ROX-TV takes a look at “The Basketball Diaries”
Sometimes there are movies and books that come down the line and force me to pause. Stopping the forever march of life, in order to take something in that in my view is exceptional. Sometimes the things that cause me to stomp on the brakes are beautiful, disgusting, blissful, or just plain tragic. The really good movies/books are always based on real life, which makes sense, because what is better than something that actually happened? I can’t think of anything I rather read about more than an actual occurrence or series of true events. Make believe can be interesting I suppose, but just doesn’t have the ability to sting the soul quite like an experience that happened to a real human.
I guess things that cause us pause can happen for a variety of reasons, but at least for me, I get hung up on stories of excess. It probably explains my trouble with substance abuse on some level, but destruction and tragedy are in their very nature interesting. Why do people slam on the brakes as they pass a car accident with police on the scene? In a perverse way, I think people are hoping to “see something”. Nothing stops people in their tracks faster than watching a train wreck. The loss of life and actual violence are about the only things I can think of anymore that will get people to look up from their phones or focus on something outside of “their experience”.
As I look around society these days, I take stock of what “is going on” and like any person with a few years under their belt, generally compare it to the time that has come before. For me, the nineteen nineties were a time of coming of age and the older I get, I can’t believe how lucky I was to hit that block of time in America. The things going on in music were breathtaking, the movies coming out were “eye scorching”, and change was happening all the time. Old beliefs were being challenged with new ideas on virtually every form of media back then. The content was raw and sometimes unfiltered.
I think the most incredible thing was that people were moving in all directions, pushing the limits on thought and creativity. I don’t see that anymore in America and it makes me rather sad. The world views are shrinking and “over generalizations” are becoming the law of the land. When I was coming up in the mid nineties, there was the accepted forms of music, books, and society norms….but, we also had free will to follow what we wanted. Sure, there was pushback, but even still, we were free to follow what we wanted in most respects.
When I look around today, I don’t see people growing in creative terms, and in fact…the boundaries are shrinking like a cotton shirt in the dryer. Instead of seeking out new ideas and ways to come together, it seems that people are being divided, focusing on what shouldn’t be, as opposed to what could be. I feel that this is a fatal step forward, and worry about “freedoms of thought and expression” in this country. I don’t believe in cancelling things I don’t agree with, I simply don’t give that idea, person, or thought any of my energy. The quickest way to kill something is to simply ignore it. When people become fixated on things they don’t like, it actually promotes the bad idea and gives it life. There was a time when worrying about what other people were doing in this country wasn’t the number one priority. Who really has the right to censor anyone else anyway? Fuck that.
So anyways, at least as far as I’m concerned…some of the best movies and books I’ve ever seen came from that ten year period, some thirty years ago. Maybe it was because of the rise of “DIY” or the rebellion against “commercialism”? I think that both of those things were heavy influences of the free thinking 90’s and the breakaway from following every fucking thing “industry standards” wanted. People were sick of being fed the same tired shit, from the previous generations, who in most cases, had all the wealth (they still do). The system was starting to fail and new ideas and bold characters were bubbling up from the underbelly of America. Other stories of truth that had come before were also getting a chance to see daylight with the help of bold directors, writers, and visionaries that could recognize the value.
Which brings me to the point of this article, which is “The Basketball Diaries”. The book and the movie of the same name chronicles the real life and times of Jim Carroll. The memoir was written in 1978 by the author and musician, and chronicles his life from the ages of twelve, until he was sixteen, living in New York City. Some of the subject matter that he wrote about includes becoming an all-star basketball player in the city leagues, his interactions with his environment, his first sexual experiences, his poetry, and of course…..his heroin addiction, which began at age 13.
Jim Carroll goes into stunning detail in his writings about life with addiction and everything that came along with a vice like heroin. It’s a sad story, and one that caused me to pause the first time I seen the movie. The actual movie was released in 1995 and distributed by New Line Cinema. A young Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jim on the silver screen and Mark Wahlberg (known to the world at that time as the white rapper Marky Mark “and the funky bunch”) co-stars in the movie.
I guess I could be like everyone else that ever reviewed a movie, breaking down the scenes, giving cinematic critiques of the excellent use of lighting, the brilliant “vision” of the director, and all that other hippy shit, but I will pass. It’s already been done before, by people whose expertise in such matters, is hard to challenge on a technical level. I don’t really care about that anyway. Like I said before, I paused when I first seen this movie, and I have my own reasons for that.
When a person is in their formative years (12-17) they are figuring out the world around them. This includes the basic things like how to “be an adult” but there are also competing forces that show up too. For me, drugs and alcohol became very interesting topics, that started showing up more and more in the backdrop of my life. People were starting to smoke marijuana in my near vicinity and I was curious about the drug. Alcohol starting showing up at “parties” that I happened to be in attendance. There were whispers of other things…..like “magic mushrooms”, and even one or two references to cocaine. All these things were starting to become a possibility and people around me were trying them for the first time, or at least talking about them in casual conversation.
I was young, impressionable, and naturally curious about things going on in other people’s heads. I started stealing “roaches” (marijuana cigarette butts) pretty early on and did my best to get “high” with them. I wanted to see what the hell it was all about. I came from a pretty big extended family and every Sunday like clockwork, the family would gather at my Grandparent’s home on the corner of West Harvard and N. Saginaw in Beecher to enjoy a day barbequing and being together. The men all drank forty ounce bottles of beer and puffed on marijuana cigarettes, while playing cards. The women, well I don’t remember what they did, but I’m sure they had their own circle somewhere on the premises. The kids, and there was a shit load of us, ran wild in the yard and in the “woods” which was really a narrow strip of unkept trees and bushes, which only ran for maybe a hundred feet and had a width of about twenty feet. Regardless, it was the “woods” to us and we spent the early years raising hell.
