Writes The Times:

He was a favored photographer of Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, and he was the only photographer allowed backstage at the Beatles' last concert, in San Francisco in 1966. He was also the chief photographer at Woodstock.

Marshall lives in California but died in New York. He was in town to promote his most recent book, Match Prints.

There is little doubt that Mitchell’s work with Hendrix between 1966 and 1969 transformed him into one of the most mimicked stickmen in rock ’n’ roll. With the Experience, Mitchell’s fluid, jazz-inflected style made the most of what little room Hendrix’s explosive guitar left him—creating shuffling grooves where none existed before (see “Crosstown Traffic” and the haunting “The Wind Cries Mary”). While folks may blame him for sowing the seeds of fusion’s wankier moments, it was precisely his own band’s mix of styles—Mitchell and Redding’s antsy mod beats combined with Hendrix’s soulful blues—that made the Experience such a transformative player in the 60s.

Needless to say, Mitchell will be missed.

alliance is over. Long live the (real) alliance, The Edgy Alliance.

According to Sean, the goofy alleged neurologist from the

first Survivor (if you ask me, anyone

who would go to Sean for a neurological consultation ought to have his head

examined), the key difference in the new Survivor

is that the show now bans alliances. Of course, I'm not sure Sean is the most

reliable source in the world about anything, but it's right there in cold type,

in one of publicity-shy Sean's gazillion or so exclusive interviews in the

run-up to the new Survivor , this one

in the Post . After crudely dissing

the looks of the women in his Survivor

group and telling us, of the women in the new

one, "They are just great looking! Great looking! I could have had a great time

with a couple of them, believe me," the super-suave Sean proceeded to drop a

bombshell about an alleged new alliance policy. One he takes credit for

himself. One so stupid , you can

almost believe him on that basis alone.

"At the end of the

taping for Survivor I ," Sean told the

Post , "the creator Mark Burnett asked

us what we would do to make the next series better …. One of the things I told them

was to ban alliances. And this time they've done that. The rules say it's

illegal to collude on a vote. That's going to add a new dimension to the

series."

Yeah, Sean-the dimension of boredom . Way to go, you neurological nitwit; way to ruin the single

most (perhaps only) interesting and novel element in the show. Hey, why not

just cut out the heart of its popularity, the only thing that gave it any

unscripted drama amidst the schlock.

What did you think was the source of the show's success,

Sean? The dumb relay races? The island-legends trivia contest? Your moronic

alphabetical voting strategy in the tribal council? No, you brain-challenged

brain doctor, it was the drama of alliance formation, the Machiavellian

scheming, the rise of Richard Hatch as a great pop-culture character archetype,

the way the alliance formation and freeze-outs tapped deep into the nation's

primal junior high school insecurity fears (primal fears that carry over into

the rest of life for many of us). The way it made human character and human

relationships the real subject of Survivor

in a brilliant, pop-novelistic way.

Jeez, banning alliances: an idea so dumb only the deeply

addled, self-infatuated Sean could have thought of it. Well, we'll see. Since

I'm writing this in advance of the first episode of the new Survivor , I'll reserve comment until the

end of this column, which I'll append after I see it.

Instead, this column will be devoted to another kind of

alliance: to The Edgy Alliance and its members, and their responses to my idea,

in the aftermath of Survivor, to form

a different kind of alliance.

As I wrote back then, I was stunned by the success of

Richard Hatch's Machiavellian scheming, stunned into re-evaluating my life and

realizing that I wanted an alliance too .

Not to win some game-show prize, but an alliance of kindred spirits,

enlightened obsessives and enthusiasts-and who better to turn to than the

readers of this column?

