Kool Thing of the Week #4: Nighttime Music

After going on hiatus last week, Kool Thing is back once again to close out the month of August with a bang (kinda). This week, you should probably check out the new bedtime-relevant Wild Nothing album Nocturne, which will be officially released Tuesday on Captured Tracks. Much like the New York-via-Virginia band’s previous album Gemini, Nocturne sounds a lot like the end of summer/beginning of fall—so its release date is perfectly timed to coincide with the changing of the seasons. As to be expected from this band, the songs here are hazy and shimmery, sounding the way the moonlight looks on the ocean at night. Album opener “Shadow” is probably my favorite cut of the bunch, but the whole album is impressively solid. It’s a very relaxed record—one that I imagine I’ll be listening to quite a bit as we transition into the time of pumpkin beer, falling leaves, and crisp autumn nights. 

Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can stream the album before its release here. 

Oldies Corner

It was a bummer to hear of the passing of Neil Armstrong over the weekend. Being the first human to step foot on the moon is a pretty huge deal, so in memory of Armstrong, here’s the song “The Moon” by Cat Power. This track appeared on The Greatest, which I can barely believe is six years old already. This is also good time to remind you that Cat Power has a new record called Sun due out September 4. Hopefully, that album will contain a song as stunning as “The Moon,” which, with its haunting, nighttime melody, has long been a favorite of mine. So maybe tonight, after it gets dark, you should look up at the moon, turn on this song, and pour one out for Neil Armstrong. Rest in peace.

Carolina Blues: Disillusionment and the Modern Sports Fan

The first time I ever saw Julius Peppers play football was sometime in the fall of 1997. Though I hadn’t heard of Peppers before, my uncle convinced me this guy from Southern Nash High School was going to be a superstar at UNC—my college team of choice—so we needed to check him out. In spite of my nascent adolescent fears about the big, scary world that existed at high school football games, I went, and I stood on hollow, cold, metal bleachers and thought this is what it meant to be growing up. Most of what happened at that game has been lost thanks to the passage of time, but I can still vividly remember how Peppers towered over the opposition (and his own teammates) and basically turned the contest into a one-man show. Even though it’d be years before I enrolled at Chapel Hill, I was thrilled with the prospect of a guy from my own backyard tearing it up on the football field at Kenan Stadium on crisp Saturday afternoons. Once Peppers got to Carolina, I watched from afar as he did indeed become an incredible defensive back for the Heels, earning first team All-America honors his junior season. At 6’7” Peppers was even able to contribute to the basketball team before heading to the NFL, where he’s found a great deal of success. Though I don’t think about Peppers often these days, I still consider him to be a superior athlete and a source of pride for me and my university.

A few nights ago, just before I fell asleep, I found myself straining my tired eyes to view what appeared to be an academic transcript, more than a decade old.  My fatigued brain couldn’t figure out where it had come from and why someone had decided it was a good idea to post it online. As discovered by N.C. State fans and widely disseminated by the News & Observer, the transcript and the downright atrocious grades contained in it ostensibly belonged to Julius Frazier Peppers. As I scoured the list of acronyms and digits, I realized the only classes that provided a lifeboat to the rapidly sinking GPA were in the African and Afro-American Studies department—the same division that has recently been implicated in a far-reaching scheme of conducting dozens of sham courses that either never met or had puzzlingly minimal requirements. The majority of the students in many of these questionable classes were athletes, mostly football players, so questions have naturally arisen as to whether there was some kind of ‘understanding’ between the athletic and AFAM departments to keep athletes eligible. Though the connections between what has taken place as late as 2011 and as early as the late 1990s have not been definitively proven, it seems hard to deny that something was going on. This latest revelation comes on the heels of more than two years of uncertainty, investigation, and self- and NCAA-imposed penalties related to academic cheating, improper benefits to players, and inappropriate ties to agents that violate NCAA rules. The resulting mess has cost several people their jobs and several more their eligibility to play college football. Now that an independent investigation is underway to tackle these claims of academic fraud—which may spill over into men’s basketball—it appears this saga will drag on a good deal longer.

Being a sports fan, for me, has always been about entering a world outside the bounds of reality. It’s always been about shelving rational and civil discourse and rooting like hell for your team to beat the crap out of the other guys. It’s always been about seeing a human being launch into orbit and slam a rubber ball through a metal rim and nylon hoop--no matter how many times you’ve seen it before, no matter what other pressing concerns are going on around you. The unabashed glory of sports also has a flip side—the way that it draws us in and clenches us with its talons means that we will occasionally get carried away; we’ll shout obscenities we’ll soon regret, and we’ll feel intense pangs of sadness in our gut when a stupid ball rolls under someone’s glove. It’s a strange existence being a sports fan. But no matter how high the highs are and how lows the lows are, it has typically been segmented and contained into one compact portion of life, separated from the real world. This isn’t true at all, of course. But it’s the shimmering façade I had constructed, one that has now reached a perpetual state of defacement and desecration.

