Boom Baby!” and I think they know what that means.

Sunday wore my ass out, emotionally. It felt redemptive to sit behind my old ESPN bosses and biggest NY supporters and see/hear them lead the gales of laughter that would follow our film around Park City like herpes or a stalker or some other (perhaps more positive) such shit. Then, unexpectedly, at ESPN’s party, my mood crashed. Seeing Terrell Owens and Adrien Brody didn’t bum my ass out, but waiting to get a word with Bill Simmons in V.I.P. totally sank my shit. I was like, Man, I was supposed to be that nigga. What the fuck? How am I waiting behind these fools to talk to him?

Then I went home with my girl and creative partner and drank and bitched and argued for approximately 36 hours. (”Your negativity is turning people off!” “Isn’t that ironic, coming from you?” Coat grab. Door slam. Elevator wait. James Beach matchbook strike. Cigarette burn beneath falling show.) We did awesome work on our Dock Ellis feature film treatment though.

On Tuesday came the short film awards. Our collaborators, artist James Blagden and No Mas impresario Chris Isenberg, convinced me to grow the fuck up and actually attend the event. To make a long-ish story nudge the neighborhood of brevity, we almost won the jury prize. I ain’t going into particulars about the HBO-sponsored short that beat us, ‘cuz I’m told the film is very good. But hella juror grumbling made its way to my ears and, as mentioned earlier, I didn’t leave my room unless I had to. The general tenor of the rancor had something to do with the award’s  intended spirit and our joint being the the embodiment of guerilla filmmaking.

Crowding the awards party stage with Neille, Chris and James — “Look how sad they all are,” I whispered to Chris while looking out at the also-rans — I understood that we were smack-dab in the middle of an indelible moment. Here are this week’s honorable mentions for most unique moment:

Reggie Miller joking from the podium that he might have performed better in a certain iconic loss to the Knicks if he’d dropped LSD beforehand; feeling compelled to “snub” Manohla Dargis on a bus headed to a screening of Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child; hot-tubbing with my girl and Ondi Timoner and her hell-bent on diving (and beautiful) son; telling a Sundance TV interviewer that I was on acid and desperately needed to touch her furry hat.

And there was the signing of an autograph and the photograph with a black tourist couple from Atlanta on my first whole day in town. They’d not seen that soon-to-be-renowned piece, but treated me like a celebrity presumably because I’d crashed the supremely white world of Hollywood independent film. (Park City during Sundance makes Chico look like Harlem. [The old Harlem.] It intermittently sickened my gut to know that my town’s biggest industry is apparently comfortable with such a degree of racial exclusivity. And I know it hurts my career to say this — if you’ve been reading this far and long, you know I am quite careless about that — but controlling the world narrative is a crucial component of maintaining white supremacy. That goes whether you actively approve of racism or not.)

Not to be too deep for disco. That’s an expression I learned from my man Michael Wharton, on the Internet this week.  It’s officially my favorite shit. A credo, if you will. From now on, I’m easing back. Taking things as they come. Jumping back on my bike and MTA to hang on the Eastside with my boys and Sol, in hopes that (among other things) they’ll one day know how great the Knicks-Pacers thing was, back inna day. Ain’t a damn bit of it more complicated than disco, my peeps, at the end of the day.

Thank you, Robert Redford, for a beautiful collection of memories. And thank you, Howard Zinn, for writing the playbook.

Two years ago, when public radio producers Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel found themselves in the living room of Dock Ellis, discussing the particulars of what was clearly the only no-hitter ever thrown under the influence of LSD, they knew they were onto something special. After all, a no-hitter only occurs 7.5 times for every 10000 Major League Baseball games. One fueled by history’s most celebrated psychedelic comes once in a lifetime.

They knew the general facts of the modern-day folk legend. There had been songs written about Ellis’ legendary accomplishment. The “no-no” was whispered about in that strange nexus where drug lore and sports lore intersect. Dock himself told how he inadvertently took acid in the second edition of eventual poet laureate Donald Hall’s Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball.

(But not in the initial printing of the book. He had been playing with the New York Yankees at the time of publication, and New York’s fiery owner George Steinbrenner prohibited his players even from wearing facial hair. Lysergic acid diethylamide, sixties counterculture’s ultimate
multivitamin, out of the question. Hall and Ellis changed his trip to a more traditional and accepted bout of drunkenness.)

Alexander, who is based in Los Angeles, first thought of reaching out to the legendarily quirky pitcher in 2007, after being assigned a piece on Barry Bonds by Vibe magazine. Bonds, then chasing the all-time home run record, had come under attack for his seemingly obvious steroid use.

While researching a book project with Bonds five years earlier — he’d anticipated Jason Giambi’s “I did it” strategy — Alexander learned that Joe DiMaggio drank outrageous amounts of coffee in order to affect his baseball posture of ever-readiness. He’d already been aware of “greenies” and other amphetamines from Jim Bouton’s seminal sports bio Ball Four. And the writer sought to examine the contradictions in MLB’s anti-drug stance. So, he decided to call Dock Ellis.

The two talked briefly that year, but weren’t able to connect long enough to complete a full piece. (The Pittsburgh Pirates, with whom Ellis is largely identified, had been able to offer no information regarding the ballplayer’s whereabouts; the writer was forced to feel his way around the Southern California penal network.) The idea of covering Dock Ellis began to dissipate.

One evening shortly thereafter, in an Echo Park dive bar called Little Joy, Alexander sat with colleagues of his partner Neille Ilel, then an editor at public radio show called Weekend America. Alexander began telling what he knew of the infamous no-hitter. A Weekend America producer named Jim Gates said, If you get that story, I’ll absolutely put it on the air.

Perpetually scratching for cash, Alexander tracked down Dock Ellis once again.

Spring had just arrived in 2008 and Alexander and Ilel arrived at the Apple Valley home of Dock Ellis. Bald and tall, Ellis remained a powerful presence even though it was clear that he had become ill. Clad in a robe, he welcomed the producers into his ranch-style home and for more than two hours told them stories about the game and about drugs. Ilel prompted him for details, such as how the game’s visual aspect changed. Ellis explained that Dave Cash coined term “no-no” on the day of his hitless wonder.

Beyond no-no’s thrown while tripping, Ellis ran down baseball’s litany of racial transgressions. From a dog-eared copy of Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, he read a letter that had once meant a lot to him:

I read your comments in our paper the last few days and I wanted you to know how much I appreciate your courage and honesty. In my opinion progress for today’s players will only come from this kind of dedication. I am sure also you know some of the possible consequences. The news media while knowing full well you are right and honest will use every means to get back at you. Blacks should not protest, as you are, even though they know you are right. Honors that should be yours will bypass you and the pressures will be great … There will be times when you ask yourself if it’s worth it all … I can only say, Dock, it is. I again appreciate what you are doing - continued success. Sincerely, Jackie Robinson

And right there, with Neille holding a microphone in front of his face, Dock Ellis broke down, weeping as only a man who knows his best days are far, far behind him can cry. He rambled away from the mic, screaming from a room away. “I never read that like that before!” he shouted. “Oooh, shit!”

Ilel and Alexander hauled ass back Los Angeles, stopping at Ikea along the way. Led by Ilel, the two winnowed Dock’s wide-ranging ramble from two hours to four minutes, adding Rufus Thomas “The Push and Pull” and a game call that Ilel tracked down from an amateur archivist in Indiana. The Weekend America piece ran on baseball’s Opening Day Weekend, less than a month later. By the end of 2008, Dock Phillip Ellis, Jr. would be dead.

Fast forward to late 2009, New York. After already completing their animated interpenetration of Ilel and Alexander’s radio piece, artist James Blagden and No Mas creator Christopher Isenberg made nervous contact with the two LA based producers, first over email. They were relieved to find that Ilel and Alexander were charmed by the piece and — being staunch believers in fair use, the democracy of the Internet and the primacy of artistic vision — were happy to accept this artistic partnership.

The group will be meeting in person for the first time at the 2010 Sundance film festival, promoting the product of their unusual
bi-coastal semi-psychic collaboration… DOCK ELLIS & THE LSD NO-NO

The idea of Scott Brown taking his dense pubes to Washington reminds me of a great underground record by the Crack Emcee, from when he led a short-lived band called Little White Radio. That band ruled. If ya ever heard ‘em light up a San Francisco night, let me know.

It would make me sound like a maniac if I said the Crack Emcee was one of my life’s most important artistic mentors. So, let me not say that. I’m trying to get a job during a recession. A writing job. And I’m black.

Sorry, Crack. Gotta leave you outta this one.

Remember that business about Jay-Z being the anti-Christ that I posted back in2006? (I know you don’t, but play along, please.) Well, it’s back in a big way. A Christian rapper has actually taken on Sean Carter with a diss track. The song is part of a wave of occultism allegations and such.

The work that’s got Illuminati fears up is “On to the Next One”, which J-Hova made with Swizz Beats.

It sounds weird to type this, but… I kinda believe the Christian rapper.

Not that Jay is the anti-Christ; I don’t know what that means. But it’s hard to deny that the symbols signify something as yet unspecified. This MC says exactly what he wants to say. He doesn’t allow for a lot of accidents of communication.