Thus was born The Edgy

Alliance. I provided a handy coupon-sized application form with space for readers

to make their own suggestions for topics to be treated in the column, as well

as a list of some 60 or so writers, artists, thinkers, songwriters, films,

books and music I'd previously praised, so that prospective members could see

if they felt simpatico.*

I spoke of the way I hoped the Alliance could serve not just

as solidarity for like-minded souls, but as a kind of "mobile cultural strike

force to galvanize support for deserving works of art." And cited, as

precedent, successful campaigns by this column to get the works of the

brilliant, reclusive novelist Charles Portis back in print (if you haven't read

Dog of the South yet, I'm tempted to

ban you from the Alliance), to save the smartest, funniest show on TV, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (for a couple

of seasons, anyway) and to get the new owners of the Chrysler Building to keep

its beautiful spire lit all night long instead of turning it off at 2 a.m. (If

you're out late at night and you gaze up at the spire, you have this column to

thank for the sight.)

Anyway, the response was truly gratifying. Letters began

pouring in to the postal box I'd rented (The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second

Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10016). I was invited to appear on Christopher Lydon's

National Public Radio program, The

Connection, prompting a new wave of applications-and after one further

mention in my Jan. 8 column on Thomas Pynchon and Captain Crunch, the total is

now nearly 400 Edgy Allies. (By the way, I was pleased The Times cited my essay on Crunch in its recent profile of the

hacker legend, but a little bit dismayed that they said I characterized Crunch

as an "American anti-hero." My exact words were, "a true American hero." How does that become "anti-hero"? O.K., O.K.,

I'm edgy.)

But what was most gratifying was not the number of responses

but the range, variety and quality of the suggestions and obsessions shared.

To paraphrase Wayne and Garth in Wayne's World : I am not

worthy . The erudition, the passion, the eclectic and imaginative aesthetic

taste in your suggestions floored me. Edgy Allies don't just rock the house

down, they rock it back up again and re-arrange the porch furniture.

So I've been trying to figure out what to do with all of the suggestions, many of

which deserve an entire column in response. And I thought maybe the best thing

would be to go through the coupons and letters and select a few suggestions

this week, some just to list, some to comment briefly on-kind of an interactive

thing-hoping this will inspire more people to seek to join and send in

suggestions (did I mention the address: The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second

Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016).

Let me begin with:

· Oblomov , by Ivan Goncharov. No fewer

than three requests to write about

this lovely 19th-century Russian novel that is, in a way, a hymn to lassitude.

I think it's no accident that Oblomov

is such a favorite with The Edgy Alliance, because over the years I've noticed

that Oblomov enthusiasts tend to be,

like Edgy Enthusiast types, above all deeply devoted readers. The kind of

reader for whom reading is a deliriously sensual pleasure. The kind of readers

for whom Oblomovian lassitude represents a realization of their secret fantasy

of abandoning the onerous demands of the real world-going to work in the

morning and all that-and, instead, getting to stay in bed and read as long as

they want for the rest of their lives. Anyway, I know that's my alternate-life

fantasy. Well, one of them.

· "William

Empson's essay on Marvell's 'Garden,' Scrutiny

1932, pp. 236-240." What I like about this suggestion is not just the poet

(Marvell is my fave among the later metaphysical poets), not just the poem

itself. "The Garden" is a lovely pastoral in which the poet imagines himself

going into a synesthesia-like trance in a garden, annihilating all into "a

green thought in a green shade." (Interesting: another instance of sensual and

spiritual lassitude. I think there's a theme here.) And it's not just the

reference to Empson, who, as I've confessed in previous columns, is my

20th-century lit-crit hero, still a giant (you'll note the appearance of his

great work Seven Types of Ambiguity

in my original list). I'd commend to anyone who doubts the continuing relevance

of Empson the chapter on him in Jonathan Bate's valuable recent book The Genius of Shakespeare . Mr. Bate

makes a lovely analogy between Empsonian ambiguity and Heisenbergian

uncertainty, both of which intersected in Cambridge in the 1920's.

But what I particularly like about this suggestion is its

specificity. Although Empson's Marvell essay has been reprinted elsewhere, the

specificity of the citation to " Scrutiny

… pp. 236-40" suggests the reader actually has in his possession an original

copy of that legendary (in lit-crit circles, anyway) magazine edited by F.R.

Leavis. Marvell's "Garden," Empson, Scrutiny :

a trifecta of good taste!

