The Basketball Diaries: The Classic about Growing Up Hip on New York's Mean Streets

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MacAdams, Lewis (September 16, 2009). "Remembering Jim Carroll". The Los Angeles Times . Retrieved December 18, 2012. The Basketball Diaries dissects the complexities of addiction and provides a brutally honest narrative on the challenges teens face in a rapidly evolving sociocultural landscape.

Carroll describes how he hustles homosexuals for money, and he says that his hustles have gotten weird lately. He and several friends find a half-dead, naked woman who has committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Carroll describes the bathroom at Grand Central Terminal, where men from all walks of life go to look at other men and masturbate. He recalls the first time he saw transvestites naked, when he was about nine years old. He talks about his fear of atomic war. Carroll and his friends get high and steal food from a restaurant. He gets high on a train and becomes paranoid that the other passengers are going to throw him off. He gets a case of gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, and goes to an underground doctor in Harlem to get a shot and some pills. He realizes that he is not in control of his growing heroin addiction, but he says that he better get in control if he wants to do well in school and basketball. He hung out in Greenwich Village and went to a poetry reading with Carroll, basically living out Goluboff's fantasies. 7. THERE WAS A DRUG CONSULTANT ON SET. Jim Carroll, a talented writer and poet, masterfully weaves his pain, confusion, and despair into vivid diary entries. The raw, unpolished style resonates with readers, giving them glimpses into the harsh realities faced by rebellious youths in 1960s America.

Goldman, Marlene (January 8, 1999). "Mercury Rising (1999) – Jim Carroll Interviews". CatholicBoy.com . Retrieved December 18, 2012. After working as a musician, Carroll returned to writing full-time in the mid-1980s and began to appear regularly on the spoken-word circuit. Starting in 1991, Carroll performed readings from his then-in-progress first novel, The Petting Zoo. [12] On the other hand, supporters argue that the book presents a realistic depiction of the horrors associated with addiction and the destructive path it potentially leads to, thus serving as a stark deterrent.

However, it also during this time that I have to question the veracity of some of Carrol’s adventures. I’m not going to say they never happened. But, I will be skeptical of how they happened. You see, to me, a diary is only the rebirth of previous memories. Sometimes these memories are shrouded in the fog of time; sometimes these memories have been tinkered with and are no longer a memory of what happened as they are a memory of what has been reconstructed. Regardless, Carrol’s memories of this time evoke a sense of innocence that is about to be corrupted in a manner that can never be uncorrupted. James Dennis Carroll (August 1, 1949 – September 11, 2009) [1] was an American author, poet, autobiographer, and punk musician. Carroll was best known for his 1978 autobiographical work The Basketball Diaries, which inspired a 1995 film of the same title that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll, and his 1980 song "People Who Died" with the Jim Carroll Band. Carroll accidentally exposes himself during a basketball game. He starts hanging around Headquarters, an apartment that hosts all of the local drug users. He drinks codeine cough syrup to get high. He describes his recurring fantasy about shooting a machine gun in class. He goes to a Communist Party meeting but is not impressed. He steals money from the wrestling team. Carroll and some of his team members take drugs that severely affect their game performance. And as I sit here and type this review, I am still contemplating the last sentence of his diary. What does it mean? Was it his last confession? Did he know that his life was only going to get darker and decide that the reader was no longer invited on his journey? It was written in the summer of ’66 after Carrol had lost almost everything. “I just want to be pure…” he says. Carroll was born to a working-class family of Irish descent, and grew up in New York City's Lower East Side. When he was about 11 (in the sixth grade) his family moved north to Inwood in Upper Manhattan. [2] He was taught by the LaSalle Christian Brothers. In fall 1963, he entered Rice High School in Harlem, but was soon awarded a scholarship to the elite Trinity School. [2] He attended Trinity from 1964 to 1968. [3]a b Ebert, Roger. "The Basketball Diaries Movie Review (1995)". Chicago Sun-Times– via www.rogerebert.com.

PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Basketball_Diaries_-_Jim_Carroll.pdf, The_Basketball_Diaries_-_Jim_Carroll.epub The controversy surrounding The Basketball Diaries pushes us to reflect on literature’s role in shaping societal understanding and empathy. Educational institutions have been at the forefront of banning the book. For instance 1994, the book was removed from middle school libraries in Dade County, Florida. The explicit sexual content and depiction of substance abuse were claimed to be leading adolescents astray. When they first told me it was gonna be Leo, I didn't know who he was," Carroll told The Los Angeles Times. "If they'd said the kid from Growing Pains, I would have known, because when I first saw that kid, I said, 'This kid has a lot of presence.' I said, 'That kid is very pretty. He's gonna do well.'" 5. MARK WAHLBERG HAD TO READ FOR THE PART SIX TIMES BECAUSE DICAPRIO DIDN'T WANT HIM IN IT. As the movie opens, Jim ( Leonardo DiCaprio) is on the basketball team at St. Vitus High School in New York, where a perverted priest salivates while spanking naughty students with a big paddle and the rest of the class watches. This scene owes more to Victorian pornography than to any actual parochial school in 20th century America, but no matter: The message, I guess, is that the teachers are such hypocrites you might as well go out and destroy yourself.a b c Mallon, Thomas (December 6, 2010). "Off the Rim: Jim Carroll's "The Petting Zoo" ". The New Yorker. New York City: Condé Nast. pp.90–93 . Retrieved December 27, 2010.

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES takes Carrol from Harlem to Manhattan to Riker’s Island and everywhere in between. This is so much more than a story about being a junky or a disenchanted street kid from New York; this is a story about loss and real-life, about hope and the everlasting truth that hope is sometimes only found in the minds of those that are still crazy enough to believe in it; it is about finding the apparition of happiness within a world of phantoms.

Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four. Ebert remarked: "At the end, Jim is seen going in through a 'stage door' and then we hear him telling the story of his descent and recovery. We can't tell if this is supposed to be genuine testimony or a performance. That's the problem with the whole movie." [3] Lawsuits [ edit ] Carroll has another classroom-shooting fantasy. He says his fear of atomic warfare has lessened but that he is still paranoid. He talks about his experiences during the National High School All Star Basketball Game, when he is groped by Benny Greenbaum, a homosexual college scout. Carroll explains his passion for writing about New York. Carroll describes what it is like shooting up and says that it is getting hard to concentrate on his writing. Carroll’s drug habit continues to affect his basketball performance. He talks about an older woman with whom he has been having an affair; the rich divorcée pays for his drug habit and in return she makes him engage in abnormal sexual acts. Carroll talks about a junkie friend who is in prison for two years. Carroll and a friend get swindled by a drug dealer. Carroll buys heroin from a new dealer and begins to like the vomiting that comes as a side effect. He finds out that one of his old friends is in prison for a drug-related murder. Carroll gets sent to Riker’s Island Juvenile Reformatory for three months for heroin possession.