"For those who have crashed their skulls against poles, chain link fences, and concrete after taking it to the butter, and have gotten up and kept playing"
from "For Those Who Know ... the Playground" - Bobbito Garcia
Larry Racioppo's newest book, B-BALL NYC is a great tribute to the game here in New York. Basketball played city-wide, from Hunts Point to East New York, from Sunset Park to Staten Island, in a playground or a gym, or anywhere a wall or a fence or a branch of a tree can accommodate a makeshift hoop. Along with its cousin soccer (as played in the cities of the world where nobody calls it that), a game where a ball and the wobbly painted lines of goalposts are all you need by way of equipment, basketball belongs to everyone.
Players are largely absent from the book. The sidewalks & scrappy lots and & rain-slicked schoolyards are mostly caught in between games, when the kids are elsewhere. But their spirits are ever present. Generations of them. The photographs span forty years of street ball dreams.
Tomorrow night there'll be a B-BALL NYC exhibition opening and book signing at the Brooklyn Arts Council, in DUMBO. Details below.
1 comment:
sweet
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