·

Gram Parsons' "Thousand Dollar Wedding." In this case, a reader sent me an

entire essay he'd written about the version of this song on the Gram Parson

tribute album, Return of the Grievous

Angel (a duet cover version sung by Juliana Hatfield and Evan Dando), an

essay entitled "$1,000 Wedding: Gram Parson's Faulknerian Mini-Opera." It's

really smart, the essay, and it made me think again about why I'm drawn to

country music. Not only me, but a number of Edgy Allies who requested more

about both Johnny and Rosanne Cash (which led me to go buy Johnny's new album, Solitary Man . Check out his

heartbreaking version of Bono's great anthem, "One"). Maybe it's the lassitude

again, the pure lassitude of longing and sadness at the heart of every great

country song.

It also made me realize that if I got to choose another

person's life to have lived, I'd have wanted to be Gram Parsons. To have

written his songs, lived his brief tragic life, given birth to his legend and,

perhaps most of all, to have Emmylou Harris write "Boulder to Birmingham" about

my death, how they burned my body in a desert canyon near Joshua Tree.

· Here's a

multiple request that I record here for its wonderfully strange eclecticism:

the reader who wanted me to write about "Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian , Bar Kochba [the

second-century Jewish rebel], Buddy Greco, and the cello."

I'm sort of fascinated by whatever it is that links those

four, but it gives me an excuse to cite one of my favorite lines from one of my

favorite film comedies, The In-Laws ,

the cult fave scripted by Andrew Bergman. Not a Buddy Greco reference exactly,

but a Jose Greco reference.

It's in the scene in which Peter Falk, who's playing a

wacked-out rogue C.I.A. agent, not quite housebroken in polite society, arrives

for dinner at the home of his son's prospective in-laws, a suburban dentist

(played with deadpan aplomb by Alan Arkin) and his wife (Nancy Dussault). Mr.

Falk proceeds to weird them out by telling a disturbingly over-the-top story

about some operation down in Central America, a place where, he claims, the

tsetse flies were so big they carried off young children in their beaks. He

goes into an elegiac description of the flies flapping off into the sunset with

the children drooping from their jaws, and then tells the wigged-out in-laws

the name he claims the frightened native people have for the giant tsetses:

"They call them ' Los Jose Greco del Muertes '-the flamenco

dancers of death." Thank you for giving me an excuse to repeat that. You'll

see: Rent the movie, you'll thank me.

·

Ed Sanders. Yes! Great request. Here's another alternate life fantasy: If I

were a Beat, Sanders is the Beat I'd most like to have been. Virtually the only

one I really admire as a poet: his Egyptological and classical Greek learning

inflect, in a brilliant way, his vision of the East Village as a site of comic,

mythic, pornographic legends. Beatitude fused with grungitude: a sensibility

best exemplified in prose in Sanders' Tales

of Beatnik Glory and Shards of God .

Plus he wrote The Family , one of the

scariest true-crime books ever (about the Manson family) and co-founded the

Fugs with the great Tuli Kupferberg. I rest my case.

· "Joel

Carmichael's translation of Anna Karenina ."

Not familiar with it yet, although I have written in the past about the

mystical vision of the One and the Many to be found beneath the surface of

Tolstoy's opening line in Anna Karenina

("All happy families are alike ….") as an analogue to Flannery O'Connor's

mystical vision of beatitude in the title Everything

That Rises Must Converge, another true fave .

· "The Sex Life

of Krishnamurti." No comment yet, but I'll look into it.

· "The Tao of

Jackson Browne." Yes, he's very unfashionable now, but I've confessed in the

past to having a weakness for J.B.'s work, even to searching for and

celebrating "my inner Jackson Browne" every time I go to L.A. The first two

letters of lassitude are "L.A.," and Late

for the Sky -isn't that a classic of sad lassitude? And yes, it's true: My

heart still stirs in a sad, neo–Popular Front way (a "Pop Front" way?) whenever

I hear Jackson Browne's "For Every Man."

· A

thought-provoking analysis of the metrical anomalies in King Lear's

grief-stricken words ("Never, never, never, never, never") and their thematic

implications.

