jack’s musings

I’ve mentioned my love for sporting insanity before, so how could I not mention Mike Tyson’s infamous interview with Jim Gray after a fight in which he threatened to “eat” Lennox Lewis’ children. As an added bonus, Lennox had no children at the time. The quote appears at the end of the clip, a good minute after Tyson completely ignores Gray’s question(s).

To those not aware, I’m in the process of making my way over to France to harass my brother, who’s studying abroad, for a week. The first leg of my journey had me traveling from Nashville to Houston on a small commuter jet, and now I’m sitting at George Bush Intercontinental Airport waiting for five hours for the flight to Paris. I’ve only been here an hour or so now and I’ve noticed a few things I wanted to point out.

While on the approach to Houston, I looked down out the window and noticed this sign staring right back at me:

It would appear to be an advertisement for a local golf course to air travelers flying in on the major approach path to IAH. I sat and thought about this for a second, and I came to this conclusion: “Why don’t I see this more often?” You’d think in this world of ads and commercials this would be just another common sight. I don’t necessarily want to encourage such advertisements, nor does this ad make me want to grab the sticks and head out to slam in nine holes, but I will give props to unique advertising. Clever work Tour 18, clever work.

After landing at the airport in IAH’s terminal B, or as I like to call it, “The Land That Time Forgot”, I decided to take the tram to Terminal C and walk the rest of the way to my gate in Terminal E. I had plenty of time to kill and decided to stroll through the old terminal that I used to fly out of so many times to see what kind of changes had been made over the past few years. For one, they’ve added one of those iPod vending machines that you’ll occasionally see in malls and department stores. This particular machine also sold digital cameras and iPod accessories, but who impulse buys an iPod at the airport? And even if you did, how would you charge and load it up with any significant amount of music and power before your flight? I feel like this machine should take a photo of people who buy an iPod and post it on some wall of shame somewhere.

That’s all I’ve got so far, we’ll see what else I encounter during my travels.

With Vanderbilt’s recent announcement that Lil’ John will be the Saturday headliner at the annual binge drinking /music festival Rites of Spring, I recalled my “list”. The “list” consists of people I want to travel back in time and kill. Perhaps no one has stayed at the top of the list longer than Lil’ John. The crimes he’s committed against music and popular culture are unforgivable. With the production skill of a five year old kid with a Casio keyboard, Lil’ John managed to release a string of singles each more mundane and retarded than the previous, and people love it?

I may be pretentious and way too cynical in saying this, but I’ve always believed that most people out there are pretty stupid, and I’m no exception.  I recently sat my own damn self at a “Wait to be Seated” restaurant at an airport and wondered for a good 15 minutes why no one would give me any service! However my assumption is perhaps in no way better exemplified than through Lil’ John’s popularity. What the hell people? Am I missing something? This man has hijacked hip-hop, is doing his damndest to run the ship into the nearest iceberg, and all the teeny-boppers, fratty assholes, and club rats in the world are clawing at the hull to get on board!

So for the good of all mankind and popular culture, Lil’ John is on my list to travel back in time and kill. I would also accept just kicking his father in the nuts a few times.

I’d go gay for this guy. Courtesy of Squatty Q. Willson, Esquire.

SI.com has an interesting article this week profiling the excessive nature of taunting and heckling today in college sports. While the article is limited to basketball in its scope, it’s clear that the main points could be translated to any major college sports. Essentially, the article argues that heckling has crossed beyond the realm of clever and humorous to that of profane and abusive. It chronicles stories of fans throwing cups at player’s families at games, students engaging in vulgar chants, players being abused all over Facebook and MySpace, and even one story in which Oregon fans made Kevin Love’s grandmother cry as a result of all the abuse they were receiving.

I’ve seen the best and worst of heckling on the front line at major college sporting events. And I’m all about heckling at college events, and I agree with the article on some levels and disagree wholeheartedly on others. For example, as a whole college students and fans certainly are getting too unruly. I sit at Vanderbilt games and the best heckling cheers the students can come up with is “Ref You Suck”, “Fuck You ____” , or “____’s an Asshole”. It’s unnerving, uncreative, and unfunny. I’m willing to bet every player on that field/court has heard everything of that sort a time or two. Additionally, fans harassing family members at games is completely unacceptable. I’ve never actually seen this occur, but it’s absolutely reprehensible. It’s a shame that the best a group of fans can come up with is vulgarity, and this may be a sign of larger cultural forces that have migrated themselves into sporting arenas. Strong responses from arenas and officials is absolutely necessary to curtail these extreme events from happening again. But then there’s the question, how much is too much?

As I mentioned before, I’m all about heckling at sporting events. Perhaps it was the crew I always went to games with as an undergrad, but heckling was just as important as getting to the event early to get great seats. However we had a general understanding to keep all of our tirades PG. (It would have been G, but even we use “suck”.) After all, the point of heckling is to get inside an opposing player’s head, and what better way to do this that performing some strange act that is both non-vulgar and completely confusing. They’ve heard all of the vulgar junk you have to say, but the realm of non-vulgar heckles is both wide and limitless.

Let me give you an example of what we’ve done at sporting events. At Vanderbilt baseball games, a tradition of the student section is to harass the third baseman. He’s the closest position player to the students and as such is generally subject to the most junk. One thing we’ve enjoyed doing is yelling, “RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU THINK ____ SUCKS!” We’ll generally get the entire third base side bleachers to raise their hand, and you know what the general response from a player who hasn’t seen this before is? It’s laughter. That’s when you know you’ve got a good heckle going, if the player is laughing. He’s thinking about what you’re saying and not the game. Another example. Whenever a player fouled out at a basketball game, we’d try to get the harmless “LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, SIT DOWN” cheer going. However our variation would be the “LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, RIGHT, TRIP!” chant, and every now and again we’d get either a miss-step or laughter out of the player.

However it appears that the SI article is referring to some pretty innocent stuff as “over-the-top” behavior. Take this example at a Maryland-Duke game:

Now that seems to me like a clever thing to do at a game. It probably won’t get Gary Williams to make a wrong decision or anything, but this is harmless and has been around forever. The SI article however portrays asks the question “…was it a creative dig at their rival’s ACC-lowest graduation rate or a boorish put-down?” Um creative dig. I see no way of interpreting it any other way. SI shouldn’t even put incidents like this even in the same article as the type of horrible behavior they’re describing. Perhaps they couldn’t show all the abusive stuff, but why indict the innocent jabs? Check out these other images they have posted as potential “examples”:

This kind of heckling I find clever and humorous. Sure it’s kind of abusive, but isn’t that the point of heckling at its core? Heckling can be abusive, just don’t take it into the realm of offensive. A crack-down unlike anything seen before is going to be necessary to bring unruly crowds in line, but it’s important to note that there is still good in the world of heckling.

But let’s keep this in perspective. We’re no where near the upper echelons of fan unruliness. All one has to do to see this is look abroad:

One of the most common misconceptions in the recording of music is that the production element really isn’t all that important. To the uninitiated, the production portion of an album’s birth is merely a time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Nothing could be further from the truth. The production period is largely the time in which an album gains it’s soul and color. It’s the results of skillful and diligent production work that can take an album from the realm of good to that of legend. (Or from good to horrible.) Perhaps no one person on this planet is more adept with these elements than studio master Brian Eno. He made many influential albums, but the 1975 album Another Green World is largely seen as the gold standard of both his catalog and studio production work. Most music critics worship the ground this album walked on, but it still seems like tragically few people know about it.

Like Kraftwerk, we listen to these tracks now and they seem almost dated. Much of his work from this album inspired the entire ambient music scene. But again imagine yourself in 1975 and listening to this album for the first time. What would you make of it? You want to know what some of top singles in 1975 were? They included Paul Simon’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, the Bee Gees’ Jive Talkin’, and Nazareth’s Love Hurts. All good songs, except for the last one, but it should give you a context of the type of popular music at the time. And here comes Eno with this ambient masterpiece that presented music many years before its time. He practically invented the genre as we know it today. But almost more important that creating a whole genre, Eno explored the limits of the abilities of production equipment like no one before or since. It was this work that largely inspired music as a whole.

The album itself can best be described as atmospheric. Eno creates entire musical environments through painstaking production skill and the use of many different audio pieces blended into one cohesive element. My favorite track on the album “I’ll Come Running” is one of only five songs on the album that even feature lyrics. The title track of the album is also a favorite. This is the kind of music that you play on headphones, as it’s all about the use of music to create texture and scene.

Later works from the likes of Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, and Massive Attack borrow largely from the trail that Eno blazed, and you better believe that the Flaming Lips‘ Wayne Coyne listened to this album a time or two. But Eno by no means stayed in the Ambient realm. He was later responsible for producing legendary work including Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. Sure there had been ambient-esque music before, but never had it been crystallized into such a cohesive album.

Far be it for me to question another person’s religion. After all, I strongly believe that religion should be a very personal and individually chosen faith. However I’ve been following this whole Anonymous vs. Scientology battle on the intertubes over the past couple of months, and it seems like I see crazier and crazier stuff every week. There have been protests, DDoS attacks, threats from both sides, etc.

But this next installment takes this upheaval to another level in my book.  A previously undiscovered German book who’s contents seem strikingly familiar to the tenets of Scientology was posted on a a major forum site.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of all this insanity, so I merely observe comfortably from the sidelines.

 Link

I’ve always been a fan of the ridiculous stuff that happens outside the lines of sport. Take Carl Lewis for example. While he is certainly famous for being a the world-class track athlete above, few know about his national anthem before a 1993 Bulls vs. Nets game. I don’t care how many times I hear this clip, I will always die laughing after he says, “UH OH!”

Partial video with elaborate intro not featured in the mp3 can be found here.

This is something I’ve been doing for a number of years now after an inspired moment in the mail room at school. I’m kind of surprised that no one else does this. Have you ever gotten a piece of junk-mail that comes with one of those “business reply envelopes” that require no postage? This could be a credit card offer, magazine subscription, etc. Here’s a tip. Next time you get one of these, tear up whatever junk is sent to you, cram it and whatever crap is within arm’s reach into the reply envelope, and toss it in the nearest mailbox. I’ve been mailing my trash away for years now, and it’s time more people joined in.

“Sexman” reviews Jumper.  If it turns out that this kid is just an actor, I’m going to be hurt.