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I can still remember watching Strawberry during batting practice at Shea shortly after his rookie callup, in 1983. Only 21 years old, he had a dazed look in his eyes, as if he wasn't exactly sure how he'd ended up in New York City. That expression went from vulnerable to hangdog over the years, as the fans turned on him, mockingly chanting "Darrr-ylll" in a Nelson Muntz singsong. Like Michael Jackson, Linsey Lohan, or Britney Spears, he grew up in public. When it falls apart for somebody like that, I find it hard not to, well, blame the public, myself included - hey, I may not read Perez Hilton, but I do watch Best Week Ever, which launders celebrity rumors just as newscasts launder Matt Drudge's political snark.
In the classic Simpsons baseball episode, the opposing fans go into the "Darrr-ylll" chant when Strawberry steps to the plate. A teammate comments that Strawberry's a professional, so it'll roll right off him - then we cut to Strawberry, a single tear trickling down his face. I always thought that joke held more truth than we fans would like to admit. (Actually, that whole episode is worth rewatching - remember Ken Griffey's "grotesquely swollen head"? In the show, it's caused by drinking too much of a Springfield patent medicine, but after all we've learned about the changes in Barry Bonds's hat size, it comes off a lot differently today.)
Some people just aren't built for the media glare. From George Foster to Ed Whitson to Chuck Knoblauch to Roberto Alamar to Jeff Weaver, many established vetrans come to New York and wilt. I guess that means they "don't have what it takes," compared to the heroes with icewater in their veins, like Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. But every player - every person - is a bundle of strengths and limitations. Jeter doesn't have great range at short. Mo can't get through a season any more without a few trips to the DL. And some players just don't click with the hyperactive media culture of New York City. (I guess I can relate - I lived in NYC for one year after college, then hightailed it to grad school in North Carolina.) Those players probably just shouldn't play in markets where dozens of reporters hound you after every game when you're just trying to clean up and go home - just as righthanded pull hitters like Don Baylor probably shouldn't play in a ballpark that's 430' to left center. Paul O'Neil, a lefty who thrives under pressure, was a much better fit.
Savvy management maximizes its players' strengths and minimizes their weaknesses, while keeping its eye on the long term. But Strawberry and Gooden were just squeezed for everything they had, future be damned - Doc's arm was never the same after he'd pitched a boggling 35 complete games by the age of 21.
Stawberry told Klapisch that he helps autistic children because they "have that pain in their eyes that I can relate to." I think that's the look I saw in Strawberry's eyes back in 1983. I'm so glad to hear that after years of injury, addiction, and a battle with cancer, he's finally in such a good place. And when I hear about Gooden, I feel sorry - and guilty.
]]>"The Angels know who they got in Torii Hunter -- a man who drips energy and preaches hope and potential. There are numbers that will quantify what Hunter is or isn't worth, just as there are politicians who try to tell us that "experience" is far more important than the foundation of hope and potential. Those numbers don't matter as much as Hunter's ability to energize and inspire his teammates, with character that cannot be quantified."
As an Obama fan, I'm tickled, but I'm perturbed to see him equated with an aging, overpriced outfielder, however much of a mensch Hunter is. Who does that make Hillary - maybe an uninspiring sabermetric fave like Jack Cust?
]]>You can read my essay on the original "1984" ad here.
]]>Freston got canned after the MTV Music Video Awards continued their ratings freefall this year, while MTV's web offerrings got their clocks cleaned by "Web 2.0" social networking juggernauts MySpace and YouTube. Christgau got axed after the Village Voice was sold to an alternaweekly chain desperately trying to compete with craigslist's free classified ads.
The old frameworks for making sense of pop culture are starting to collapse. Pop's presumed market of scarcity - only a handful of songs can make it to heavy rotation, only a handful of artists can become stars - is being overwhelmed by an information explosion. On MySpace, thousands of local band listings sit side by side with Paris Hilton promotions - and Paris needs the locals more than they need her. No one indie band has the reach of a pop star, but it's the community they've built that brings eyeballs to Paris's page. Meanwhile, viewers are tuning out TV channels and becoming their own programmers on YouTube.
The demassification of American popular culture continues. Every year, the big networks lose ground to cable, while the big cable channels lose ground to the profusion of newer digital channels. The big record labels' sales shrink, while the global jukebox becomes available on all-you-can-download subscription services like Rhapsody. Radio listeners abandon terrestrial's shrunken playlists for Sirius and XM. "The Long Tail" grows ever longer.
Which explains not only Freston's departure, but perhaps Christgau's, too. When the mainstream dissolves, how do we define the margins? If there's no longer such a thing as pop, how can there still be punk?
Christgau himself was never an indie snob - he's always had the open-earedness to praise a big star like Garth Brooks if he thought the music earned it. And I'm sure he'll land on his feet - some smart publication should grab him for some instant hipster credibility. Freston, I'm not so sure about, although I'm confident his parachute was much more golden than Christgau's. But the real question is what comes next.
Pop Culture 2.0 no longer needs a lowest common denominator. Traditional media companies are always out to score a blockbuster, because it's so much more efficient to sell one product to one million customers, rather than a thousnd products to a thousand customers each. But to MySpace, it's all the same. They make their money off ads, and a million pageviews is a million pageviews, no matter how they're sliced up. In fact, better they be a thousand different pages with a thousand viewers each - all the more room for growth. Finally, the economics are on the side of cultural diversity.
That doesn't mean they'll stay that way. I'm sure that Fox, which bought MySpace, would love to see it simply replace MTV as pop's top tastemaker. But I doubt we'll ever again see the kind of teen monoculture I lived through in the 1980s. There's just too much cool stuff out there to listen to. Christgau's the one who taught me that. And now everybody's figuring it out.
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The above scene went down at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which is an amazing zoo/arboretum/natural history museum outside of Tucson, Arizona. It has a spectacular selection of plants, animals, and artifacts, all displayed in their natural habitats under minimum confinement.
We watched the staring contest for a good ten minutes, but it was likely to keep going all day, until more substantial bobcat-food arrived and the squirrel could make a clean getaway. The focus of the standing bobcat was just incredible - that little squirrel was clearly the most interesting thing he'd seen in a long time. If you can't make out the second bobcat, check out the larger version of the photo here.
I've posted more photos from the desert museum on my main Flickr page, including some shots of an Ocelot guarding his water bowl in a manner familiar anyone who lives with felines.
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KT and I encountered this guy in the middle of "Cowpies," one of the many stunnning trails among the spectacular red rocks of Sedona, Arizona. We're in the middle of a two-week jaunt through the west, with stops in Las Vegas, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, Sedona, Phoenix and Tuscon. I've put up many more travel photos on Flickr.
Sedona's an amazing place, where the desert meets the mountains. In one hike, you can walk from lizards and cacti to alpine forests - all under the shadows of those luminous red rocks.
There's definitely a special kind of energy in Sedona. Our hotel was nestled among the rocks, and on the last morning I woke up at 6:30 so brimming with vitality I ended up taking a two-hour pre-breakfast hike through the canyon. Those of you who know me know how out of character it is for me to even get out of bed before noon.
Sedonans have concluded that the place is full of what they call "vortexes" - sites where the earth's energy is especially concentrated. The purported precise locations of the vortexes were first mapped out by a local psychic in 1980. Surprisingly, they're all conveniently located within short walks of trailhead parking lots - which may say more about her lack of interest in hiking than in the dynamics of local energy flows.
We had a fantastic tour gide in Sednoa, Dennis Andres, also known in town as "Mr. Sedona." In his invaluable, BS-free guide, What Is a Vortex?, Dennis concludes it may make more sense to consider the entire city one giant vortex, rather than splitting hairs over which spots count as vortex sites. A globetrotting hiker, he compares the energy in Sedona to Peru's Macchu Picchu, California's Mount Shasta, and Mount Everest.
Not surprisingly, Sedona's become a New Age magnet in recent years, leading to traffic, inflation, and a truly boggling number of crystal stores. Land is being gobbled up by rich vacationers, yuppie dropouts, and speculators, As Dennis explains, the top four professions in Sedona today are psychic, jeep tour driver, realtor, and psychic jeep-tour-driving realtor. Out of a population of 10,000, there are 400 reiki healers.
Not to knock Sednoa reiki healers - I had a session the night I got into town that blew my mind. That Sedona energy is powerful stuff, however fuzzy the rhetoric and kitschy the marketing. After three days, I was ready to take a vacation from my vacation, and bring my chi back to more familiar levels. But I'll be back.
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I came in third my first year, but it's been downhill ever since. This year's a real tricky one to predict - I'm very confident in Superman Returns at #1, but after that, it's a real crapshoot.
The ballots were due on May 15, but movies released before then still count. So, we were all able to take into account the disappointing openings of MI:III and Poseidon. I've concluded audiences this year are unmotivated to rush to the theaters for bigger, louder sequels and remakes, figuring they can eventually catch them on DVD. But everybody needs a summer movie fix eventually, so I'm betting on Superman Returns as the movie that brings the nation together, Da Vinci Code as the must-see object of controversy, and Cars as the kids' movie adults enjoy too. (I guess Superman Returns is kind of a remake/sequel, but the previews suggest Brian Singer's produced a fresh take on the material - an idealistic antidote to our ugly era.)
On the other hand, I almost always underestimate the power of the mediocre sequel - junk like Rush Hour 2 and Austin Powers 3 have been my undoing, year after year. But some years, the audience does rebel. So far, this is looking like one of those years.
Not that my entry is full of European art flicks. Here's my complete list:
1. Superman Returns
2. The Da Vinci Code
3. Cars
4. Pirates of the Caribbean II
5. X-Men III
6. Mission Impossible III
7. Click
8. The Break-Up
9. The Lake House
10. Nacho Libre
We also get to pick three "dark horses":
Talladega Nights
Little Miss Sunshine
A Scanner Darkly
And we each pick a catchphrase every year. This year, mine comes from blockbuster savant George Lucas. According to Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, it's the only direction he ever gave them on the set: "Faster, more intense."
All the summer movie pool results since 2002 are online here. You'll just have to take my word for it that I finished in the money in 2001.
UPDATE: I take it back. Complete top finishers since the pool's start back in 1994, including corroboration of my 2001 finish, are available on this Hall of Fame page.
]]>Hey - why don't the Dems take a page from the playbook of their trial lawyer benefactors, and make it all or nothing for consultants? 33% if they win, zilch if they lose. Maybe then you'd see them go for the jugular more often.
This morass of sleaze and complacency shows why the netroots needs to do more than just raise money for Democratic candidates. All the money Howard Dean raised in 2004 didn't mean much once he hired the same old hacks to make his ads. And why do incompetents like Bob Shrum still have jobs?
We need to be thinking about ways to shake up every aspect of Democratic business as usual. We need to encourage creativity and fresh blood by funding innovative consulting startups. We need to bring the online world's innovation to the hidebound world of political TV advertising. And we need to do it
But don't think it can't be taken away.
Right now, there's a debate in congress over "net neutrality." It's hard to get worked up over something that sounds so technical, but the stakes couldn't be higher.
The end of net neutrality would mean the end of the internet as we know it today in America. The giant corporations which provide internet access to most Americans would be free to sell preferential access to the highest bidder - and to squeeze the bandwidth of the websites that don't pay their protection money.
The internet didn't get the way it is today by accident, or simply because of the "free market." The system was coded - by regulators and technologists - in ways that enforce fair, equal treatment to all speakers. But code can be altered, and don't think big media wouldn't love to see all us uppity bloggers put back in our place, and the net turned from a global public square to just another mass medium.
If you think I'm exaggerating here, check out this shockingly spiteful and incoherent rant from Mike McCurry, onetime Clinton hand, now lapdog for the telcos. (To get some context on McCurry's bewhilderingly aggreived tone, check out Joshua Micah Marshall here, and Adam Green here.)
For more on how net neutrality works, check out this video distributed by MoveOn:
To get involved in this struggle over the future of democratic discourse in the United States, go to savetheinternet.com.
UPDATE: From the New Yorker, here's James Surowiecki on net neutrality. Surowiecki's an extraordinary business writer, and he does a great job of laying out the economics of the conflict, but I think he understates the dangers to democracy posed by the loss of net neutrality. Right now, the internet is America's public square. The end of net neutrality could turn it into a mall.
]]>Although I loved superheroes as a little kid, I actually wasn't a comic book geek in high school. (I was a sports stathead instead, which may be even geekier.) And I got back into comics the wrong way around - in college, rather than moving from the mainstream to the indies, I started with R. Crumb and Los Bros Hernandez, got into Neil Gaiman, and gradually worked my way back to the guys in tights. Today, I find the indie scene disappointingly thin (beyond Carla Speed McNeil's amazing, overlooked Finder), but there's lots of superhero genre stuff I love - especially the work of the astonishingly prolific Brian Michael Bendis, who combines the dialogue skills of David Mamet with the mythographic imagination of Alan Moore. There's a superhero comics renaissance going on, as great writers like Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Kurt Busiek, Warren Ellis, Alan Heinberg, Paul Jenkins, Robert Kirkman, David Lapham, Brian Melzer, Mark Millar, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith, Brian K. Vaughan and Bill Willingham reinvigorate a genre many gave up for dead years - if not decades - ago. Call me old-fashioned, but I still love seeing the classic archetypes put through their paces - and I'm still thrilled when a visionary like Bendis rings some new changes on the old tunes.
For years, I stopped by my local comics shop every Wednesday to pick up new releases. But it closed down a few months ago, leaving the nearest store a little too distant for a regular haul. So, I've started mail-ordering my purchases from an online subscription service, Sci-Fi Genre. It's not the best way to buy comics - I miss the weekly ritual, the browsing, and the overheard debates over whether Picard could take Kirk in a fight - but it's better than waiting a year to get the trade paperbacks on Amazon.
So, here's my current subscription list. It may look like a lot of comics - alright, I admit, it is a lot of comics - but it boils down to about 5-10 issues a week. Since each issue takes about 15-20 minutes to read - more for the talky ones, less for the ones with lots of fights and explosions - that's roughly 2-3 hours of new comic book reading a week, less than the time it takes to watch one baseball or football game. The only problem comes when responsibilities intercede and I start falling behind. Then, catching up can start to seem like work rather than fun, and I end up feeling like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World when he tells Thora Birch, "I hate my interests!"
I'd probably read fewer comics if there were more good SF on TV, or if SF literature weren't currently dominated by the "hard SF" genre, which so often boils down to blowhard scientists with guns. But I'll take my pleasures where I find them.
Ted's Comics Subscription List
Albion
All Star Batman and Robin
American Virgin
Apocalypse Nerd
Astonishing X-Men
Astro City
Battle Pope
Books of Doom
Captain America
Checkmate
Civil War
Colonia
Conan
Daredevil
Dork Tower
Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink
Eightball
Eternals
Expatriate
Fables
Finder
Girls
Hate Annual
Hawaiian Dick
Invincible
Justice
Love & Rockets
Luba's Comics and Stories
Marvel Team-Up
Nat Turner
New Avengers
Palookaville
Polly and the Pirates
Powers
PvP
Queen & Country
Runaways
Shadowpact
Stray Bullets
Superpatriot
True Story, Swear to God
Ultimate Extinction
Ultimate Fantastic Four
Ultimate Spider-Man
Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk
Ultimate X-Men
Ultimates
Usagi Yojimbo
Walking Dead
Wonder Woman
Y: The Last Man
Young Avengers
Gibson's line is one of those sexy aphorisms that crystalizes a whole theory of the relationship between technology and society, like Stewart Brand's famous dictum, "Information wants to be free." But as with Brand's pontification, it conceals as much as it reveals.
What makes Gibson's phrase so appealing is the idea that we can get a grip on what is to come if we just examine today's cutting edge. To understand the future of mobile technologies, study how the hippest teens in Tokyo use IM. To see what ubiquitous broadband produces, go to Seoul. And to see the future of the human species, check out the research at DARPA's hottest labs (as Garreau did).
But there's something suspiciously self-flattering about a theory of history that so easily boils down to, "We technorati are already living in the future; now it's just up to the rest of the world to catch up."
Granted, this smug, monolithic vision of progress isn't an inevitable corollary of Gibson's aphorism. After all, the phrase doesn't specify who's living in the present, and who's living in the future. Perhaps it's Brazil's present that's the future of the USA: increasing stratification of haves and have-nots. Or maybe in a hundred years everybody will decide it's the Amish who really live the good life. We could simply interpret the line to mean, "To understand the possible shapes the future might take, study the range of ways people live today."
But when I actually see Gibson's phrase invoked, it's almost always being used to justify an author's predictions of inevitable social change to be produced by the inexorable forward march of technology. It implies you can't argue with the author's predictions of the future - after all, it's already here. And that's just a new way to justify old-fashioned technological determinism. Garreau's book claims to offer a range of "scenarios" for how the future might look. But what all of them take for granted, despite his protestations, is that the engine of history is technological change, and that such change is continuously accellerating (thanks to Moore's Law, which predicts that the speed of processing power will continue to double every two years for the foreseeable future). Even Garreau's less deterministic predictions start from the premise that humans will have to take strong action to avoid being pulled along by the tidal force of technology.
But Garreau too quickly takes the grand predictions of technologists - both the optimists like Ray Kurzweil and pessimists like Bill Joy - at face value. The past fifty years have seen many, many pronouncements of the inevitability of certain technological developments - from machine sentience to space tourism to the extension of the human life span. Each has been derailed by the irreducible complexity of the real world - by the mystery of consciousness, by the expense of space travel, by the relentlessness of mortality. Instead, the greatest breakthroughs have been in the development of a parallel universe designed precisely to escape the constraints of the material world: cyberspace. Given that track record, I'm skeptical that the next fifty years will see us finally get back to those flying cars and cancer cures we were promised fify years ago.
Moore's Law creates the illusion that technology is speeding forward at a breakneck, ever-accellerating pace. But a few minutes with Windows XP should be enough to shatter that fantasy. Processor power may double every two years, but that doesn't mean software improves at the same rate - or at all. Bloatware can make a Pentium 4 run more sluggishly than my old 386. That's supposed to be a sign of the progress that's going to transform the human species?
I'm being flip, I know. I'm sure we're in for profound changes over the next few decades, many influenced by the emergence of powerful new technologies. And certainly some awesome technologies - nuclear bombs, for one - have the power to radically and quickly transform our globe. But whenever I hear technologists make grand predictions about the future, I always consider how they may be projecting their own fantasies and fears. This is the process I describe in Electric Dreams as the dialectic of technological determinism: using the rhetoric of inevitability as a cover to authorize utopian (and dystopian) speculation. That's fine - by all means, let's talk about what kinds of futures we want to live in. But let's remember that the choice is always up to us. After all, our machines are just extensions of our selves.
The future may well already be here. But nobody can say for sure where it is, or how we'll know it when we see it.
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