· On the Shoulders of Giants by Robert

Merton. Described as " Pale Fire

footnotes in non-fiction form." I'm down, dude. I once owned a secondhand copy,

but somehow lost it. Will now search for another.

· Jimi Hendrix

and Randy Rhoads. Who is Randy Rhoads again? Oh, okay-the dude who played

guitar for Ozzy Osbourne. But I will say something about Hendrix: We share the

same birthday! James Agee, too-Nov. 27. Nonetheless, apropos of Hendrix:

doesn't "Voodoo Chile" in the Mazda commercial just completely blow away

Bowie's "Changes" in the Nortel ad? "Voodoo Chile" dominates, subverts,

shatters the framework of its commercial exploitation, but "Changes" becomes,

with repetition, subservient to it. Very sad.

· "The aggressive

machiavellian alliance forming game play in King Herod," with a citation to

Josephus' Jewish Antiquities , Books

14-17. A worthy subject, but isn't Josephus a suspect  source?

· One of my

favorite requests: "Could you write about what is a liberal today? When I was

in college in 1938 I took a liberal conservative test. I scored 85% liberal 15%

conservative I dare say the questions would be somewhat different today." A

good question and I'll get to this and some others I have in hand later on. But

I think I have to stop now. Not because I've run out of great suggestions from

Edgy Allies, but because I'm running out of space.

But I kind of like this

free-associative, interactive way of responding to Edgy Alliance suggestions.

So I hope readers will continue to sign up for the Alliance and send their

suggestions for possible discussion in future columns.

And by the way, I promised an update on goofy Sean's

"alliance ban" claim about the new Survivor .

What do you know: No mention of any

rule change on the first show, and you'd certainly think they'd mention it if there was a change. Way to go, Dr. Sean! I think what we have here, with

the neurologist turned show-biz analyst, is the first case of infotainment malpractice . Still, I'll

forgive Sean, since his claim did prompt me to get around to writing about the

Alliance suggestions. I'd even let Sean join the Alliance, on one condition:

that he reveal the one remaining secret of the first Survivor -when he claimed that Colleen and Greg were "covering up for

another relationship" when they'd go off together (followed by a camera crew)

at night. What was that other

relationship, Sean? The Edgy Alliance wants to know.

*Here's the original list:

All the King's Men ,

the Cowboy Junkies, Dead Souls , Mystery Science Theater 3000 , The Long Goodbye , Peter Brook, Badlands , Smokey Robinson, Chimes at Midnight , Don DeLillo's Libra , Chrissie Hynde, Murray Kempton, Larry Sanders , the Dixie Chicks, De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), Persuasion , doo wop, Pale Fire , Brian Kulick, Sandra

Bernhardt, David Berlinski, "Shipping Out" (David Foster Wallace), Tom Petty, The Third Man , Julie Taymor's Titus , Lingua Franca , Willie Nelson, Tom Frank, the Shirelles, Eric

Ambler, Blade Runner , The Anatomy of Melancholy , Charles

Portis, Blood on the Tracks , James M.

Cain, Bruce Wagner, Rickie Lee Jones, Sam Cooke, Errol Morris, Ann Magnuson, Seven Types of Ambiguity , The Woman in White , The Simpsons , "Losing My Religion," Christopher Ricks, Renaldo and

Clara, the dream of Clarence (in Richard

III ), Edith Wharton, Jon Stewart, George Herbert, The Pat Hobby Stories , Nicholson Baker, The Crying of Lot 49 , Other

Inquisitions (Borges), Chinatown ,

Bill Murray, Rosanne Cash, Hart Crane, and Bruce Cutler, John Gotti's lawyer.

(No official Gotti endorsement implied.)

Mr. Scofield 's latest, Bump , just out on Verve, is a continuation of this middle-age guitarists-just-want-to-have-fun mode (the title alone says that) and a reminder that A Go Go wasn't the aberration it might have seemed. From his first dance with fame as a sideman with Miles Davis in the trumpeter's pop-star 80's, Mr. Scofield has had his own distinctive sound palette, mixing a bebopper's immaculate single-note lines with the strummed chords, fuzzy tonalities and bent notes of R&B, funk and rock, of, in a word, the blues.