Disillusionment has become the natural product of so much reality crashing into the sporting world all at once. The man we believed to be an upstanding and exemplary coach turned out to be shielding a child molester in order to protect the good name of his college football program. The guys we cheered as they blasted homeruns turned out to be jacked up on steroids. Professional football teams have been caught offering bounties for taking out opposing players. Long-standing collegiate conferences have been collapsing thanks to a desperate rush for money. Many of the best cyclists have been doping during impressive Tour de France runs. Even badminton players sometimes do the unthinkable and throw matches on the sport's biggest stage. The list of these types of egregious actions seems endless and constantly growing. Sometimes I fear that if the sporting world continues on its current path, I’ll one day view the pastime with the same lifeless lack of interest as I do most discussions of tax policy. What once was a way to avoid the stressors and burdens of life has grown into nothing but. One day, you’re in the stands, seeing nothing but touchdowns and high-fives. The next, all you see is exploitation, crass commercialism, and the misguided predominance of sports over any other of life’s necessary concerns. It’s jarring and disheartening. As a fan, there’s only so much you can take.

Julius Peppers, though not my favorite Tar Heel athlete of all time, does represent for me the period in which I grew from casual childhood fandom handed down from my parents to an individual who has “Carolina fan” indelibly attached to his identity for the rest of his life. This current predicament has been shifting my long-established view that everything ever done by the Heels was right and perfect and I won’t consider the alternative forever and ever amen. But now, what do you do when it appears the school you have followed so closely may have put the wool over your eyes in order to be successful? How do you come to terms with the very real possibility that much about what you believed about your alma mater has been untrue? What will I do if they have to take down those banners in the Dean Dome?

Of course, scandals in college sports are rampant and constant, no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise. Major programs often blur the line between professional and amateur, bringing in athletes to make money for the university all while requiring them to attend classes and keep up grades, even if they are unprepared or have little interest in doing so. The dirtiness involved in exploiting unpaid young people is conveniently overlooked a lot of the time, because frankly, college sports are a great deal of fun. As college sports—football in particular—have grown exponentially more popular in recent years, the question grows ever more pressing: do the benefits of running a successful (profitable) athletic program at the university level outweigh the costs?

I don’t have a lot of answers to these questions, so I try to get back to the basics.  Like many Carolina fans, I recognize that the academic integrity of the University of North Carolina should be paramount to any other consideration. If the University cannot manage to be both a well-regarded public institution of higher learning and a powerhouse athletic program, we must always err on the side of academics—no matter how badly it hurts the wallet or our plans for Saturday afternoons. Our society can likely weather the scandals and indignities of professional sport, but when athletics poison the academic well, we compromise everyone’s future. Those institutions exist to prepare the next generation by educating them and teaching them to lead lives as decent human beings. Shoe contracts, stadium expansions, and TV deals should have no seat at that table.

I don’t blame Peppers for any of this. He was and is an outstanding athlete. He showed an incredible amount of humility and generosity by admitting the transcript belonged to him and then donating $250,000 to a UNC scholarship fund for African-Americans. I can’t help but think he was likely steered towards the University of North Carolina when he shouldn’t have been by people who should have known better. And that’s the whole problem: there are adults who should know better than to allow these systems to exist. Adults who shouldn’t have to depend on an unpaid 18-year-old kid passing an Introduction to Drama course so that he can maintain his job and his million dollar contract. This kind of thing goes on all over the place, I know, but that doesn’t make it any more right.

I claim no inside sources. I have no idea how this issue will play out. Whether it’s a lack of leadership, lack of oversight, or insight, there has been an incredible void of anything that should have been done during this debacle at UNC. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a wonderful place, with an outstanding faculty, a gorgeous campus, and a diverse and talented student body. It’s simply not worth it to sully the strong legacy established more than 200 years ago for the glory of playing in a second-rate bowl game in Charlotte. Hopefully, the new phase of investigation will get to the bottom of this issue once and for all, and we will finally be able to accept the truth, fix the problems, and move on. I really do hope those banners stay flying in the rafters in the Smith Center for the next 100 years—but I only want them there if they were won fairly. We shouldn’t accept them any other way. Because even in this muddled world, I do know that the right thing is to shed light on the truth. Even if we won’t like what we find.  

Totally Pointless Debate: Deep Impact vs. Armageddon

This past weekend, while the rest of the world was out catching rays and riding waves, I mostly stayed indoors and spent some quality time with the television. Quite uncharacteristically, I took in a slew of movies, ranging from the incomparable 2004 ‘instant classic’ Fat Albert, to the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn-Sydney Poitier juggernaut Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, to the Canadian roadtrip film, One Week, starring Joshua Jackson. While all these films were enjoyable in their own ways, two other movies I watched really took my weekend to the next level. Purely through the powers of serendipity, TBS decided to air Deep Impact on Friday night, and on Saturday evening, FX put on that film’s brother-in-arms/eternal archrival Armageddon. These two blockbusters from the summer of 1998 deal with mind-bogglingly similar topics (imminent destruction of the planet by some kind of space rock), and are responsible for creating a zeitgeist for the ‘apocalyptic earth destruction film’ in the late 1990s. I saw both of these films around the time of their release and probably thought they were okay, though I cannot say I've seen either one in the last decade. In an effort to trick myself into believing this was a productive weekend, I figured it would be a useful exercise to compare and contrast some specific elements of these films. While they have a lot in common, it will be interesting to see which has better stood the test of time.

