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Using Game Theory against Dew-Flavored Kool-Aid

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Last Friday, my friend Dennis took me down to the parking lot of the HP Pavilion to check out The Roots. Actually, that’s not quite right. It was the Dew Action Sports Tour, featuring The Roots playing out back after all the BMX jumping was over. I’d never been to one of these action sports thingies, so I was curious to see what I’d find there. Apparently ?uestlove and company were in the same boat; The Roots’ official page on MySpace didn’t bother list this gig in their Upcoming Shows. And right there that was a big Hmmmmm. Was this something they weren’t particularly proud of?

Every last square inch of the parking lot was branded. There was no entertainment that didn’t have a logo on it, ranging from the obvious (Schwinn) to the ominous (Toyota Land Cruisers) to the downright bizarre (an inflatable jumpie — brought to you by US Air Force recruiters). There was nothing in the least edgy about this set-up, even though it was sold as the theoretical edge of American youth culture. Hardly anybody was drunk or otherwise messed-up. Having missed Burning Man the week before, I could only think that somehow I’d fallen into its evil doppelganger.

After the extremely loud BMX event ended, we were herded off into another corner of the lot to face a stage and a huge branded TV screen. After a few moments, opener Dilated Peoples appeared. Featuring a white guy, an dreaded Afro-American guy and an Asian-American DJ, the Peoples gave the impression that if they did not already exist, they would have been invented by a Dew Action Sports marketer for just such an occasion. With songs that stayed relentlessly on the positive tip, the crowd loved them, but I thought they were bland at gest. It didn’t help that that the DJ totally blew his obligatory spotlight scratching and then blamed it on the wind. They also made the opening act cardinal sin of running overtime, which seems particularly egregious for a hip-hop group that really should know exactly the length of every song they play. Song lengths aren’t going to vary performed in front of a programmed beat track.

After a brief delay, The Roots tookthe stage, all business, no chattiness. Opening with “Here I Come” off super-dope new album Game Theory, The Roots did not stop for their entire 50-minute set. They were tight, charismatic and entertaining, and are touring behind their strongest album in several years. But it was just too weird to hear these songs in this place.

Dew Action Sports I guess I have to give credit to The Roots for seizing the opportunity to go where the money and the audience are. This was the second time I’d seen them at a presumably poorly-paying festival situation, the first being when they played the “Other Stage” at Moby’s tour several years ago. (Remember Moby, anyone?) Nevertheless, it was surprising to see them doing their conscious-hip-hop-meets-The-Meters thing surrounded by logos and product placement and more logos. And they certainly got their message out to a diverse audience of kids in an environment that was non-threatening (if you find conspicuous consumption non-threatening). But if this is the future of concert-going — and mass-market entertainment in general — something has been lost. It’s not news that major music label artists are no longer counter-cultural, but until recently at least they tried to pretend.

But the kids at the show, many with their parents, did get to see a great live band doing edgy material in a safe, sober place — and that you can’t fault. Will they know quality & authenticity when they see it or does the uber-marekting context ultimately defeat it?

MP3: The Roots – Here I Come

The Onion AV Club interviews ?uestlove
Metacritic: Everybody Loves Game Theory (except the NYT)

Posted in Culture, Music - Current, Music - Live Testimony | No Comments »

Mourn The Loss, Find The Center

Monday, September 11th, 2006

MP3 – John Adams: On The Transmigration Of Souls (34.4 MB)

http://entroporium.com/mp3/01%20On%20the%20Transmigration%20of%20souls.mp3

From Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul:

Ours is a time of connection. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted.

Foreign Policy: The Day Nothing Much Changed

[I]f you look closely at the trend lines since 9/11, what is remarkable is how little the world has changed. The forces of globalization continue unabated; indeed, if anything, they have accelerated. The issues of the day that we were debating on that morning in September are largely the same. Across broad measures of political, economic, and social data, the constants outweigh the variations. And, five years later, the United States’ foreign policy is marked by no greater strategic clarity than it had on Sept. 10, 2001…. Perhaps the truest thing that changed because of 9/11 was the way in which the Pentagon’s budget soared.

From In The Shadow Of No Towers by Art Spiegelman: Art Spiegelman - In The Shadow Of No Towers

Martin Amis reminds us in The Guardian that the Iraq War may be but a distraction to the war in which we have been engaged:

Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven’t managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion… Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason… The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation – it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.

Posted in Body Politic, Music - Current | No Comments »

Pitchfork’s Top 200 Singles of the 60�s, downloadable

Sunday, September 10th, 2006

Ordinarily I’d be ho-hum about this sort of thing. I mean, do I really need to hear any of these again? But yesterday I listened to Aquarium Drunkard’s curated podcast of Pitchfork’s list and found myself enraptured. It’s amazing how solid an oldies station can be when you hack the treacle off of it.

I missed the original posting of the MP3s at Dogs Are For Blogs, but Plays My Cards Right re-posted them all with (bless him) all the tags fixed! That just saved me four hours of tweaking out on something I’ll use three-times ever. Play My Cards Right / Pitchfork Top 200 of the 60’s

One note of caution: The files are hosted in three parts at Sendspace, which may require some patience on your part.

Posted in Music - Retro, Podcasts | No Comments »

Roll On You Bears?

Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

Today presents a challenge to my core identity. I’ve been attending Cal games since I was a wee cub of six. That’s thirty-three years (cough) of futility. Not totally futility, mind you — there have been a few bowl games and good years — but thirty-three years without playing in the Rose Bowl or BCS game, winning the conference, or generally having a reason to look forward to New Years Day.

This is not a matter of simple alma mater loyalty; this is something I’ve done my whole life. Everything I learned about humility I learned from Cal football.

It wasn’t just me; it was the whole fan base. The oft-proferred line about Cal — at least when things were going poorly — was that its alumni would rather be proud (and beat Stanford) than become a so-called major program.

But this year looks different. Very different. Not only is Cal ranked in the Top Ten to start the season and opening its season at a bona fide "football school" (Tennessee), but ESPN analyst Lee Corso predicted Cal to win the national championship! This, dear readers, is crazy stuff. Cal hasn’t even got to the Rose Bowl since 1959, many years before my parents were thinking that sex was something they could do.

A national championship simply does not compute. It does not map to my self-image, to root for a team that can and will win. It used to be that I went to Memorial Stadium each week wondering how we’d find a way to lose. Now I have the neurosis of the winner — "Which game is the one where we slip and fall?" Instead of worrying about whether we’ll beat Stanford, my attention turns instead to "How much do we need to beat Portland State by to keep the East Coast writers from doubting the Bears? If we don’t win by 35 points, will it hurt our standing in the computer rankings?" I’m not certain that this is an improvement, fandom-wise.

There are cultural issues to think of, too. I’ve been very happy with the ramshackle stadium and the relatively low-key games. (Note the picture above; that’s the highly successful 1975 team upsetting USC at home. The stands in the background are pretty much empty.) I don’t want to be Texas with the world’s largest HDTV or the Florida teams with their absurd fan rivalries. Or, god forbid, USC with its traveling squad of weirdly mindless fans led by 5,000 band members playing one song over and over. (Cal fans have found ways to get back at idiot Trojans over the years.)

But unfortunately this is what it takes to be a top program in today’s major collegiate athletics. Today we stare into the abyss, sing our fight songs and hope we don’t lose our selfhood along the way.

UPDATE: So much for that. Jake Curtis at SFGate still thinks Cal has room for hope. One friend said that we had to break our "culture of losing" and then in the same breath said that we didn’t really want the national championship, just the Rose Bowl. Sounds like a contradiction to me, but I guess that’s we’ll have to do to break up this culture one step at a time.

Posted in Essays, Sporting Life | No Comments »

In Praise Of The Roads Not Taken

Friday, September 1st, 2006

On a week when my home state has signed into law one of t he world’s most sweeping environmental policies, it’s fitting to take a brief look at one of San Francisco’s other major contributions to the greening of America. This one, though, took place over 50 years ago.

In the early 1950s, the California Division of Highways was loving its job. Combined with President Eisenhower’s push for the Federal Interstate system — partly for commerce and partly for Cold War homeland security — the nation’s freeway planners were give virtual free reign to plan whatever they wanted. Treating the nation’s communities as if they were networks of Fisher-Price toys scattered on their bedroom floor, the planners looked at every possible throughway and connection point as a place to run a freeway.

By 1959, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, Mayor Alioto and several neighborhood groups had turned back many of the most megalomaniacal plans, including turning Van Ness into an elevated freeway, running expressways along either side of Golden Gate Park, and wrapping a road through Fishermen’s Wharf to connect the Bay Bridge & Golden Gate Bridge. Nevertheless, it was too late to stop the Embarcadero Freeway, but the 1989 earthquake took care of that road at least.

SF vets like myself will attest that the City was indeed easier to get around with the Embarcadero Freeway and the on-ramp at Golden Gate & Gough, but I’m sure we’d all say also agree that what’s been gained by their removal — the return of the Embarcadero Promenade and Hayes Valley, respectively — is a trade we’d make any day. Almost as if The Wizard Of Oz himself ordained it, those areas went from depressing and grey to lively and technicolor within months of the removal of the oppressive elevated throughways.

Perhaps California’s new emissions law will all turn out to be ineffectual in the end. As the Chronicle points out today, if California is able to achieve the targets in this week’s legislation, the world’s carbon emissions will be reduced by only .5%. (California, the world’s 12th largest economy, makes 2% of Earth’s emissions; the state seeks to reduce by 25%.) The Law of Unintended Consequences always lurks; the dismantling of CDH’s original SF freeway plan may have done more to encourage urban sprawl in the Bay Area than to end it, thereby driving up California’s fuel usage and air pollution levels.

But try to imagine San Francisco today with all those freeways. It would not be worth living in or visiting. It would not be a great city.

So today I’m damn proud of my state for taking on a leadership role in the fight against Global Warming. And (dare I say it) I’m thrilled for the bravery of my term-limited Legislature and Governor to push through Green laws that could help make the world a better, healthier place, even though it could hurt the State’s economic growth in the short-term.

San Francisco CITYSCAPE – Freeway Revolt Map
BikeSummer – The Freeway Revolt

Posted in Essays, Oakland & The Bay Area | No Comments »

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