As time rolled on, we got older, and we started to steal beer and cigarettes from unsuspecting adults, sharing them out behind the garage between the cousins. Nothing heavy, just growing up in a working class town in the Midwest among the people that made it all happen. Back then everyone in Flint seemed to be connected in one form or another to General Motors and the factories. That’s all gone now, there is only a rotting shell of that industry in Flint and time has not been good to the towns and the people that relied on GM and the jobs she provided.
In the early 90’s I was ready to start growing my wings and sampling the world around me. I think why “The Basketball Diaries” had such an impact on me was the fact that I could relate to a lot of what Jim Carroll had written about, and through Leonardo’s amazing acting, it translated perfectly into the movie. I was at an age where my curiosity about drugs was growing. Like with all humans, from all over the planet, the first experiences with sexual encounters start to happen. In a nut shell, the world starts to “open up” with things that might not have been thought about, only a few years earlier.
So here is this “kid” Jim Carroll (played by Leonardo) who was roughly the same age as me, experiencing some of the same things that I was, and he got it all down on paper, which became the movie. Just like Jim, I played in a city basketball league (but wasn’t much better than just a slight tick above average in fair estimation), dabbled with the edges of drug use, started to chase girls, and became interested in music and the written word. By fifteen, I myself had started writing for the Flint Journal in a section called “WORD UP” which was for teens and by teens. I valued the form of expression through writing, although I didn’t really know at the time, where that would take me, if anywhere.
Jim Carroll and his friends, start to drift past just swigging forty ouncers and smoking joints….eventually getting into pills and powders, and ultimately main lining “junk”. As the movie progresses, Jim becomes intrigued with drugs, they seem to work for him, inspire him on some level, and allows him to see the world in a certain way. The problem is that eventually, the bills for such living are rather high and the he starts to lose the things that made him who he was. Jim eventually gets kicked off the basketball team for being so fucked up that he can’t pull off the trick anymore. His mother throws him out because he has become a mess. People that he had once shared time with, turn their backs on him and slowly, he ends up at the rock bottom lounge. Heroin has replaced his life with a one way ticket to misery town, for an indefinite stay.
Although my drug of choice was alcohol, it became a destructive force in my life, and eventually switched out the best parts of me for another version of myself. Were there parallels to Jim’s life? I suppose on some level, but that wouldn’t become evident for many years in some aspects. Addiction is addiction and for people who like to “feel good” I don’t think it really matters at the end of the day, what the delivery system is. I think that there are ways to manage it better than others, but that is for another discussion, on another day and article.
The movie was basically a front row seat to Jim Carroll’s life and addiction, and the end results. I haven’t seen a movie like “The Basketball Diaries” in some time. Most of the movies that come out now, in my eyes are just dog shit, and over saturated with special interests. For the younger generations, they may have never experienced anything else, and that is why the stuff that has come before is so valuable. There is real value in history, and probably the biggest benefit is not being tricked into an “old bag”.
A wise person once told me that I shouldn’t focus on anything but “how I live my own life”. The world is going to do what the world does, but as long as I was living the best life I could, without being mean spirited or hurtful to others, then so be it. I don’t care what other people do and I’m not accountable for what other people do. I’m only accountable for the things that I do and that’s all that matters. For Jim, his heroin addiction was destroying his life and causing harm to the people that loved him.
Jim Carroll was an interesting person and not just because of this snapshot of his life in “The Basketball Diaries”. While in high school he was getting his poetry work published in magazines, sometimes elite publications like “The Paris Review”. He published some more poetry and eventually became employed by the world famous artist Andy Warhol, working on content for films, but later going on to co-manage Warhol’s theatre. In 1973 Jim got his work published by a mainstream publishing house (Grossman Publishers) and in 1978 got “The Basketball Diaries” published as well. Jim dated and lived with famous New York Punk Rocker Patti Smith (Singer, writer, poet) for a time. To his credit, Jim would eventually become sober by the end of the 1970’s.
In 1978 Jim moved to California, looking for a fresh start and maybe to put a little distance between himself and a town he had so many miles with. It was in Cali that Jim started the “Jim Carroll Band” at Patti Smith’s urging. The group was probably best described as a new wave punk rock type of situation and they released “People who died” in 1980 which referenced Jim’s friends and acquaintances who had literally died. I love that song, and just like the movie, when I finally got a copy, I played the shit out of it.
In 1987 Jim released “Forced Entries: The downtown diaries: 1971-1973” which simply carried on the autobiography started with “The Basketball Diaries” and delves into Jim’s early adult years in the New York City art and music scenes.
Sadly Jim Carroll would die in 2009, at the age of 60. At the time of his death he was battling pneumonia and hepatitis C. I guess everyone dies, but the world becomes dimmer when we lose a musician, artist, writer, or poet. Why? Because they dedicate their lives to enhance ours and for that, I am eternally grateful. My advice, go watch the movie and see what the 90’s movie scene was all about. Who knows, you may never want to return to 2021 again.
Signing Off,
Mike Shepard
ROX-TV Head Writer
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