Cast

Deep Impact: Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman, Mike O’Malley

Armageddon: Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, voice of Charlton Heston

While both of these films have some undeniable star power, few movies have brought in a haul of big names like Armageddon. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of any of the major actors in that film, but it’s always good to see a bunch of familiar faces, especially when an audience is tasked with coming to terms with the potential end of the world. Though Morgan Freeman’s role of U.S. president in Deep Impact makes this a closer call, Buscemi and Thornton get the job done for Armageddon.

Music

If you like Aerosmith, Armageddon’s the film for you. (I don’t like Aerosmith). “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” still carries with it the haunting chill of awkward middle school dances, so I have attempted to avoid that song at all costs in the ensuing years. The Armageddon soundtrack also features the likes of Journey, Shawn Colvin, Jon Bon Jovi, Our Lady Peace, and ZZ Top. So, yikes. The score for Deep Impact was composed by James Horner, the man behind the music of Titanic, amongst several other big time motion pictures. The music in Deep Impact didn’t have much of an (ahem) impact on me, and the film obviously wasn’t swinging for the fences to create pop chart hits like Armageddon was. But really, simply based on what music was not featured in the movie, Deep Impact gets the win in this category.

Plot

The plots follow generally similar trajectories: we learn an asteroid or comet is headed towards earth and someone decides the best way to avert this disaster is to send people to the space rock and blow it up. The stories take different approaches to the same structural framework though. In Armageddon, we spend an awful lot of time on an oil rig, then an inordinate chunk of the movie dealing with a rag-tag group of oil drillers who must be made into astronauts, then an even longer portion trying to figure out how to implant explosives on the asteroid. I became increasingly impatient as the film refused to move on to the major, important work of actually saving the earth from destruction. There are also only 18 days before the asteroid hits earth when the film begins, which does not seem to be a reasonable amount of time to expect people who have never been to space to try to figure out how to land and to maneuver spacecraft. Couldn’t we have found some astronauts who could handle this work? There is also a lot of joking and light-heartedness while the team prepares for their mission. This cuts the tension a bit, but as someone who ostensibly would have perished had the plan not worked, I kept thinking these folks should have taken their job a bit more seriously.

In Deep Impact, we get several narratives woven together to create the storyline, as we examine how the president, the news media, a space crew, and average Americans digest a dire situation which may lead to the end of the world. Fortunately for humanity, there is much more time to come up with a plan to stop the comet from hitting us than in Armageddon. So it doesn’t seem so far-fetched when the team of assembled astronauts is able to manage the daunting challenge of landing on a comet or when we learn the U.S. government has constructed an enormous bunker in Missouri to save one million people. In Deep Impact, we must deal with several dilemmas—how do we inform the people of this kind of event, who do we try to save from dying, where do we want to spend our last moments alive, etc. This format of following different people opens the door to wider discussion of ethical issues, which makes it easier to overlook glaring implausibilities of the film, like (spoiler alert) when Elijah Wood’s character travels from Missouri to Virginia by motorbike to save a girl from the tidal wave and escapes its wrath by mere inches.   

While much of the screen shots in Armageddon are impressively expansive, the story in that film feels much smaller. You don’t get a good sense of how people on the ground are handling this situation. It’s all about Bruce and Ben fixing the problem and figuring out how to get back home to Liv Tyler—a scenario which is less interesting to me than figuring out how different people would respond to the impending end of human history. The resolution in both films involves sacrifice to save humanity. However, given the stakes, Deep Impact gets things worked out in a more digestible way. In that film, a lot of people die as we are unable to fully stop the comet from striking the Atlantic and creating a massive wave that swallows a great deal of land and people. We lose some key characters along the way, but in the end, Morgan Freeman and the nation vow to rebuild. In Armageddon, at the very last minute, Bruce Willis pulls the trigger, the asteroid explodes, and its constituent pieces manage to miss earth entirely. Sure, it’s a happier ending, but it feels a lot more forced and a lot less realistic than what transpires in Deep Impact. Also of note, Deep Impact accomplishes the feat of saving earth in 30 fewer minutes than Armageddon, which I count as an extremely good thing.

Special Effects

With a budget of $140 million (versus $75 million for Deep Impact), Armageddon easily gets the nod in this category. As should be expected for a Michael Bay film, the shots of the crew in space and the depictions of the asteroid itself are pretty spectacular. The asteroid is oddly beautiful and frightening at the same time, which enhances a film with an otherwise shaky plot. Deep Impact’s best effects occur after the comet hits and the tidal wave crushes Téa Leoni and most of the eastern seaboard. Outside of these shots, though, none of the effects were particularly memorable.

Overall Evaluation 

The fact Paris was the only city (aside from a few boats which were bombarded in Shanghai) destroyed in Armageddon was an insult this Francophile could not forgive. Notwithstanding the incomprehensibly low odds of a piece of rock hitting that exact spot, this occurrence underscores the major issue with Armageddon: this movie is about ensuring Liv Tyler is not forever separated from Ben Affleck, the rest of the world be damned. In Deep Impact, by following different stories of people dealing with the implications of the end of the world, I got a better grasp of what this kind of threat would mean for the planet. Also, I am a big fan of rooting for the underdog, and Armageddon and its massive budget outdid Deep Impact at the box office by more than $200 million. So if I ever find myself in the unlikely position of having to choose one or the other to watch again, it would certainly be Deep Impact. Though I think it’s a safe bet I won’t be tuning in anytime soon—unless an asteroid or comet starts heading this way, and I determine the best course of action is reviewing late 20^th century motion pictures for guidance.

