Month: January 2010 (Page 1 of 2)

A hot start to the new year.

God Save The Fan – Will Leitch. Along with Bill Simmons, Leitch is one of the founding fathers of internet sports journalism. The creator of Deadspin, Leitch mainstreamed irreverence and snark in sports writing.

The cover claims that this is his look at all the things that are ruining sports, from ESPN to idiot fans to ESPN to dishonest owners to ESPN to, well, ESPN. It’s not really all about ESPN, but there is a lot of WWL bashing.

But really it’s more than just about the things that are wrong with sports. There are plenty of essays about what is right with sports. The piece about Leitch’s experience watching the clinching game of the 2006 NLCS with other Cardinals fans in New York is an ode to why we still care despite all the garbage we have to put up with these days.

Some of it is goofy, some overly self-referential, but there are enough fine essays to make it worth the read. Especially of note, in addition to his Cards essay, are those about PEDs and athletes who evangelize.

Where The Game Matters Most – William Gildea. Another in my reading tour through Indiana basketball. This book covers the final season of the All Comers high school basketball tournament in Indiana, which was played in 1996-7. Gildea focuses on four schools – tiny Batesville, just down the road from Milan; DeKalb, which features the state’s best talent and future Indiana and Iowa player Luke Recker; Anderson, a traditional power whose coach just had a liver transplant; and Merrillville, the previous year’s runner up who feel perpetually overlooked in the “Region” near Chicago. In addition to those four schools, Gildea visits others, hits the high points of Indiana basketball history, and examines the political battle that encompassed the move to class basketball.

I’ll admit, and I believe I’ve written about this before, that I never used to understand the fuss over class basketball. After all, 47 other states did it. And then I moved here. It took a year or two, but now I’m firmly in the single-class camp. I don’t know that going back to single class basketball would bring back all the glamor to Indiana high school basketball. There are numerous factors that have fueled its decline in popularity despite the fact a historic number of excellent players have come out of the state in recent years.* There’s no denying that high school basketball does not have the same hold over the state it once did.

(Including current NBA players Courtney Lee, George Hill, Josh McRoberts, Greg Oden, Michael Conley, and Jeff Teague. Of course, they’re all from the Indianapolis area, so perhaps that’s part of the problem.)

Written during the transition, the book is certainly steeped in the emotions of the time. Gildea is not a Hoosier, and at times his tone shows that. There’s a little too much reliance on rural images to characterize the state. Too many hackneyed devices like “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” But maybe that’s just me. It’s a decent, but not great, book.

Chasing the Dragon – Domenic Stansberry
The Big Boom – Domenic Stansberry
So I’ve been working my way through The Wire (getting close to the end of season one). Since I can’t really watch the show while the girls are awake/around, to supplement the show I decided to read some novels in the same genre. I’ve read quite a few Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and RIchard Price novels, each of whom wrote for the series. Using the magic of the internet, I searched for similar authors I had not read yet. Stansberry came highly recommended.

These books are the first two of several that focus on Domenic Mancuso. In the first, while he travels back to his hometown of San Francisco for his father’s funeral, the mysterious, quasi-governmental agency he works for puts him to work setting up a trap for some local drug dealers. In the second, he has moved back to SF, set up shop as a private detective, and investigates a murder of a former lover during the glory days of the dot-com boom.

Each is taut, brief, and wonderfully detailed. Mancuso is the classic difficult-to-know detective with a dark past that always finds a way to unravel the threads of a mystery. Sometimes, though, while he unravels them just in time to save himself he does so too late to save others.

Stansberry, who lives in the Bay Area, does a wonderful job putting you in the City. If you’ve ever been to San Francisco, you know it has a particular feel that no other city has.* You sense the fog and cool air of the evenings, the ocean-tinged warmth of the day in these pages. As most of each story takes place in the old, Italian North Beach neighborhood, you feel the Italian roots with the creeping Asian culture that is slowly replacing it. Having lived in the Bay Area briefly, I ate these books up.

(You can probably say that of any place. But the unique qualities of San Francisco’s geography make them more noticeable.)

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The final installment in my review of December readings.

Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music – Greg Kot. For months I’ve been mentally drafting an essay about how music changed over the last decade. As I thought about it, I’ve read numerous articles, columns, and now a book about the same subject. So I’ll try to share my thoughts without plagiarizing too much.

Kot’s book is a fine jumping off point. While it’s not intended to be a decade-end review, it serves as one. He examines how technology, business decisions, and the changing relationships between consumer and artist have turned the music industry upside down. He focuses on how bands, from the biggest selling to the unsigned, have leveraged the power of emerging technologies to distribute their music.

The impression that is left from Kot’s book, and the other decade-end examinations of the music world, is that the Aughts were the most revolutionary and destructive decade in the history of recorded music.

It began with file sharing and the emergence of high speed internet access. Suddenly nearly every song ever recoded was available through a variety of services for fast and free download. While some people dabbled, others amassed massive libraries of music without passing any money back to the record companies or artists.

The next major change was the iPod. While there were many digital music players before the iPod, it wasn’t until the iPod’s small size, simple interface, and sexy design appeared that the MP3 player became a must-have device. Those collections of music that people downloaded or ripped were no longer stuck in their living rooms. Listeners could now carry every song they owned in their pocket.

The final major shift in music was the embrace of technology by artists, and to a much lesser extent, the record labels. Wilco got around a label that wasn’t interested in releasing their album by streaming it for free from their website. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails offered their albums for whatever price their fans wanted to pay. Smaller artists learned that creating a community for their fans was often the easiest path towards making a living off of their music. And by the end of the decade, there wasn’t a major label that didn’t make its music available for digital purchase through the iTunes Music Store, Amazon, or other digital music outlet.

For the most part this has been a very cool thing. At the most basic level, music listeners are empowered as never before. If you love music, there are nearly limitless ways for finding interesting music. Most important, you don’t have to rely on the corporate gatekeepers to direct you to the new, exciting stuff. It’s not what MTV is playing, what the record companies are “encouraging” radio stations to play, who gets the prime rack space at Best Buy, and what artists have massive ad campaigns behind their releases that matters. It’s music bloggers, online magazines, streaming independent radio stations, and indie labels that allow customers to sample their music that drive listeners’ choices.

There is a price, of course, for all of this progress. While many artists are seizing control of their careers, countless mid- and entry-level artists have been lost in the shuffle as record companies struggle to understand the new economics of their industry. There is the suggestion that the value of music has been cheapened as more-and-more people expect it to be free. The album as a work of art is disappearing.* The reduced space between artist and listener have destroyed the classic Top 40 format, dividing us into limitless audiences of sub-genres.

(You can argue this is a good thing, as consumers are able to focus on the best music artists create and not have to listen to the extras used to fill the capacity of a CD.)

Looking at my own listening habits, I can sum up the changes in one relationship: Back vs. Next. I was always a person who listened to songs I liked repeatedly. When I was really feeling a song, I might listen to it four, five, ten times in a row, hitting the Back button each time it ended. Now, with more music to select from, I find myself more interested in what’s next. My periods of music bliss are based on extended sets of related or complimentary music rather than the repetition of a single song. Even when a song connects with me, it’s far less likely I will listen to it on repeat than I would have ten years ago.

Is that good or bad? I honestly don’t know. If you take my favorite songs from the 90s and compare them to my favorite songs of the 00s, I’m sure I listened to the songs of the 90s far more often. Even as we approach the 20 year anniversary of the grunge explosion and alternative music revolution, I am more familiar with many of the songs of that era than songs from the last five years. As I sift through the mountains of new music, I think my relationship with songs I like is less intense, less personal than it was in the days of CDs. But I like a lot more music than I did back in the day.

I suppose the summary is that we still don’t know where this revolution in music technology is going to lead us. Artists, content providers, and listeners are still trying to make sense of the options that are available. Maybe in five years we’ll have a new normal that we can compare to the glory days of Top 40 radio. Or perhaps technology is going to keep the music industry in constant flux, and consumers will always be rethinking their listening habits.
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Continuing my review of books read in December.

Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn. I’m sad to say I knew not of Ms. Flynn until this summer. That’s a shame, as she’s both a Kansas City native and a KU alum. And I only learned of her by chance; while visiting Kansas City there was a feature on her in the Sunday Star that I happened to glance at while digging for the sports page.

This is Flynn’s debut novel; I’ve been trying to get her most recent work but it is constantly checked out at the library. In Sharp Objects, Camille Preaker, a Chicago crime reporter is sent back to her hometown in southeast Missouri to investigate what may be an emerging pattern of serial killings. While in SeMo, she is forced to confront her family, which has loads of buried skeletons that seem to explain her assorted issues. Somewhat predictably the trail leads back to her relatives, although there is a nice twist at the end.

For a first novel, this is a fine book. While not quite as dark, it recalls the work of another KU alum, Daniel Woodrell, who writes about the western side of southern Missouri. Still, it’s spooky and tense and an entertaining read. Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places, is supposed to be even better. One day I’ll track it down and see for myself.

Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana – Phillip M. Hoose. I’m somewhat ashamed I haven’t dived into the history of Indiana basketball more in the six-plus years I’ve lived here. Since I’m now a regular basketball correspondent, it seemed like a good time to get to know the local roots a little better.

This is a nice, if not terribly comprehensive overview of the local game. It looks at some of the most famous high school teams in Indiana history – Milan and Crispus Attucks being the obvious inclusions – a chapter on Bob Knight and Gene Keady, one on the emergence of girls basketball, Larry Bird, and Damon Bailey. Interestingly, there is nothing other than casual references to John Wooden.

It’s a decent jumping off point, but I was looking for more detail on the high school game. It’s also dated by the focus on Knight, Keady, and Bailey and its copyright date, which was before the end of single-class basketball.

The Attucks chapter, though, makes the book worth the read. It’s not just an accounting of the first team that was all-black and from Indianapolis to win the state title (behind a young Oscar Robertson), but the many factors that lead to Attucks’ 1955 state title. Factors such as the Klan’s control of Indiana government, the bizarre racial attitudes of the early 1900s, and the fight to allow black high school athletes to compete against whites. It’s one of the many pieces of our history that is flabbergasting to read now, just a couple generations down the road.

VH1’s 100 Greatest Albums. I received this from my mother-in-law for Christmas and raced through it in a night or so. Mini-essays on the top 100 albums in VH1’s countdown from earlier this decade, whoops, last decade. Good stuff.