Ever since Jimi Hendrix flamed out in 1970, the fusion of rock guitar's head-banging ecstasies and jazz guitar's often dweeby virtuosity has floated out of reach like the holy grail. Avant-jazzers like James (Blood) Ulmer and avant-rockers like Vernon Reid have taken honest grabs at it. But Mr. Scofield could never quite pass for Jimi's love child, no matter how artfully he incorporated the folk blues. Even his "dirty" playing was clean, in that unmistakably measured "jazzy" way. (That's what you get for going to the Berklee School of Music instead of staying in the garage.) Still, Mr. Scofield's typically loping, amiable guitar lines packed plenty of pleasure on their own terms. If he's never been as inventively "out" as Bill Frisell (with whom he joined forces on a nice 1992 Blue Note album, Grace Under Pressure ), he is, to my way of thinking, anyway, a lot more of a satisfying listen than Pat Metheny whose periodic descents into preciousness have no counterpart in the ample Scofield discography. (All right, maybe at moments on their 1993 joint effort, I Can See Your House From Here . Clearly it's not easy for a guitarists to make it in a horn man's world.)

That Mr. Scofield could put his hard-won jazz chops and reputation, and on A Go Go become the fourth member of MMW&S, is fairly remarkable. I think I've sufficiently worked through my own bop issues to appreciate that album for the salubrious slap in the face it is. Mr. Scofield banishes the memory of dexterous Wes Montgomery licks, not to mention an entire European tradition of music going someplace harmonically, to jam with the lads, his surprisingly tough guitar a fine counterpoint to Mr. Medeski's abstracted organ.

On the new album, Bump , the guitarist does that thing that jazz musicians like to do. He makes things complicated, staying true to the circular logic of the groove, but in a very elaborate fashion. Gone is the gloriously retro, low-rent sound of A Go Go , replaced by a three-dimensional soundscape of shifting textures, timbres and electronic sounds that go beep in the night. This is the handiwork of his au courant jam dream team-a rhythm section drawn variously from an obscure New England jam band Deep Banana Blackout and from the Downtown po-mo jazzers, the Sex Mob, with the addition of salsa percussionist Johnny Almendre and keyboard sampler Mark De Gli Antoni.

The Scofield originals that comprise Bump offer up their share of pleasures-on "Kelpers," the keyboardist synthesizing what sounds like Benny Hill's organ; on "Groan Man," the guitarists' funk licks suddenly giving way to a pretty, popish melody that reminds me of the bridge to Nena's "99 Luftballons" (unless that's the ecstasy talking). In general, though, I can't help but wish there were more Hendrix, less Bitches Brew -vintage electronic Miles. Miles' trademarked evil-cool was a crucial element in his make-believe sonic world. Smiling Sco too often sounds like he's flirting with kitsch. Of course, if I were raving at a club instead of sitting alone in my room with my disc player, I'm sure it would all sound good.

The nickname comes from a stunning advertisement aired during the playoffs by And 1, a basketball sneaker company. The 30-second spot featured a close-up shot of Mr. Sprewell, a basketball player most famous for a violent outburst against a former coach, as he got his hair cornrowed and offered what the company called an "intensely personal communication" about who he is.

"I've made mistakes, but I don't let them keep me down," he said. "People say I'm America's worst nightmare. I say I'm the American dream." In the background, a guitar played "The Star-Spangled Banner," sounding very much like Jimi Hendrix's indelible rendition of the anthem at Woodstock, 1969.

It goes without saying that as the finals get underway, Mr. Sprewell, who choked his former coach, P.J. Carlesimo of the Golden State Warriors, in 1997 and lost a year of his career before the Knicks traded for him in January, has been vindicated in the eyes of most New Yorkers. At once mellow and explosive, his game is a big reason the Knicks are in the finals. And his story, of being derided by the press through a lackluster season, labeled dysfunctional by The New York Times , looks like a thrilling redemption tale.

"He's done something that's really interesting," said Jerry Della Femina, the ad man. "At the end of every game, he gives the most reasonable of interviews. I'm almost convinced he's been coached, that there's a sinister P.R. person behind this who's told him, Never raise your voice. And he's good. He seems like a very decent guy. My 10-year-old son adores him. No one wants to bring up the choking incident anymore. If it is an act, we're going to find out before too long."

Then Mr. Della Femina dismissed a rumor I've heard, that he's tried to meet with Mr. Sprewell.

"I'd be afraid to meet him," he told me. "Maybe I'm not being forgiving enough."

For many young people, blacks especially, the idea of Sprewell could not be more different. It is not about black menace, violence or racism. It's about rebirth, creativity, colorblindness and hard work. The "American Dream" ad was designed by a small multiracial company to allow Mr. Sprewell to go over the heads of the media, older white men who Mr. Sprewell's supporters felt were misreading the player's introversion as racial defiance, and it has struck a chord. The idea of Sprewell is the idea of inclusion and individuality, the very things that white Americans have long celebrated as their American inheritance and that black Americans are now embracing as theirs.

"The stereotype doesn't fit," Keith Livingston told me at the Dean Street Cafe. "Yes, some people are going to find him intimidating. His outer person-he does look fairly intimidating, with the braids. And, yes, he has a mean look. But then you realize you can't judge him by that. He lost a lot of money. He lost his livelihood for a brief moment. He came from nowhere and now look at him. He's on top, he's a leader of his team. In the ad you hear 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' It's like apple pie and baseball. You can't get more American than that."

On Dec. 1, 1997, P.J. Carlesimo, the Golden State Warriors coach who has a reputation for riding players, got on Latrell Sprewell during a practice for not making good passes, and for Mr. Sprewell it represented the culmination of a month of verbal abuse. Tempers flared; Mr. Sprewell rushed at Mr. Carlesimo's neck. He was thrown out of the gym, and is alleged to have come back 20 minutes later to attack Mr. Carlesimo again. (Mr. Sprewell denies this.) The player soon apologized for his conduct, backed by many members of the Golden State Warriors, even as he expressed indifference about ever returning to the game. He was suspended and lost his salary.

For many people, Mr. Sprewell's behavior fit an obvious category: black hostility toward whites. When I told Mr. Della Femina that he was judging Mr. Sprewell on the basis of one piece of data, he said, "I had only one piece of data on O.J. Simpson, too." On the And 1 Web site, "JoCouch" said the Sprewell ad was "the equivalent of putting O.J. on for a knife commercial." Some of these judgments are voiced by black people. At the Dean Street Cafe the other night, a young black man from Queens told me that he was disturbed when the Knicks traded for Mr. Sprewell.

"But when I saw him on television, I saw that he was well-spoken. He didn't talk like he was on the street," the man said. "Still, if I choked my boss, would I still have a job?"

No. But neither did Latrell Sprewell. This is a crucial element of the idea of Sprewell. He is post-O.J. O.J. surely had the impulse to confess. In a jailhouse interview with Rosie Grier, the minister and former football star, O.J. is said to have confessed and asked Mr. Grier what to do. Mr. Grier told him that he must acknowledge the crime and beg forgiveness. O.J. never took this advice. No, we live in a legalistic society where people like Alan Dershowitz exist to beat raps. So O.J. won his case-and has become a burnt shell of a human being. But Mr. Sprewell confessed, and was punished severely. While he is still suing the National Basketball Association and the Warriors (saying he should get back all but $1 million of the $6.4 million he lost), his story is the opposite of O.J.'s.

The latent racism in Latrell Sprewell's treatment is the refusal to allow him to get past a crime he paid for. "If Latrell Sprewell was white, would his punishment be different?" asked "CP" on And 1's Web site, not long ago. "Ernesto R" responded that the punishment might have been the same, but the media coverage "would have died out really fast." The New York Times has at times been punitive, characterizing his play as "dysfunctional." Mike Wise's story on Mr. Sprewell in the May 2 Times Magazine said that Mr. Sprewell's contemptuous behavior justified the "worst thoughts" about his character, a miasma that he implied had swallowed the team's championship hopes. (Mr. Wise manfully recanted this story in the June 13 Times .)

Younger students of basketball have tended to see Latrell Sprewell in a much less threatening context. They look past the anger and see the skills, an open-court throwback to Elgin Baylor, a work-ethic defensive player who does everything that coaches teach in Catholic Youth Organization leagues.

"I was at the Garden when I saw on the Jumbotron that his hobby is fixing old stereos," Tony Gervino, the editor of Slam magazine, said. "I got a chuckle out of that. Is he a violent threat like America thinks, or a very intense athlete, like Ty Cobb? There was no one more intense than Ty Cobb. Cobb was a maniac. But he's also an American hero."

Larry Platt, the author of Keepin' It Real, A Turbulent Season at the Crossroads With the N.B.A. , said that Mr. Sprewell is in a post-Jordan category, indeed a category made possible by Michael Jordan, of hard-working capitalists who are determined to maintain their character even as they try and build economic empires to rival Michael Jordan's.

"It used to be that black athletes had to be made palatable to be marketed," Mr. Platt said. "In the 70's, Julius Erving said 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir,' in a dutiful way, and shaved his Afro when he opened a shoe store. Not long ago, Fila presented Grant Hill in a tuxedo and tap shoes. Well, you will never see Allen Iverson or Latrell Sprewell lose the cornrows to appease white businessmen. Mr. Iverson just fired David Falk, the man who created the Jordan crossover. He said, 'I felt like I was the prey.'"

Mr. Platt said the culture clash of N.B.A. locker rooms these days is between older white sportswriters who are used to the Jordan paradigm-a politically savvy black man, exchanging goods, services and smiles with the majority society-and younger athletes who see their place in that society as more established, less color-coded.

Seth Berger, the president of the shoe company And 1, agreed. He said that music television created a youth market in which blacks and whites are surprisingly indifferent to color. "It's a race-neutral culture that is open to endorsers and heroes that look different," he said. "These people are comfortable with tattoos and cornrows."

And 1 is a multiracial company in suburban Philadelphia (it has black and white partners; one of its white partners is married to a black woman). It started by selling T-shirts that glorified trash talk; in Mr. Sprewell it saw a player with "mad skillz," to use the hip-hop term for creative game. After the choking incident, Converse promptly dropped Latrell Sprewell as an endorser. And 1 partners called friends in the league, and reached a sympathetic view of the case: Mr. Sprewell is a hard-working, independent player who had been provoked. And 1 offered to pick him up at once. His agent said it wasn't time.

Then on April 19, Mr. Sprewell signed with the company. "Latrell said to me, 'My gosh, this is more than an apparel company. This is a company that understands me. Its ideology reflects mine. We can grow together,'" said Robert Gist, Mr. Sprewell's agent and one of his lawyers. "Their feeling is, 'Let's sell Latrell.' We don't want a better image, we want Latrell's image, because we know people will accept Latrell for who he is. It's not a management image or a corporate American image."

That was the whole point of the American Dream ad. "If you have a problem with this, then your problem is you," Seth Berger explained. And 1 made the commercial in the last week of the season, when it became apparent that the Knicks were going to squeak into the playoffs. "We decided on a Thursday and met Latrell on Friday in the locker room at the Garden, after the Knicks played the Celtics," Mr. Berger said. "It was shot that weekend."

The Miami ad firm of Crispin Porter and Bogusky made the ad in around four days, for about $80,000. Alex Burnard, the firm's art director, said the script was specifically intended not to "give him a second chance" but to let Mr. Sprewell say who he is. "We weren't trying to go, here we have a basketball player with a sketchy past, we want to fix him. But we have a powerful person, show him in his true light." Thought was given to staging the ad in a barbershop, before a more personal space was used: Mr. Sprewell's hotel room, in Westchester County. "It was always going to be 'The Star-Spangled Banner' or 'God Bless America,'" Mr. Berger said. But Mr. Burnard said they wanted to recall the shocking effect that Jimi Hendrix had had. Why did they use a blues guitarist to "funk up" the anthem, and not Hendrix's own licks? "Probably money," Mr. Burnard said.

