Rajon Rondo, artist

Rondo had 20 assists last night against the Raptors. I don't care who it was against, 20 assists is like what...? unheard of, ungodly. Rondo's the one guy I'd pay to watch play basketball, he's the only guy in the NBA who comes to mind now. I get no aesthetic pleasure from watching Lebron. Derrick Rose is cool--he reminds me a little of Allen Iverson who I used to love to watch--but he's hurt and won't play until January.  Steph Curry, who runs Golden State, plays with the cool joy of a young alto saxophonist and has that tinge of unpredictability I like. I dug Deron Williams when he played for the Jazz, but he's gone corporate. Am I missing anybody? Kobe, nah. Steven Nash? I can only think of how old he is now when he plays. There's a rookie in Portland who looks interesting--Lilliard. Some of my friends talk about Russell Westbrook, but I don't quite get the whole OKC thing even though they made the front cover of The New York Times magazine last week.

I couldn't sleep last night, so I went downstairs and turned the tv on. Caught the last half hour of Pulp Fiction. I want to own that movie. It's like a great book, you can pick it up anywhere and not only get something from it but get right into the story wherever it may be. Tim Reynolds, Bible scholar, used to call the Bible, "unbroken water." I don't know if Tarantino intended Pulp Fiction to have the Biblical narrative flow & dimension it has. It doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter what team Rondo got his 20 assists against, when it's genius. Somebody said to me once--I wish I could remember who it was so I could give them credit--that "Pulp Fiction is everything good and bad about our culture," which is pretty much right on the money.

What did Emerson say about enthusiasm? "That nothing great was ever achieved without it". I think enthusiam is the quality that bonds an artist such as Rondo or Tarantino to their fans: we can see and feel the love and joy they invest in their work; the love and joy, the pain, the struggle, even the opposition to what they're doing, is as much a part of their work as the actual performance.

John Struthers, pictured, is an artist who lives in the Orkney Islands. When we knocked on his studio door in late September without an appointment, he let us in. John's been making art for a long time. He won't sell the early work (he's standing in front of some of it in this picture), but he's having a show of his newer stuff in Paris soon. I asked him if he knew the ceramics of the American, Ken Price. He didn't, but he wrote the name Ken Price on a little notepad he kept closeby.