Kool Thing of the Week # 3: Goodbye, Olympics Edition

This video is not from the Olympics, nor is it particularly new (it was posted in July), yet I can think of no better way to send the 2012 Games off into the sunset than a clip of a runner bulldozing his way through a set of hurdles. This event occurred at the Chinese University Games, which I am not particularly familiar with, but apparently seems to be a legitimate athletic competition. Taking no heed of the barriers in his path, the runner adopts a scorched earth policy, somehow managing to demolish hurdles in his competitor's lane, which is an impressive feat. After witnessing so many near-perfect acts of athletic prowess over the last two weeks, it's pleasant to see a different approach to one of track's oldest and most revered events. 

Oldies Corner
In honor of Blur's performance last night as part of the Closing Ceremonies in Hyde Park, here is footage of those '90s Britpop heroes performing one of their many excellent songs, "End of a Century," live. Blur have been all over the place lately, thanks largely to the recent release of a box set containing all their albums as well as a boatload of unreleased material (which you can pick up for a cool $210). The band never got the credit they deserved here in the United States (outside of the fact "Song Two" will be played at sporting events for all of eternity), so I will attempt to do my part to share a taste of a great band that you may not have considered could have been so great. 

Lazy Day Cheap Thrills: Rereading My Terrible Poetry

Whether it’s coming across that head-scratching haircut forever memorialized in the high school yearbook, or stumbling upon gushing love letters you passed down the aisle to that special someone in middle school, looking back at your ‘old self’ through words and pictures can be a cringe-inducing ordeal. There’s some kind of innate human tendency to want to reject things from our past that we acknowledge are familiar, but we no longer recognize as being ‘us.’ They seem detached from who we are, somehow alien, even if they are as much a part of our identity as the reflection we just gazed at in the mirror. However, fighting through the discomfort and examining these relics from past iterations of ourselves can be a restorative and revealing experience. If you can come to terms with the way you used to be, you can probably better handle who you are now, right?

Yesterday, I spent far too many hours digging out old notebooks full of poetry I had written dating back to the year 2000—a year which, in case you hadn’t realized, was a long, long, long time ago. The process of looking back on my awkwardly spilt ink, from beginning to end, was not easy. So many of the poems were quite dreadful—not just due to ill-advised word selection or failed attempts at being clever, but because the sentiments they were attempting to capture were frequently muddled and misguided. It sent a chill up my spine realizing that I had actually stood up and read some of this material out loud in front of other human beings at poetry readings in high school. For a great deal of it, perhaps mercifully, I had completely forgotten who or what I was writing about (thanks in large measure to my propensity to obscure meaning miles below the surface). Nevertheless, for some of it, I was able to imagine exactly where I was and what I was thinking when I first wrote them, which unleashed a flood of memories I hadn’t confronted in quite a long time.

After reading through hundreds of poems, it was a fairly simple task to determine that many, if not all of them, could be neatly packed into one of a handful of categories:

• Poems about specific people/events: These were somewhat direct (for me) in subject matter, but because so many were written about some ‘you’ out there, I cannot specifically recall now who this ‘you’ was (or if it was really about anyone at all). The ones about more straightforward topics rendered the most successful recollection while reading, so if I had to save only one set of poems in a fire, it would probably be these.
• The philosophical/symbolic journey: Early on, I was hell-bent on writing lengthy poems about being stuck in bizarre dream-like worlds, heavy on detailed imagery that the protagonist had to wade through in order to come to some revelation (or often to just learn there was no point at all). These works now come off as extremely juvenile, and an obvious sign of someone in the process of growing up and tackling major life questions for the first time (with the help of a high school-level philosophy class).
• Emo Poetry: Writing poems was always a way for me to vent in short spurts that didn’t really require complete thoughts or full sentences, so there was no pressure to make them look good or even make sense. So I would reach for the notebook and pen when I got back from class after some kind of monumental tragedy had befallen me, such as the dining hall running out of chicken fingers or something. Some of these poems ended up being okay, more so by pure chance than anything else (perhaps because there were so many).
• Let’s be funny: In order to counterbalance the emo works (so I wouldn’t look crazy if someone found them), I decided to write odes to toasters, blueberries, horseradish, rubber duckies, etc., to prove that I was not out of my mind (though this strategy probably backfired). Today, these come off as mere filler, but they did make me chuckle a bit simply because they were so ridiculous.  
• Stream of consciousness: These were easily spotted because the handwriting was atrocious and big and off the lines on the page. I would sometimes write these late at night in the dark with my eyes closed, or after I’d had a couple of drinks and just let my mind put words on a page—without thinking about anything in particular. These poems were usually indecipherable in the sense that I have no idea what I was trying to say and they never stayed on topic. Though I may have felt I was channeling some higher power at the time, years later I can safely say they were probably just a waste of perfectly good college ruled notebook paper.
• Messing with Forms: I went through several phases in which the entire point of writing was to create shapes out of the lines on the page, or to incorporate pictures I’d drawn into a set of words. I was a big fan of ee cummings in high school, so I tried to model a lot of what I was doing then after his work.  Some of these were actually interesting and were welcome diversions from the typical straight line form I normally used.

After finally getting through all the notebooks, I realized my choice to read the poems chronologically was the correct decision; I could see how my style mutated over time and how, surprisingly, my handwriting got progressively sloppier between 9^th grade and college. At the beginning, I wrote with a basic repetitive, stanza-based structure that frequently used rhyme, but by the end, there was largely nothing but ‘free form’ poetry; I am not sure if this can be attributed to some type of liberation from the strictures of the past or just because I grew lazy. Even with a great deal of upheaval in my writing, I did develop a ‘style’ that was pretty well-cemented by the end of 10^th grade, one that would continually pop up years later when writing (even now). Perhaps this means I really haven’t changed as much as I thought. Or perhaps I stopped trying.

Now, more than a decade after some of these poems were first put to paper, I can genuinely appreciate them for what they are and were. I don’t envision publishers clamoring for these tattered volumes upon my death, but I can say that some of them weren’t so bad—at least decent enough that I will perhaps try to read them again from time to time, if for no other reason than to bring back memories that would otherwise be lost forever. Otherwise, I’ll just let a lot of those words lie where I left them, knowing that they, at one time, served a purpose for me—to get things from my head to the paper and make them real, and to help me make sense of a world that was constantly shifting below my feet and above my head. They were therapeutic and provided a safe opportunity to experiment with creative forces that had no other outlet. And really, that’s not only the reason I wrote back then, but the reason I write now— to try to figure the world out by way of pen and a paper. No matter how many awful poems are produced as a result, I can’t see anything wrong with that. 

---------

An example of a regretfully undated, but quite old, poem:

Home

There was no such thing

As death or suffering,

Just runny noses and hiccups.

The green was greener.

The sun was brighter.

The red bricks were a fortress

To shield my eyes 

From the dangers of the world.

They were sturdy and strong

But we outgrew them.

The paths into the woods I take

Are made of red bricks.

I look down on them and

Think of days gone by.

We should have learned to dance sooner

Or continued to paint

But really all that matters

Is the trail through the woods

Leading to some tiny village

Where men make their own

Forts of red brick.

The murky puddle falls victim

To the workings of Nature

And each droplet vanishes into the sky

Leaving behind nothing but

Dry red clay. 

Space is the Place: Mars and American Identity

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner published “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a paper which detailed his theory that the persistent westward expansion of the United States had given the country a unique identity and had been the major force behind its willingness to do things its own way. The introduction of Turner’s theory came on the heels of the 1890 U.S. Census proclamation that the American frontier was now closed—an occurrence that Turner believed would have detrimental effects on the American psyche and future societal progress. There was a pervasive fear that the American experience would be significantly altered without the pull of the unknown West. Of course, the story didn’t end in the 1890s; the nation continued to expand, adding Alaska and Hawaii as states at the end of the 1950s, and the country further turned its efforts toward technological frontiers, using innovation to create airplanes, automobiles, nuclear weapons, and new devices that enhanced communication, health, and human efficiency. The American frontier had not in fact been closed, but had morphed from the deserts of Nevada to something more conceptual and less geographical in nature.

Another, larger frontier opened up during the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union both began to look skyward to one-up each other in attempts to be the first nation to ________ in space. Once again, Americans had a new frontier to reach towards. Space, being infinite, provided endless possibilities for exploration and discovery, not even 70 years after the first manned airplane flight on Earth. But after beating the Soviets to the moon, the U.S. has lessened its emphasis on space exploration and in the process its people have largely lost interest in advancing frontiers up above.

This past Monday, while much of the United States was sound asleep, a NASA rover named Curiosity hurtled through the Martian atmosphere and landed safely on dusty, rust-colored soil inside a crater millions of miles from Earth. Hours earlier, while Curiosity began its final descent onto a planet named for the Roman god of war, the nation was left picking up the pieces of yet another mass shooting—this time at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee. Few 24-hour periods could more aptly display the American tendencies for both pushing boundaries and for self-destruction. The tragic shooting was also a stark reminder that while investing in a space program may be an achievement worthy of praise, we have many more pressing issues to deal with domestically. Some have questioned the prudence of spending $2.6 billion on a trip to a red planet to look for rocks when back home we are faced with a shaky economy, high unemployment, and an endless list of grave problems, ranging from gun violence to crumbling infrastructure to homelessness to global warming. Couldn’t such a gargantuan sum of money have been better spent here on Earth? Shouldn’t we take care of business at home before sending our precious resources into outer space?

The budget of any governmental unit can be viewed as a reflection of the priorities of its people.  We invest in roads because we, as a people, value ease of travel. We fund schools because we believe educating young people is a critical tool for improving society. We fund national parks because we want to protect our natural resources for the future. The reasons for spending billions on a space program are somewhat more ambiguous—largely because they don’t materially affect the average person—yet they are still quite substantial. We fund missions to space because we believe it is in the national interest to advance the field of science, to promote human achievement, and to seek answers to the great mysteries of the universe. While we have often sought to expand our presence outside our own atmosphere due to nationalistic urges, to one-up a rival, excelling in space doesn’t need to be viewed as an agonistic pursuit: we merely must continue to explore uncharted territory because we are Americans and that is what we do. To echo the words of President Kennedy, we must continue to press on in space not because it is easy to do so, but because it is hard.

While much has changed about the world since humans first reached the moon in 1969, what has not changed is how monumental a feat it was for our species, still easily ranking near the top of a short list of human accomplishments. It was indeed a giant leap for all of humanity, not just the United States. Just as Olympians at the ongoing Games in London have shown, there lies a beauty in pushing to the limit what we humans can do. To use the mind and body to accomplish what people once believed impossible. It is often a herculean task to do these things; they are frequently criticized, usually expensive, and always time-consuming. But we must keep our eyes on the astounding value that the end results can give us. While there is no way of knowing what we will find or not find on Mars—elements that make up the building blocks of life or nothing but lifeless, red dust—the potential for what we could learn greatly outweighs the costs. Discovering concrete evidence that life has existed elsewhere in the solar system would be a watershed moment in human understanding about our place in the universe, shedding greater light on who we really are.

This is not to say that funding the space program should be the first or only priority of the United States government. Planned cuts to the space program in the coming years may indeed be necessary, but we should never stop seeking to strike a balance between meeting America’s needs at home—creating meaningful opportunities for all of our people and living up to the lofty ideals espoused in our constitution—while also giving people something to look up at and feel a sense of pride— to not just wonder if little green men inhabit the upper crust of some faraway red-tinted sphere, but to be able to say that humans are capable of reaching that place and actually finding out what is there. We need to continue to push ourselves to these heights, reaching Mars through technology and one day, sending ourselves there (and points beyond) to provide for future generations an extension of the dream that anything is possible.

Though Turner was wrong that American identity would be permanently harmed when the Western Frontier was pronounced closed, he was likely correct in saying that America won’t be what it once was if we take our focus away from the ‘frontier’—regardless of its form or location in the universe. If we cease to innovate, to reach beyond what has been done before, to search for answers, to push the frontier further, we will cease to be who we are. No matter the economy, no matter the current political climate, no matter how difficult things may seem, we must never lose sight of that. 

Kool Thing of the Week #2: Party Like It's 2009 (or 1964)

Similar to 2009, the present year has been ‘above average’ for good music thus far (at least, according to me). And just like three years ago, 2012 also appears to be setting up for another death match between Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear for the hearts and minds of the ‘almost/not quite mainstream’ indie music universe. Back then, Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear both put out albums which garnered sufficient levels of internet buzz and critical acclaim; these records also happened to perform pretty well on the Billboard charts (Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest debuted at number 8, while AnCo’s Merriweather Post Pavilion peaked at 13). This time around, the two sides have upped the ante by releasing singles from their upcoming albums in short succession. Perhaps the upper-middle level indie world has finally gotten its own Blur vs. Oasis showdown, as millions of crazed fans will undoubtedly head down to their local Tower Records to purchase these bands’ new CDs when they are released in September, unleashing a sales war unlike anything the music world has seen before. While you gear up for this key battle in the march towards Armageddon, check out the new Grizzly Bear track “Yet Again,” which some may argue is the musical equivalent of “come at me, bro” being tossed in the general direction of the boys in Animal Collective (maybe).

Oldies Corner
There’s just something about the voice of Otis Redding. There’s just so much feeling in every note that poured out of his lungs that it can sometimes be overwhelming to listen. But it always ends up being worth the effort. “Pain in My Heart,” from Redding’s 1964 album of the same name, is a fitting example of how simple lyrics and a familiar blues trope can be transformed to sound expansive and alive just by the fact that Redding is the man on the microphone. You can hear the agony of longing for someone who is probably never coming back—perhaps the same way you feel about the now-passed weekend.  So, let Otis help ease the pain of starting a new work week with a little classic soul.

I Can't Stop Watching the Olympics

I initially had planned to do only one post about the Olympics, but seeing as that sporting spectacle is now totally consuming my life, I had no other choice but to write about it again. Since we are now a week into competition, it seems to be a fitting time to reflect on what I have absorbed from hours and hours of viewing thus far. While NBC insists on pretending synchronized diving, swimming, beach volleyball, and gymnastics are the only sports at this year’s Games, there actually have been plenty of notable moments in other sports. Here’s what I’ve learned while compulsive flipping through the NBC family of networks over the past few days:

• Team USA men’s basketball is better than I thought. In my last post about the Olympics, I asked that someone call me when Team USA won a game by more than 68 points. I honestly wasn’t expecting to hear that phone ring, but last night the squad-who-we-may-actually-have-to-start-comparing-to-the-Dream-Team accomplished a feat that I did not think was possible. The Americans defeated Nigeria 156 to 73—a whopping 83-point margin of victory. Records were falling as quickly as the threes out there, sending a clear message to the other teams and to haters at home (like me) that this team is for real.
• Boxing people are not happy with the way boxing is going. The commentators on CNBC’s coverage have been nothing short of perpetually incredulous over the scoring and officiating at this year’s boxing competition. The sport has been mired in controversy; one referee was expelled from the Games after a match between fighters from Japan and Azerbaijan was not called fairly. Even though I don’t understand a lot about boxing, I’ve had to stop my channel surfing several times just to hear what the commentators have been shouting about. It has been some of the most frank and critical sports commentary I’ve seen in some time, which I think is fantastic. 
• Water polo looks exhausting. Not only do the players have to swim the length of the pool over and over again, then tread water whilst catching and shooting a ball, they must also fend off opponents who are ostensibly attempting to drown them. It’s an entertaining sport to watch, but the odds of me heading down to the local pool for a little friendly game of water polo are next to none.
• The sport of badminton has some explaining to do. Whether you’re on the middle school basketball team or playing croquet with your cousins in the backyard, throwing matches isn’t a good look. Doing it on the biggest stage of the sport, while the whole world is watching, is unconscionable. Regrettable incidents like this one lead to questions of whether a sport which is usually only contested at family picnics should be at the Olympics at all.
• Handball is a highly underrated sport. It combines elements of basketball, hockey, and soccer, so there’s a little something for every sports fan. The game is surprisingly physical and the men’s and women’s competitions have been equally compelling to watch. Here’s hoping my boys from Iceland are able to keep rolling and take home the gold after finishing with the silver in 2008.

• Fencing is entirely lost on me. While there is something alluring about the bizarre lighting of the platform and the Power Rangers-esque body armor (which lights up!), I have no idea where the points come from and I can’t figure out strategy or technique in any way, shape, or form. While I’m sure there will be plenty more fencing in the next week, I will not be tuning in.
• Bradley Wiggins is tearing up the world of cycling. After dominating the Tour de France just days ago, the man the Brits call ‘Wiggo’ took home the gold in the road cycling time trial event, and it wasn’t particularly close. His stature is sure to continue to rise, especially when people get at look at his awesome sideburns.
• Soccer needs to change its age restrictions. Limiting the men’s soccer competition to players in the under-23 bracket (with three exceptions) but allowing the women’s game to include the best players regardless of age creates a great imbalance between the two events. In one, you have the best players in the world competing on a huge stage, so it naturally will be a big deal. In the other, you have a few select young players that aren’t on many of the elite national teams, and even fewer big names that get people excited about tuning in. Something is obviously off when Spain, whose real national team are the undisputed champions of Europe (and maybe the World), couldn’t even get out of the group stage. Perhaps the International Olympic Committee is worried a full-fledged World Cup-type of Olympic tournament would overshadow the other sports [via roommate’s contribution]. However, the Olympics should be about seeing athletes perform their respective sports at the highest level, regardless of age or any other arbitrary restriction. Either allow everyone to play, or don’t waste time putting on a soccer tournament at the Olympics.
• Archery is the best sport at the Olympic Games. It is fast-paced, suspenseful, the rules are pretty simple, and you can watch a full match in the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee. There are also tons of bucket hats, if you are into that kind of thing. Shout out to the American men’s squad, who came away with a surprise silver medal, defeating archery powerhouse South Korea before barely losing the gold medal match to a tough Italy squad.
• The fact that table tennis, equestrian, and judo are part of the Olympics, but sports like cricket, rugby, squash, racquetball, and lacrosse are not, is downright shocking. I think someone should do something about this.

While I can say at this time that I don’t plan on writing any more about the Olympics, considering my weekend schedule will be filled with nothing but high jumps, hammer throws, and handball, I won’t make any promises. Enjoy the Olympics, folks, because before you know it, we’ll be back to baseball and counting down the hours until the XXXI Olympiad kicks off in Rio. 

Gathering Moss or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Rolling Stones

I admit it: I was wrong. I am quite often wrong, so this isn’t a major life event, but it’s still somewhat significant. Like most people, I have a set of biases and prejudices that I scarcely know from whence they came or why they continue to exist. Yet they do persist and affect my behaviors even when logic and reason indicate they should be discarded and left for dead. It just happens. For most all of my life, I have held hateful feelings towards something I hardly knew, something so established amongst the pantheon of greats that even the suggestion that I wasn’t enamored of this thing would surely bring disdain and disapproval on me and my kin. This thing of which I speak is none other than the rock and roll band known as The Rolling Stones. So maybe this sounds crazy, but really, for someone who has obsessed over rock artists ranging from The Beach Boys to Bad Brains, Sonic Youth to Sleigh Bells, Nick Drake to Nosferatu D2, you figure I would have made some time for one of the biggest and most renowned rock bands that ever existed. But I just didn’t.

If you grew up as I did, long after the door had closed on the 1960s and 70s, millions of blog years after those time periods had been analyzed, picked over, regurgitated, rehashed, and reformulated, then you likely don’t have the same feelings towards those decades as people who lived through them. Becoming a sentient, music-discovering person in the late 1990s, I viewed the music and culture from those time periods with the same kind of cold detachment most people assume when reading about the Thirty Years’ War. Sure, I knew the ‘60s and ‘70s weren’t all that long ago and I knew my parents and grandparents had been alive then, but the way it was all portrayed—as a mix of war protests, free-loving hippies, oil crises, disco, punk—were as foreign and unfamiliar to me in my suburban mind as any protracted battle on the fields of Germany in the Seventeenth Century. Of course, as I grew older and gathered more knowledge about history, it became easier to see the connections between the time I was living in and the time just before I was alive, but that took wisdom that only age can provide.

To say that I was detached from everything from before I existed would not be fair: I’d basically been a fan of the Beach Boys since birth. I grew into a fascination of the Beatles, and went through the requisite young-American-male-obsessing-over-Led-Zeppelin phase. But pretty soon, all those concerns became quite minor once I entered high school and underwent the process of becoming a fan of ‘indie rock.’ I was convinced the golden age of music hadn’t been in the 1960s like everyone said, but rather in the just-ended 90s. I would begin, without even realizing it, to shape my view of musical development as beginning with the birth of punk rock and ending with whatever I was listening to at the time. This meant that Television, Minor Threat, the Pixies, Pavement, and the Unicorns were all fair game, but the Who, Boston, Def Leppard, and Jet were not. So I declared all of classic rock and its progeny to be dumb, simple, overplayed, and lifeless. And in truth, even today I can say that much of that music is terrible. I still tremble at the thought of being trapped in someone’s car and forced to hear “Carry on My Wayward Son” or “Feel Like Makin’ Love.”  Based on these selections alone, I feel I was pretty justified in trying to avoid classic rock altogether.

However, as I was dumping an entire era of rock n roll from my life, I didn’t realize I was missing gems that fell through the cracks. I did come to learn that David Bowie had some pretty good songs, and there were many merits to the Stooges, MC5, and even the Who. But one band I would never budge on, wouldn’t even dare speak their name even until a few weeks ago, was the Rolling Stones. This specific aversion was borne out of the fact that the band still somehow existed when I was in high school. Seeing people my age shelling out big bucks to witness what I could only then describe as decaying dinosaurs playing songs that I already heard on the bathroom radio five times a day seemed depressingly pathetic. The band appeared as nothing but an irrelevant anachronism that was being propped up by people who longed for ‘the good old days’ and threw their money at a set of senior citizens to ‘recapture the magic’ once again.

What I’ve mentioned thus far against the Stones is admittedly very superficial and has nothing to do with the actual music, but I’m sure I could have thrown around insults about their musical contributions too. The few songs I’d heard by them were all kind of schlocky or seemed like contrived aping of foot-stomping American music (“Honky Tonk Woman” really made my blood boil). But that was about all I had to offer as justification for thinking the worst of them. So, having finished high school having largely avoided the Stones, I was able to more easily do so in college as my musical preferences fell further into the indie abyss. And all that was good and well.

But, lo, things were not destined to remain that way forever.  Just a couple of months ago, just after a frighteningly aged Mick Jagger hosted Saturday Night Live, something changed. Out of the blue, I felt curious to listen to Exile on Main Street.  I’d heard about this album for some time and was at least able to acknowledge that it must be somewhat ‘good’ based on the fact that so many people with decent taste seemed to like it. So I fought back my old hang-ups and just listened, with an open mind, and actually really liked it. In fact, what really surprised me is that on their most highly lauded album, I’d only heard about one song previously. And all these songs were really enjoyable, and by virtue of being new to me, they didn’t possess the tired taint that so many of the overplayed radio-popular Stones tunes seemed to have. In short order I found myself listening to the album again. And again. And again. Then I realized I couldn’t get “Rocks Off” out of my head. So then I moved on to Sticky Fingers and I really liked that one too. And then I tried out Beggars Banquet and my reaction was the same. I was puzzled by the urge to ‘keep exploring’ this band. What had happened to me? What had happened to the brash soul who had so vehemently disavowed and denigrated this band for so many years? Had I really changed so much?

After taking a step back to ensure myself that I wasn’t undergoing some kind of existential crisis, I realized I was pretty okay with the fact I was starting to like the Stones. So I watched the documentary Gimme Shelter which follows the Stones on their 1969 tour of the United States which ended in a horrifying climax at the Altamont Free Concert in December of that year. (Trivia: three births and three deaths occurred at this festival, including, most famously, the stabbing of Meredith Hunter by a member of Hells Angels while the Stones were playing “Under My Thumb.”) The film, in spite of the violence, had some incredible footage of the band playing live. Even as I had listened to their records, I had not before considered the Rolling Stones to have actually existed and been composed of living, breathing people during the 1960s (“Sympathy for the Devil” seemed to have been looping on radio stations around the world since time immemorial). But this documentary startled me because the band at one time was made up of young people who were uneasy, frustrated, and really seeking and searching for love, sex, drugs, truth, satisfaction, etc. This experience was akin to how seeing pictures of your parents as teenagers can give you perspective on how they ‘aren’t that different from you’ after all. The Stones of that era were just regular people trying to figure it all out, not some immovable object or sterile institution that had been handed down from the heavens. The whole experience was a revelation. Finally, finally I felt broken of my old prejudice against a band that had no real basis, I can now recognize, in anything other than youthful ignorance.

Before I knew it, I was reading up all I could about the band on Wikipedia and listening to Let It Bleed late into the night. Now, as I write, I’m listening to the song “Sway” from Sticky Fingers and I feel quite satisfied. The song is soulful, forlorn, and agitated, yet it shuffles over welcoming piano chords and a guitar line full self-assured familiarity and calm.  When I hear it, I experience that feeling that simultaneously makes me want to sit in my room and write poetry all day and at the same time grow my hair out and run away forever (which is for me an indicator of great music). Perhaps this newfound obsession with the Rolling Stones is really just a symptom of maturity, or of aging, or of on the onset of senility. Whatever it is, I quite like it, and imagine it will continue—no matter how upset my 17-year-old self would be if he could see me now.