The ad began running the first day of the playoffs, mostly on Turner Broadcasting, MTV and Black Entertainment Television. It has played only three times on NBC, where 30 seconds costs $200,000. But the message has gone out, drawing enormous hostility. Bill Walton, onetime hippie and NBC commentator, has opined that Mr. Sprewell isn't in Jimi Hendrix's league, and the ad has regularly been attacked by Phil Mushnick of the Post . On the And 1 on-line bulletin board, some people have attacked the ad. "African-American kids are desperate for good role models … Sprewell is the perfect example of what is wrong in our society," said "Michele." Others have lashed back. "Giv it ^," wrote "j-dogg." "Spree got more game than you got remarks. Why ya wastin his flava."

"This is the first time a black athlete has been marketed as a rebel," said Mr. Platt. "Back when Muhammad Ali refused to change, he didn't get endorsements. I think he got one, from D-Con, the roach killer. This reminds me of that rap song, by Nas. 'You can hate me now, because I'm paid.'"

These stars offer glimpses of a race-neutral culture. When the Sacramento Kings dubbed white rookie sensation Jayson Williams "white chocolate," because of his style of play, Mr. Williams rejected the label. "He didn't like the nickname," Mr. Platt said. "He was influenced by black playground legends. I don't think it's colorblindness, but it's a true recognition of meritocracy. One of the new rappers these days is a white kid from Detroit, Eminem, a protégé of Doctor Dre. He owes more to black masters than to Vanilla Ice."

There are rumors of more Sprewell endorsements to come. Mr. Della Femina said a mainstream ad would have to feature P.J. Carlesimo, too. "You can't have the choker without the chokee," he said. Robert Gist, Mr. Sprewell's agent, laughed this off but said that he looks forward to a reconciliation, some day, between the player and coach. Mr. Gist said he has gotten overtures from Calvin Klein and Hugo Boss (Mr. Klein's company denied this, Boss didn't return my call), but now is not the time. Mr. Sprewell has to stay focused on a deal he made with the people of New York. "There was an unconditional acceptance from the fans," Mr. Gist said, "and Latrell has tried to meet their charge: 'We want you to be our next Walt Frazier.'"

Jimi Hendrix died in London just two weeks after Latrell Sprewell was born in Milwaukee. Hendrix was then Latrell Sprewell's current age, 28-29, and I remember lying for hours on the floor of my friend Greg McNair's house, listening to Band of Gypsies, staring at Hendrix's image in posters and album covers.

Greg and I attended a predominantly black high school in Baltimore, but Greg, a middle-class black kid, stood out way more than I did as a privileged white one. He combed his hair out like Hendrix's, wore bell bottoms, tied a bandanna around his knee, played guitar. He stayed at my house and I stayed at his, and the whole white-black thing, the labeling, the difference, so interesting to me, seemed to make Greg weary. He wanted to get past it. That's something that drew him to Hendrix, who came out of a black blues tradition but set about to defy labels. "I'm going to wave my freak flag high," Hendrix said.

Today, a broad band in the culture wants to get past it, to be freaks, capitalists or something else. The economic boom and Bill Clinton's policy of inclusion have brought the American dream alive for black Americans. That dream turns out to be the same one that Jews-Jewish writers, artists, doctors-had 40 and 50 years ago: the dream of the end of the ghetto.

The last night of the semifinals at the Dean Street Cafe, I was stunned by the Americanness of the people around me. When the black crowd started chanting, as one, the Knicks slogan, "Go New York, Go New York, Go," it was a far cry from the fabulously menacing cheers my high school teammates and I used to chant when running off the bus at white schools. When Reggie Miller missed a shot, and the crowd started chanting, "Reg-gie Sucks," they were as dorky as suburban white kids.

The game ended. Latrell Sprewell ran around the Garden floor thanking the fans who had supported him. Nearby me, a young black man went up to the bar. "Hey, put on that record, 'New York, New York,'" he said. "By Frank Sinatra. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere."