Month: September 2012

(NB: Everything posted under these next four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.)

I’d never flown into Nashville.

I didn’t need to in the old days. Three hours tops to drive it, which makes air travel ridiculous to consider. And then, I didn’t have any reason to. So when the undersized plane banked over downtown, the city lights sprinkled against the dusk were shining like diamonds and Vanderbilt Stadium, the first purpose-built football stadium in the South, was lit from all sides. And it was gorgeous. Everything I ever imagined in another life.

Then the rental car and that drive South – and once again, just like the old days, heading to Alabama to deal alone with a badly mentally-unbalanced Southern female. But there’s time to worry about that in the morning. For now, just like before – a dark night, an open road, a full tank of gas and a full bottle of soda.

“Saturn Parkway.” I got a bit of a lump in my throat at that – the car company whose name christened the new road to Spring Hill all those years ago no longer exists. And I’m not driving that Saturn this time. It’s dark, darker than I ever remember it being. In my memory, it was always a full moon and a clear sky full of stars. This time, it’s positively black in every direction. Maybe it’s the hills and the trees and a late-rising waning moon, but for whatever reason, the nighttime dark is more than I expected. The road winds more in the hills approaching the state line. I still laugh at the signs for the World Famous Boobie Bungalow, which apparently has competition from an Adult Book Store across the interstate with faux fireworks over their sign. I wonder if the same economics that affect firework sales across borders apply to vibrators.

I see signs for US 31. I always wanted to do that drive up, instead of taking I-65, but I never did. And this isn’t the time to start. So it’s interstate all the way, across the Alabama border, past the rocket towering in the dark by the welcome center, to stop at the same old Shell station at exit 351 halfway there. Then the bridge over the Tennessee River, the cluster of lights in the distance that suggested some futuristic city or casino or something…even though I’m pretty sure it’s just a refinery of some sort. Then the gas station off the Decatur exit where listening to KMOX on one late-night drive gave me the news that the Los Angeles Rams were relocating.

After that, it’s just a drive. Billboards every mile, no more darkness – the billboard is practically the state tree of Alabama – and I can feel my chest tighten ever so slightly thinking of what the next three days hold. And that’s when the Melissa Etheridge song on the CD of nostalgic 1994 songs comes on, and makes sense to me for the first time.

…this town thinks I’m crazy, they just think I’m strange

sometimes they want to own me, sometimes they wish I’d change

but I can feel the thunder underneath my feet

I sold my soul for freedom 

it’s lonely but it’s sweet…

I’m fifteen years late.

Had fate been different, I would have returned to Dudley Field in September of 1997 for an easy win over Texas Christian.  Or maybe for the Alabama loss.  Instead, I heard the bulk of the Alabama game on the radio and the rest at my uncle’s apartment on ESPN, because I was en route to Arlington to start the next phase of my life.  Somewhere in Chattanooga, I absent-mindedly put my window down for a second, and my Vanderbilt flag went hurtling onto the interstate behind me, never to be seen again.  And the Tide shut out the Dores, 20-0.

Life has a way of being ham-fisted in its symbolism sometimes.

The transformation was rapid and it was complete – and it was disorienting. Now I could follow the Redskins as closely as I’d ever followed the Tide or the Commodores – and easily following my college teams was out of the question.  Riding around listening to a game would mean Sundays.  And there’s very little national run for a team that wins two games a year…so Vanderbilt had to go.  It was Widenhofer, it was VBK, and it was an age of darkness for the black and gold, and I’d just flunked out.  No more homework. No more looming exams judging my future. No prospect for literally writing a book, for making the obligatory original contribution to the literature.  No immortality for my forecasts about the Southernization of American politics.

More to the point: no more late nights in the Overcup Oak, with milkshakes made with three shots of espresso and the grounds dumped right in.  No more steak fajitas and Rolling Rock on the patio at SATCO. No Monday Night Football at the Villager with one of Henry’s po-boys, no more drive-thru McDonalds en route to squatting awkwardly behind the plate at an intramural softball game, no more wandering through the Opryland Hotel in an attempt to clear my mind and escape the growing reality around me.  

And crucially, no more psychopath lurking in Birmingham, keeping me ensnared with guilt and obligation and fear.

It was a pretty clean break, for better or worse.  I would come back to get my diploma (and see my dad for the last time, as it turns out) and get my hair cut by Cheri at Salon FX one last time, but after that, I don’t think I returned to Nashville for five and a half years.  When I did, it was as a thirty year old, established in my new career (and quite successfully) and in the company of my fiancee (in everything but name).  A completely different person walked around campus on that trip, one who was born in DC and forged in a completely different fire, and I felt more awkward than ever about claiming the legacy of the school whose ring sat on my finger as an exercise in advanced degree-laundering and self-validation.

Three years later, over a prolonged weekend and in the wake of some serious nonsense at my undergraduate school, I had a long drawn-out think about who I could legitimately claim and the extent to which I could truly think of myself as a Vanderbilt alumnus.  And I got there in my mind, somehow, and decided that I would embrace it.  Which meant another trip up to buy some more gear, eat at SATCO, and walk around some nine years later convincing myself that it was real, that it actually happened.

That was six years ago.  Only now am I getting back to Nashville. In the meantime, we’ve turned into a top-25 program in many sports, won several conference titles, and I have over four hundred Twitter followers willing to testify to the fact that yes, I am a Vanderbilt man through and through.  And I guess I am.  Not in the way most people get there; mine is a hybrid of sidewalk-alumnus and half-assing my way through grad school attempting to relive college. But I staked myself to it, I have an equity stake in the tribal enterprise, and I’m fully invested – financially and emotionally – in my alma mater.

Now I have to go back. Get to go back, really, with as near to a guarantee of a winning game as exists in college football today.  But I won’t see any of the people I knew back then, with one possible exception that had nothing to do with academia.  Instead, I’m meeting up with a bunch of folks who know me as a Twitter avatar, a paragraph of shtick at Anchor of Gold, a hat-and-sunglassed Instagram picture.  They don’t even know my real name, and I don’t particularly know who they are.  But fair’s fair, because I’m still trying to figure out who I am, too.

I can tell you this for a fact, though : it isn’t the guy who would have shown up in 1997.

“…I’d imagined those shoes. And when you imagine something like that, you imagine a world. You imagine the world those shoes come from, and you wonder if they could happen here, in this world, the one with all the bullshit. And sometimes they can. For a season or two.”

-Meredith, Zero History, William Gibson

So I know I’ve spoken at some length before about wanting things not because you need them, but because you want to need them – whether it’s a Barbour jacket and day pack for me to hike the Cotswold Way in, or for a 100-shot C-Mag drum on a full-auto M4 so Bubba can fight the gay brown liberal hordes threatening his own ignorance – and it occurs to me that once again, William Gibson has stumbled onto something very profound.

So many of the things we want are tendrils of our dreams.  And not just the physical objects, either.  A walk to the Riptide, out at the end of the L-Taraval when the fog is coming on strong, like a visit to a small pocket of some different reality.  A high-speed dash on the Deutsche Bahn from Paris to Munich to Switzerland invites contemplation of a world where extremely rapid rail trumps both air travel and freeway driving as the best way to be whisked long distances. A sit-down at Trials Pub, which has no television to interfere with the background murmur of old 2-Tone, a crackling fire, and the light rail gliding by outside.  Or maybe just the title track from the last album by Madness, “The Liberty of Norton Folgate”.  It is their “A Day In The Life” and it is an amazing madcap wander through centuries of London history…and in the iPhone headphones on a dark evening, it’s enough to make a Timelord of you, stepping in and out of the river of time, “in your second-hand coat, happy just to float”.

Then you have the things themselves, like the steel-toed workboots that I needed when I was having my best year at my best West Coast job in 2006. Couple them with a work jacket to keep off the chill and deflect sparks from the iPad in the shoulder rig out by the smoker on a cold morning, Absolute Radio’s Rock and Roll Football streaming in from London, and it’s like I’m down by the allotment shed practicing my peculiar American hobby before walking out to market with the wife.  Or my peacoat, which I wanted for ten years without thinking exactly why – but realizing now it’s perfect for the Outer Sunset with wind and fog but no rain.  Or the iPad itself under the jacket (or even in a ScottEVest jacket?) and a sturdy pair of boots to use while spending my days wandering around the city, a digital nomad taking in everything around me without having to carry so much as a water bottle.  Or those amber-polarized Ray-Bans, the rose-colored glasses through which I saw so much of 2005 and 2006 and which make the world seem a little better by looking through them.

And I suppose deep down that’s why I want a top-of-the-line smartphone, a good pair of Palladiums and just the right second-hand coat…because at some level I think if I’m dressed for the dream, I can at least walk in its shadow for a little while. 

* Cal won, 50-31, but the score was 20-17 at the end of the 3rd quarter. The Bears are not a good team this year. In fact, based on the current schedule, there’s not another sure win the rest of the way. Road games against Ohio State and USC are next, and on form, it’s pretty much a lock that Cal will come home 1-3 to face the same Arizona State team that beat the hell out of Illinois last night.  It’s looking grim for the Tedford era.

* Vanderbilt’s loss last night was closer than the score indicated, but they got only 10 points off three red-zone drives in the first half – the last one a turnover inside the 10 to end the half. They never recovered.  The offense simply could not get on track – John Donovan’s play calling is coming in for heaps of abuse today – and Jordan Rodgers is just not effective under center.  He ends up running the ball too many times, deliberately or otherwise, and the actual running game with the much-vaunted deep field of running backs has failed to materialize.  At least next week is Presbyterian – as sure a thing as is possible to imagine – and after road tilts at Georgia and Missouri, the schedule begins to soften down the stretch.  Even so, 6-6 may be the best to hope for, and both of Vanderbilt’s recent 6 wins seasons began with a winning streak of at least 3. Overcoming the slow start might be the biggest challenge.

* Robert Griffin III has paid immediate dividends.  7-7 for 123 yards and a touchdown to open his NFL account, the rookie QB finished with over 300 yards passing, two touchdowns, 40 yards rushing and no turnovers (not to mention a passer rating of 139.9). And he delivered all this with a rookie starter at running back (who himself had two rushing touchdowns and almost a hundred yards on the ground).  I can’t remember the last time the Redskins hung 40 points on anyone, let alone on the road, let alone on a team as formidable as the Saints.  It might be time to re-evaluate the long-term prospects for this franchise; eight wins suddenly looks a lot more reasonable with the sloppy game the Eagles put together and the last-place schedule the Skins get to play (starting with the Rams next week).

* First live Vandy game since 1996 in six days. Of which more later.

Forget that the $50 annual LTE data plan only gets you 250MB a month (enough to carry me for a week on a tablet, and worthless for streaming).  Forget that they’ll all have ads on the screen. Forget that the 9-inch model won’t ship until Thanksgiving.  What Amazon announced yesterday demonstrated that they get what tablet computing can do for them and their business.

Amazon forked Android to run their devices.  This was a good move before, when Honeycomb was a big bag of suck. It might not be as necessary now, but Amazon wants a UI optimized for purchasing and consuming media – more than anyone else, they’ve embraced the accusation leveled against tablets in general and the iPad in particular. The Kindle Fire is just fine being a tool for consumption. It wants you to consume, and it wants to sell you things to consume.

Which explains the price point, no doubt made lower by the ads: Amazon can’t be making much money on these things.  The retail cost is mostly commensurate with similar devices, but the specs suggest that the profit margin has been pared down to a nail-clipping.  When Google does this with the Nexus 7, there’s a reason: get a good clean Android tablet experience in front of people as easily as possible. But when Amazon does it, it’s with the confidence that they’ll make it up on sales later.

And they will.  Books, TV shows, movies – all available through the browser, and Amazon Prime streaming is tooling up to take on Netflix (and stands a pretty good chance of doing it).  There is an Amazon App Store, which provides an Apple-esque curated experience and the assurance that you can browse through and all the listed apps will definitely work on your Kindle Fire.  And because the consumption experience is so tightly integrated, there’s the power to do things like X-Ray, in which you watch the movie, say “hey I know that guy”, tap on his face AND GET HIS IMDB INFORMATION.  Amazon’s bringing Augmented Reality to movies.

Some people are comparing Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs.  I think that’s a stretch, but more than anyone else who’s jumped into the tablet game since the iPad, he gets it. He’s not making a tablet for the sake of “we need to make a tablet,” he’s making a tablet that serves his company’s interest and provides a smooth and easy portal into Amazon goods and services for his customers.  Amazon is the first (and to date, really the only) company to meaningfully take advantage of Android’s vaunted “openness” – they’ve used it as a foundation for building an integrated product.  Which is significantly different from “we need a tablet, here’s an operating system that don’t cost nothin’.”

I guarantee you when Apple goes to bed at night, they don’t worry about Samsung at all. They probably don’t worry too too much about Google or Microsoft yet. But they probably sweat the hell out of Amazon. And well they should.

In the mid-90s, Extreme Championship Wrestling out of Philadelphia became famous for its hardcore fans, who packed the ECW arena and were merciless in their critique. When two skilled wrestlers were going at it, they would chant “THIS MATCH RULES.” And when somebody blew their spot or missed a move, they were relentless: “YOU FUCKED UP, YOU FUCKED UP.”

Tonight, the entire political world watched the Big Dog eat one more time, and as one voice they chanted (or ruefully admitted) THIS SPEECH RULES.

Brother Bill’s One Man Traveling Salvation Show rolled into Charlotte tonight, and I say that on purpose. Many policy wonks and those who wished they were have tried to sell their ideas to the American public. Paul Ryan is merely the latest in a long line of smart guys who thought they would sell their plan and people would see how smart they were and go along with it. Ryan suffers partly because his plan is full of shit and falls apart when examined closely, but who on Earth can make people examine it closely? (“Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” hits) OH MAH GOD THAT’S PRESIDENT CLINTON’S MUSIC!!

Because the only three people in the mass media era who could compete with the Arkansas Traveler are all dead in the ground, and I don’t know if Reagan, Churchill or FDR could spend 48 minutes going off script, playing the crowd like a harp, and simultaneously explaining with figures and math just how flawed the other team’s argument was while building a case for his own side. As it is, Clinton’s revival-preacher shtick kept plenty of people sufficiently rapt to hear, digest, and comprehend the case against the GOP and for Obama’s re-election.

And it didn’t necessarily have to go down like this. Much has been made of the gulf between 42 and 44 during the 2008 race and after, and the halting steps to try to come to some sort of reconciliation. But when Team Romney pushed all their chips in on a deceitful ad that tried to tie Romney to Clinton’s welfare reform and paint Obama as undermining it…they made it personal for Bill Clinton. And Bill Clinton is a man who takes everything very, very personally.

So what could have been a perfunctory (by Clintonian standards) routine ego bath and afterthought endorsement (think Chris Christie at Tampa) got turned into a better part of an hour with Bill Clinton, a shotgun, a barrel, and two very slow fish. And he just…kept…shooting.

Tomorrow is another day. Always is. But tonight, the political world looks at Team Romney and chants “YOU FUCKED UP.”

So we have new phones.  Motorols ships their new RAZR line, a whopping 4.7″ display with big ol’ battery to match…and last year’s version of Android.  Google OWNS Motorola Mobility now.  No, seriously, Motorola Mobility is a subsidiary of Google.  So why in the actual fuck is any RAZR shipping with other than Jellybean as the OS?

Once again, the maxim holds true: you buy a Nexus phone so you’ll know what next year’s Android phone is.

Meanwhile, Nokia is already catching hell for faking the video for their image-stabilization demo on what is otherwise an impressive-looking piece of kit, the Lumia 920.  It’s the world’s first Windows Phone 8 device, and that ain’t hay – WP8 is supposed to be the all-everything competitor to Jellybean and iOS6, and Nokia has always known how to make reliable hardware (the 1100 series is still the gold standard for basic phones and owned the developing world for years) so maybe they’ll puzzle it out.  Of course, with the new iPhone right outside the door and no ship date or price info for the Lumia, the odds of jumping much past third place are not too too good.

No announcements today – or lately – from Research In Motion.  Actually, they need to change their name, because as far as the Blackberry is concerned, the wheel may be spinning but the hamster’s deceased.

The announcement dropped yesterday: Apple event, September 12 (I’ll be out of town, time to charge up the iPad) and most significantly a big shadowy 5 at the bottom.  Which means, in defiance of all logic, they’re going to call this thing the iPhone 5 – something I didn’t think possible, something I am sure wouldn’t have happened if Himself were still calling the shots, because this is the SIXTH iPhone. It already has the A5 processor, so it can’t be a reference to that…the only explanation is that they want to get into a rhythm with 3G (the second one; so-called because the iPhone in 2007 was EDGE-only), 3GS, 4, 4S, and now 5…which means 5S in 2013?  Who knows.

I’m going to hold out.  Partly because I’m out of contract and don’t want to commit to anything, partly because I’m seriously considering a carrier change and want to see how performance works out (both between carriers and relative to the 4S), partly because I want to see how good iOS 6 is on the 4S.  And partly because I want to wait for it to show up in the various work contracts so I can ditch my personal phone and let work pick it up from now on (at a net savings to me of $35/month)…

There’s an uneasy sense around Apple these days.  I don’t know if it comes from the clunker of “5”, or if it’s down to the iPad mini that everyone is trying to wish into existence (and feeling like it’s chasing inferior products from Samsung, and only there to cover the niche that the Nexus 7 is blowing up into), or if it’s the new head of retail who is apparently not competent to empty Ron Johnson’s recycling bin – and who has already had to backtrack vigorously from a plan to cut down staffing in Apple stores.  Maybe it’s just unease at the Nexus 7, and the fact that Jellybean is finally a good enough version of Android, and Microsoft is finally back in the game – all of a sudden, the battle is joined, and there’s no longer a sense of inexorability and inevitability around Apple.  The iPhone “5” (sigh) is going to need to bring things back to the cutting edge, or it’s going to be hard to shake the sense that after four unstoppable years, people are beginning to catch up.

So Michelle Obama killed it last night. Not surprising.  She has the highest approval ratings of any figure in American politics, and pretty much every intellectually-honest Republican (read: not tea bagger) will concede that whatever you think of the Obamas and their politics, they have done a fine job raising a family and being parents.  I think the passage of time has made this much easier on Michelle than it was on Hillary.

What was also interesting to me was to see my Vanderbilt football Twitter timeline blowing up with players going off about how great Michelle Obama was, that she should run in 2016, that if all women were like that men would have no shot – and then Josh Grady, the WR/recruiting coordinator from Florida, opined that if you do the math, Romney has no shot, simply because if Obama’s supporters are fired up to turn out the math doesn’t work for the GOP.

And this is why Vanderbilt is the school of brilliance all around – because he nailed something demographers have been pointing out all along.  By 2020, it will no longer be possible to win the White House exclusively with white votes, as Romney/Ryan are attempting to do this year.  Demography alone will either usher in an age of Democratic hegemony or force the GOP to broaden its base and nudge us back toward two broad-based parties.  In other words, exactly what we got in The Emerging Democratic Majority a decade ago.

But our redshirt freshmen wide receivers can intuit this.  Which is why, SEC, we are better than you in every way that matters off the field. =)

Meanwhile, we just have to hang on as a nation for another decade or so without letting the Old Ones run the world into the ground…

So apparently Cal QB Zach Maynard missed a tutoring session this June past.  There were rumblings around the Internet that he might be struggling academically, but throughout the summer and into practice, the coaching staff insisted that Maynard was eligible, that he was the starter, and indeed he took almost all the first-team work leading up to the home opener.

However.

Officially, the timeline goes like this:

JUNE: Maynard misses his tutoring session.  Jeff Tedford makes the decision to suspend him for the first quarter of the home opener.

LAST THURSDAY: Tedford informs Maynard that he will be suspended for the opening quarter of the game, despite his having taken all the first-team reps in practice that week.

LAST FRIDAY NIGHT: Tedford informs the rest of the team, including backup QB Allan Bridgeford, that Maynard will be suspended to open the game and Bridgeford will get the start.

LAST SATURDAY: Maynard is announced as the starter, Bridgeford comes out and plays the first 14 minutes, and in front of a bewildered crowd goes 1-for-8 passing as Nevada runs out to a 14-0 lead ahead of a 31-24 victory over Cal in the re-opening of Memorial Stadium.

It is difficult, in retrospect, to see any way Jeff Tedford could have more thoroughly mishandled the situation. Team discipline did not require keeping the team in the dark. Nor did it require keeping the backup QB in the dark and then throwing him to the wolves.  Or, as I said last December:

Next year: eight wins, victory over at least one of the LA schools, and the Axe. Otherwise, he goes.  Jeff Tedford has already demonstrated he is no longer fit for purpose as head coach of the Golden Bears, and is only spared this year on account of the bizarre circumstances of the season.  But next year’s order is simple: win or you’re gone. Cal can flop without paying two million dollars a year for the privilege.

On balance, it looks like this should be Tedford’s last season.  Based on yesterday’s performance, eight wins seems far too much to hope for.