Your Weekly Dose (2/23/22)
This week, we’ve got a short film that shines a light on a forgotten superstar, a TV drama that reimagines a sitcom classic, and a fresh take on time travel. Enjoy! And…as always…thanks for subscribing and sharing.
FILM
The Queen of Basketball
Lusia “Lucy” Harris is one of the greatest basketball players to have ever played the game. But you’ve likely never heard of her. As dominant as an Abdul-Jabar, a Jordan, or an O’Neil, Harris’ relative obscurity speaks volumes about the ways in which female athletes and teams are celebrated and memorialized or, rather, aren’t. A recent documentary short is righting that wrong in its own small way. The Queen of Basketball tells Harris’ story, how she lead the Delta State University women’s basketball team to three national championships, scored the first basket in women’s Olympic basketball history, and was eventually drafted by the New Orleans Jazz (she declined the offer, choosing instead to remain at home, where she raised a family and coached basketball at her former high school). For all of this and more, Harris was one of the first two women inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
This short film is full of archival footage of Harris’ dominance on the court, but it’s her contemporary presence on the screen that shines brighter through her honest self-reflection and infectious laughter. Filmmaker Ben Proudfoot captured these moments just in time, as Harris died on January 18, 2022. Proudfoot also asks us to consider the disparity between how we elevate male and female athletes and the opportunities and rewards open to them. The film also left me wondering why we choose to tell one story over another. To begin its three-years-long championship run, Delta State defeated Immaculata, who had won the championship the previous three years. In both cases, they were upstart programs. There’s been a feature-length film about Immaculata (The Mighty Macs) but none about Delta State and Harris.
This is an emotional rollercoaster of a film, and Harris’ story is one that deserves the feature-length treatment. For now, however, you can watch The Queen of Basketball on YouTube.
TV
Bel-Air
This might be one of the more divisive TV prescriptions I’ve suggested since starting this newsletter, and I get it. At first glance, remaking one of the most successful sitcoms of all time might spark collective eye-rolls at Hollywood’s lack of creativity and originality. But the fan-made trailer that inspired Bel-Air, the dramatic reinterpretation of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, signals that something creative is, in fact, taking place, and that it’s coming from the ground up, not the top down.
Bel-Air takes The Fresh Prince’s set-up, a black kid from West Philadelphia suddenly thrust into the affluent, white-washed Bel-Air, and mines it for all of its drama. Themes of privilege and access and/or the lack of it, culture and authenticity, race and economics, and more are all at work here. There’s also a consistent thread of trauma and PTSD that feels absolutely necessary given how the series portrays “a couple of guys who were up to no good” and the “one little fight” referenced in the original theme song. I know this series might not be for everyone, but I’m into it. The casting is spot on and the performances are so good across the board that it’s hard to pinpoint a standout. And if you’re a fan of contemporary hip-hop, then there’s much to feast on here in the soundtrack, which must’ve cost a fortune.
The first four episodes of Bel-Air are currently streaming on Peacock.
Long Division
Reading Long Division is a singular experience. At least I can’t recall ever having read anything quite like it. The plot can be somewhat difficult to recount clearly, so I’m going to include a shortened account of the publisher’s summary here:
Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it’s 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen “City” Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he’s sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared. Before leaving, City is given a strange book without an author called Long Division. He learns that one of the book’s main characters is also named City Coldson—but Long Division is set in 1985. This 1985-version of City, along with his friend and love interest, Shalaya Crump, discovers a way to travel into the future, and steals a laptop and cellphone from an orphaned teenage rapper called...Baize Shephard. They ultimately take these items with them all the way back to 1964, to help another time-traveler they meet to protect his family from the Ku Klux Klan.
Laymon is one of the most exciting authors writing today. His first two books, the memoir Heavy, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, were published to great critical acclaim. Long Division is his first novel, and with it, he proves to be a master of yet another genre. City is one of my favorite characters in contemporary literature, and his voice feels as unique as the time-traveling tale that Laymon weaves for us. I found myself laughing out loud one moment and, the next, needing to go for a walk to contemplate his insight. “All things considered,” (if you’ve already read it, you get it 😜) Long Division is a book every avid reader should own. You’ll want to revisit it in the future…or the past, if time traveling ever becomes a thing.
Long Division is available wherever books are sold, but consider purchasing your copy from an independent bookseller like Square Books in Oxford, MS, where Laymon is the Ottilie Schillig Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi.