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June: Sun, Cool Water, and Long Poles
The Cuckoo And The Cruise
I love crazy people. One of evolution's best jokes, regarding humanity, is the constant presence of nutjobs in society. Keeps us on our toes, or in some cases, under our beds. They hit us from all angles-- TV, radio, traffic, the super market, and family gatherings. There's been a time or ten when I've been that crazy bastard who causes the crowd to avert eyes and seek the best escape, far from any sphere of confrontation. Drunken 3am sermons will do that. But I don't party like I used to, so 364 outta 365 days of the year, I'm painfully normal, and I feel a little guilty about it. Thankfully there are legions of versatile and certifiable loonies who always seem willing and eager to jump to the fore.
You'd think that thought-control freaks and the tourette's blessed would have a hard time replicating, but it doesn't work that way. Standard deviations enable our innovative streaks, so mother nature makes sure that there's always a nice complement of weirdoes around us. Hell, some of our best minds have had to be tied down inside a padded room at one point. However, for every Van Gogh or John Nash, you get 20 folks like Tom Cruise, creeper pervs, or those unstable drama queens who fill the ranks of reality TV....and now that I think about it, maybe they fulfill an important societal role too.
Man, I have to admit, watching the implosion of Tom Cruise is a hoot. We are drawn towards the destruction of others, which is why tragedies and soap operas are timeless. Tom Cruise is no Hamlet, though. After publicly spending the past two-months grasping for personal and movie-going youth via the endangered, and possibly apocryphal, virginity of 26-year-old Katie Holmes, Cruise went ahead and told the world he is a paranoid dumb-ass when he dismissed the whole of psychiatry and prescription drugs...and Brooke Shields. The first and obvious implication is that Tommy C. thinks all humans are built alike, have the same body and brain chemistry, and thus can all fit neatly into one system. If Tom can fight his demons without Paxil then everyone else should too. That Scientology stuff is pretty deep, eh?
Matt Lauer: S'cuse me, Tom, but are you saying that all shrinks are quacks?
Tom Cruise: Damn skippy! All non-Scientologist's are quacks! We got plans, non-believers. Give your money and soul now. Don't wait till we colonize Mars and come back to clean this place up for good. (stands on chair, pumps fist) Man I love my religion! Who's in? (glowers at crowd) C'mon bitches, who's in!?
Matt Lauer: (maces Tom Cruise and then runs away)
Some of our most famous actors aren't too bright. The great ones-- Norton, Pitt, Spacey, etc., can play any character effectively. Long ago, I used to rag on Pitt as another pretty-boy clone, then I saw his spectacular turn as a nutjob in 12 Monkeys and shut the hell up. You also have, on the other end, folks like Keanu Reeves and Mr. Cruise who play nothing but themselves, since that's all they can do. At least Mr. Reeves isn't telling you what to think...he knows, at some level, or maybe explicitly, that his IQ won't sniff triple digits without a brain transplant, and thus he leaves well enough alone. Tom's too dumb to keep his mouth shut...or maybe too brainwashed.
Anyone who takes a hack like L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology cult bullshit seriously is neither terribly bright nor terribly independent. The most boring yet dangerous kind of crazy manifests itself in those wiggy bastards who can not even think for themselves and must join a crazy belief system, to mask their own inadequacies. Lucky for us, that Cruise's movies are still doing well enough at the box office that we should get to see this tragicomedy play out to the end both on screen and in the tabloid media. It's gonna be a real-life Magnolia, but even uglier.
Cruise still gets tapped from good movies. Minority Report was great, Collateral was pretty good, and now the early hype on War of The Worlds is mountain-high as well. By this, we might safely assume that Cruise's career is flying along nicely, and like any good Scientologist, if you look at the evidence without thinking, then indeed, Cruise is still atop that mountain. Thing is, Tom Cruise has more or less played the same person since Top Gun. Early in his career is was a good persona, and definitely bankable. From Magnolia onward, it's been getting creepier and creepier.
With Minority Report, Collateral, and War Of The Worlds, we see that Steven Spielberg and Jamie Foxx takes turns making Cruise look good. Like Dustin Hoffman did in Rain Man, like the entire supporting cast of A Few Good Men. Even as he's supposed to be playing an evil hitman in Collateral, you can't help but think it's a merging of the Rain Man Cruise with the Mission Impossible Cruise. He's shooting up the town, talking smack, and throws tantrums when a world full of retards messes up his plans. Minority Report is the same way-- vanilla action hero who is good simply because the script says so. Schwarzenegger has more range than this clown.
I want to see more Vanilla Sky. I want to see Cruise's future movies slapped together by hack writers and directed by reeling junkies on the eve of thier suicides. Tom Cruise has embraced the messiah conceit, so before we let him run with it without proper scorn, let's see if he can actually hold together mediocre material like the masters. Better yet, let him play a classic. I wanna see Cruise play Hamlet...or maybe Iago.
Or even L. Ron Hubbard.
Pass the popcorn.
- k
Humpty Dumpty
I've grown comfortable with my periodic stints as Shrill Doomsday Dude. It's easier to tear down than to build, more entertaining to predict the end than to see sustained progress. When the Dot-Com bubble popped, I was living at ground zero, San Francisco. The Doomfreaks predicted another Great Depression-- children starving in the streets while mommy was off somewhere tricking for her rock. To the dismay of alarmists everywhere, it never went down like that, not then anyway. Instead of taking our medicine, Americans shifted the excess capital of the stock bubble into housing and derivatives.
Defeatists, fear not. America is rolling headfirst into a confluence of economic perils that will make several trillion dollars of capital go 'poof' between now and the day when car bombs in Iraq are a tragic novelty instead of a numbing daily spectacle. Poor information and unwise actions led to both our housing bubble and staggering levels of household debt used to support lifestyles we cannot afford. Though the corporate sector has begun to perform admirably once again after a nasty patch earlier in the decade, it won't be enough to deflect what rumbles our way. It's been a nice ride, but now the machinery that's supported our nasty habits is about to give.
More than ever before, good information is essential to economic health. We base our decisions on what we know. I invest in a few biotech firms because of decent price to earnings ratios and proven management. Biotech is where new medicines will come from, and Boomers really hate the notion of being either infirm or dead, thus providing plenty of capital and impetus for that sector. Conversely, I don't invest in domestic automobile companies because liabilities exceed revenue every quarter. GM and Ford have been more or less bleeding talent and money for 30 years. If GM were a horse, the owner would have turned the damned thing to glue years ago.
If our information pertaining to how we spend and invest is wrong, sooner or later, the facts of reality come forth to weed us and our purchasing decisions out of the fray. We put prices on the information we receive, from a subscription to the Wall Street Journal all the way to detailed personalized advice from a Goldman Sachs wiz-- something 99.9% of us can not afford, anyway. The price of information, plus the price of goods and services, plus the price of money--interest and whatnot-- to invest in the aforementioned, adds up to what things are worth (There is overlap in the aforementioned variables). If we believe that a fixer-upper in San Francisco is worth a million, a share of Google is worth $100, and that advice from an investment banker about to be sent to prison is worth 20k a quarter, then no problem. This means that there are folks willing to pay ridiculous prices for housing and certain stocks.
Unfortunately, there are often gaps between the perceived and actual worth of goods and services-- such as what we saw during the Japanese boom and bust of the 1980s and 1990s. When such value gaps become unsustainable, a correction is in order, that's one of the beauties of market economics. In the case of housing, pretty much everyone now has agreed, finally, that we are at or near the popping point of a housing bubble. Thing is, when no one is willing to pay a million for that SF fixer-upper, chances are that no one will be willing to pay half that amount either. It's called a herd mentality. Something worth a million one day can be worth a tenth of that the next. Again, value is dictated by what people will actually pay. It will one day dawn on the masses that housing prices are way too high in relation to typical rent prices and also in relation to consumer earnings...ah, boom goes the dynamite.
Housing bubbles are nothing new to the world. Here in the good ol' USA, we've had housing boom and bust cycles at 10 to 20-year intervals since the dawn of electricity, and probably before then. In earlier times, this was not so much a problem, because a house was something that you held on to for a very long time, and over time, the value of your house increased, though at historically lower rates than stocks. What is different today is that much of the current housing boom is being financed by folks who really shouldn't be in the housing market. Interest-only loans and other forms of 100% financing to suspect borrowers has driven housing prices sky high, turning a nice coin for professional real-estate investors, bankers, and other top tier sub-dividers who are, as I write this, sliding out of real-estate and prolly sticking their coins in money market accounts. Pretty soon, that might be the only way to earn a decent return off your dollars. Like the stock market bubble before this, the housing bubble is driven by speculation, and most of the bloat comes from folks who are getting in late...the people investing who can not afford to ride out a tough wave. There are millions of these people, and they are known, in the parlance of the game, as suckers.
The suckers who have leveraged their futures on speculative property purchases are the foot-soldiers of the housing bubble, egged on by shyster-sponsored infomercials and seminars held at your local Trailer Park Sheraton. When housing prices fall and these folks start to lose their money, they will stop spending. Then they will see that they can not cover their debts (because suckers don't save), and start to default on their debts. Then the next circle of indebted home-owners, not suckers per se, but simply a bit over-exposed in their earnings-to-debt ratios, will stop spending too. That will begin to put a squeeze on financial firms, who are on the hook for almost $200 trillion, not a typo, in derivative and hedge fund investments, much of that tied directly to the folks who lent the housing-suckers money in the first place. The financial firms will need to call in loans and cut ties to some of their shadier clients. In essence, soon after the consumers stop spending, the banks will stop spending as well. Before you know it, banks will fail, even as interest rates continue to rise. Easy access to money will dry up. Consumers will experience the thrill of fight or flight, which clears the mind, gives off a wonderful adrenaline surge, and also has the tangential effect of sealing the checkbook-- assuming it wasn't lost during bankruptcy proceedings. If, say, you owe more on your house than it is worth and you are in danger of losing your job, since consumers were forced to stop spending, meaning no one demands your services in a tightened economy, then we all slip-n-fall, no? Chances are that you go from being a debt-happy spendthrift to a tightwad in a hurry.
Even if we stop spending on consumption, we must still pay off what we've already consumed. Total household debt is currently around $11 trillion, and we figure to add over $4 trillion in 2005 alone. That is insanely dangerous. We owe too much on houses of inflated value, too much on credit cards, and we spend too much on transportation. We either begin paying these debts off in earnest or we enter into a period of mass defaults. Again, banks are already on the hook to institutional hedge fund and derivative investors. They would have to jack up interest rates wherever possible to keep from going under, and the places to do that are with adjustable mortgage and credit card rates-- something that would be a major buzzkill to tens of millions of American consumers fretting over their declining home values.
Saving is definitely preferable in this environment-- Americans are currently saving less that 2% of household income. Remove the top 2% of American income earners, and that savings rate straddles the zero line. For most Americans, saving will take more discipline than ever. Nothing stifles savings like servicing monstrous debts. Add to that our SUV culture riding a most pricey oil wave, and saving, it seems, can only be done by limiting consumption to ramen noodles and Boone's Farm. If we can no longer consume, then what exactly are we good for?
By outsourcing our manufacturing base to China and elsewhere, America not only has become consumers moreso than producers, but once again we've made ourselves very dependent on oil. Unlike the bad ol' days of the 70s oil shocks, when oil was used for heating, electricity, and transportation all in vast amounts, today oil is used primarily just transportation. There is the transportation of people, and the transportation of goods. After a successful run to and fro your neighborhood Wal-Mart Supercenter, you get to combine both. True, Chinese manufactures assemble your children's cheap toys and your cheap sneaks inside factories powered by coal, but they ship all that crap to America on vessels powered by oil. Given our current oil issues, it smells like upward price pressures to me. Warrants mentioning.
Just-in-time business, as it related to goods as opposed to services, was supposed to eliminate wasted office and warehouse space, thus saving companies, and consumers, money. However, what you save in domestic manufacturing and storage costs you make it up in global transportation costs, especially when oil prices are floating towards the heavens like a pothead three bites into a pint of Chubby Hubby. Oil prices will not decline in the short term. There is too much demand, and construction has only recently been ramped up to expand refining capabilities. That means that on top of pressures from the bursting of our housing bubble and associated debt, Tens of millions of Americans will be paying a stiff fuel premium for at least another 2 to 3 years, until our refining capabilities are up to speed.
Obviously, no one wants to see the American economy go tits-up, since it would drag pretty much everyone with it. We ain't Argentina. We sneeze, and the rest of the world catches pneumonia. Our policy of supporting a falling dollar was meant to alleviate our debts and trade deficits, but it's not enough. Since the rise of the Dot-Com boom in the mid-90s, we've had this moving glut of capital going from one sector to another. We'd hoped that the extra capital would be absorbed properly, as in China, or in new domestic business ventures. We'd hoped that the traditional American inclination to be entrepreneurs, to produce, would suck away this dangerous glut. Alas we were too busy eating pizza and watching CSI. We'd hoped that everything would return to balance without pain, and now we need to know that it's not going to happen that way. The glut of capital that we've been passing around for ten years is finally going to land in our laps. At that point, we will revalue everything and the glut will disappear, sometimes in places that will cause great fits of pain. Consumers who saved and lived within their means all along will do fine, as will the very wealthy. Everyone else is in for a nasty slog.
A quick irony before I go:
Overall American corporate health, automobile and financial companies aside, is quite good. 2k3 and 2k4 saw wonderful margins across many sectors. Construction, retail, biotech-- and the medical industry in general, and defense companies, are all rolling in dough. Government spending in our Age of Terror insures that folks like Lockheed Martin can continue to develop and test all kinds of cool shit to fly over and drop upon unsuspecting Bad People...wherever those schemey bastards might lurk. Aging boomers keep pouring money into biotech, and anyone who has traveled across a large American city can plainly see that we're still building at a brisk clip. Millions of illegal immigrants stream into the U.S. every year, and many of them work in construction-- 7$ an hour in Cleveland, $10 in San Francisco. At a time when boardrooms finally got their shit together, it will likely go for naught as demand for goods and services plummets after our nationwide margin call comes to pass. A perfectly run company still fails when consumers don't consume. It seems we can't go from gluttony to moderation. We have to go from gluttony to famine to moderation. It always works out this way, from the individual to the societal. American gluttony has removed our net savings, and our mountains of debt will prohibit us from simply swinging to moderation.
My friend Jay has taken to wonder, on a regular basis, who will end up holding the bag when all this goes down. Jay has a dry sense of humor, and his question is rhetorical. He knows exactly who will hold the bag, the same folks who always hold the bag-- the shortsighted, greedy, and financially leveraged. They will take many innocents down with them.
- k
Cross-eyed and Speechless
Chris Webber and Rasheed Wallace are good friends. Webber must have been on the cusp of a seizure when Rasheed 'my affinity for the bong provokes mental lapses' Wallace tried to call a timeout Detroit didn't have, a microsecond after regulation. Do we silly humans not learn from our mistakes? Michigan v. UNC 1992...everyone knows about this. Spurs assistant PJ Carlisimo asked the ref to double-check Sheed's timeout attempt, and to the mighty relief of us all in and around Michigan, the clock had indeed expired. No harm, no technical, Sheed escapes infamy. But apparently Sheed likes infamy. When a guy has it in his mind to screw the pooch, sometimes no amount of logic or negotiation will stop him. So, as the final seconds ticked away in overtime, Sheed figured he'd double up on Ginobli following a Horry inbounds pass, and let Big Shot Bob drift on over to his bread-n-butter spot of the last oh 20 years or so and shoot an uncontested 3.
WTF. WTF! WTF!!!! Jesus H. Christ, WTF!!!!!
I hope that the post game toke eased your pain, Sheed. Lucky for your flaky ass there is still hope for redemption. But it's gonna be hard. Like Rocky 3 hard. So, please, for the next few days, no puffin, no hanging out with C-Webb, no whining, none of that. Engage your brain with the game. I somehow know you will, because since you and C-Webb are friends, you undoubtedly want to avoid his fate.
Some predictions following a stomach-punch classic, garnished by Robert Horry and Rasheed Wallace.
Detroit will win game 6.
Sheed will outplay Duncan, and stick to Horry like stink on a bum.
That's what I see through my crystal ball, but let's face it, I'm both an optimist and a terminal fan of the Pistons, so my lack of impartiality may cloud my vision. Game 5 last night was one of the most thrilling exhibitions of basketball I've ever watched. From midway into the 3rd quarter till Rip's final and feeble shot against Tony Parker missed everything, I was pacing the floor and jumping around like a deranged mascot. You want classic? You got classic. Brutal physical defense, clutch shooting, and just enough exposure to the glitches inherent in us humans to make the heart skip beats. I could actually feel how the pressure was affecting the different players. Sure, this game produced a goat, but to warp a Hillary Clinton phrase, it takes a barnyard of animals to make a goat.
Though Sheed, deservedly, is going to catch a lot of hell for leaving Horry alone to shoot a three, when a three was the ONLY thing that could have doomed the Pistons with 6+ seconds to go, many factors were at play. I've always said, if you need to rely on one single play for victory, than you deserve whatever happens. Preceding Sheed's brain-fart and Horry's uber-clutch basket, we saw this:
Tim Duncan missed a fistful of freethrows and missed a tap-in as closing seconds of regulation expired that would have sealed the game for San Antonio. Duncan had a meltdown in the 4th quarter. It happens. Detroit does not even make it to overtime it Timmy D keeps his A-game together for the duration.
Chauncey Billips missed two shots in the paint, one late in the 4th, and one in overtime. No basket no foul, nada. Chauncey played a wonderful game last night, abusing Tony Parker like a fallen alter boy, but Chauncey could not seal the deal. I'm trying to let it go, but to be honest, I had nightmares when I finally fell asleep. I can't imagine what the Pistons are going through right now, but as I mentioned at the top of this piece, I know how Detroit's gonna come out on Tuesday.
Question is, how will Game 7 play out? Sheed has never had more reason to step up and play to his fullest potential. What transpires between now and when the title is awarded will seal his reputation in marble. Rip, Chauncey, Ben, and Tay will lay it all out. We know this in advance. So, let's see what the b-ball prodigy from UNC is willing to do for another 'ship.'
- k
Critical Beatdown
Holy crap, what a medieval molestation the Pistons applied to the Spurs. There was a point in the 3rd quarter when Lindsey Hunter started dropping one shot after another, and everyone on the Spurs just sagged. The Pistons lead was fluctuating between 16 and 22 at that point, but Timmy D and the boys knew it was going to get worse. Mid way through the 4th, Duncan was on the bench looking like someone who just got dumped by his high-school sweetheart for some meathead with a nice car and better dope connections:
This series makes absolutely no sense to me. Since when does home court this much. So far in the 2k5 Finals. Both the Pistons and the Spurs are supposed to be excellent road teams. Also, just to prove that I'm not a total homer, I have to admit that the refs allowed Detroit to freaking maul the Spurs all night long. I want to believe that Detroit's favorable calls were a result of aggressive play. Many NBA mavens swear that refs are consistent that way-- if you play aggressive, meaning, going to the hole early and often, the calls will go your way. Games 5 and 6 will put that theory to the ultimate test.
If the Pistons continue to play as they did on Thursday, the Spurs are done, and sports pundits everywhere will be proven stupid for the second year straight ...though most of us already know that stupid comes easy to these nimrods. Bill Simmons had the Spurs winning in 5. Nice call Sports Guy. You ought to give your next check to a worthy Detroit charity...may I suggest the Kwame Kilpatrick Outta Town Limo Fund. It'll help the city budget and cut down on court costs. Thank you, bro.
Detroit had 4 turnovers. Ben Wallace was once again a beast-- see above photo of Duncan. Detroit had 7 players in double figures. 30 points off the bench. And, AND, Darko had a bucket and 2 boards. Bitches.
Suffice to say, San Antonio's should come out like murderous speed freaks Sunday night. Either that, or they are pussies. Either or. I have to assume that Ginobli and Parker do not like getting smacked around. Duncan looks like he needs therapy, and I have a funny feeling, you know, like there are sharks in our midst, and they smell blood. San Antonio is not used to being defended tight from the bucket all they past the 3-point arc. The Suns didn't so it, nor did the Sonics or the Nuggets.
Game 5 is on Daddy Day. Lots of meaning there-- both hidden and out in the open. San Antonio will either find their stones and strike back, our they will be tattooed with the dreaded 'soft' label. Softies in Texas never get their parades. Just doesn't happen.
Once again, all those who predicted sweep or 5-game series to the Spurs advantage, please raise your hand again. C'mon.
- k
Mutations
A sun-soaked cool front has blown into town, pushing a sticky mound of hot humid ick off to the East Coast, where perhaps it'll end up in a fine Jersey landfill with most of everything else that chokes the life out of us in modern and sinister ways. It's not my problem anymore, not until the next muggy spell hits. According to our trusty weather-heads, that won't be for another week. It's about 70° outside right now. The air temperature and the pool's water temp are in perfect alignment. This is bliss. I swam during the heat spell for temporal relief. I swim during this cooling period for regeneration. Sometimes regeneration is vital.
I lost a dear friend to cancer a couple days ago. Ryan was 25. He battled a brain tumor, this one known in the industry as a Glioblastoma multiforme = grade 4 for 2 years. Rarely does one last a year with this hideous thing. For those of you who have lost friends or children before they could reach out and embrace the nuances of adult life-- travel, love, marriage, house, kids, rewarding career, setbacks, redemption, etc., the loss is obvious and palpable. The private stuff stays private, of course, so what's left for me to vent here pertains to the bloom of cancer all across our toxic land. I've noticed, in my own circle, that cancer rates of all types are skyrocketing.
The World Health Organization has noticed the same thing. Global cancer rates are projected to increase by 50% between now and 2020. The obvious causes for the increase are listed in the WHO report: smoking, an aging population, poor diet, and lack of exercise. Regarding poor diet, not enough is said about chemically addled processed foods, which provides primary calories for far too many people. Nor does the report really focus on environmental impacts. I fear these people, and certainly media organizations, see cancer as some amorphous ick that suddenly appears after you put too much crap into your body...akin to the relation of cheap booze and profoundly bad hangovers. Cancer is far more insidious than that.
From the beginning of our development as human beings, our cells are programmed at every step how to divide, and what to divide into. As adults, we are the compilation of some 10 trillion cells. There are always millions of cells dying and coming into being every minute of our lives. They fill every role from physical protection from the environment (skin), to wet computational device for controlling thought, movement, and heartbeat (brain). There are markers in every cell, called telomeres, which lose just a tinny tiny bit of matter every time a cell divides, until the telomeres are out of material and the cell can not divide any more. This process, while contributing mightily to the aging process, is also one of our primary defenses against cancer. See, if a cell could divide forever, eventually it would mutate, that's how evolution works, eventually mutations happen, always. Mutations themselves are not cancer, but they lead to cancer. Outside irritations such as radiation, smoke, and pesticides encourage our cells to mutate as well. Think of radioactive particles, or radio waves for that matter, as birdshot, and a single cell in our bodies as a stop sign. Sometimes, the shot cell reproduces with the holes in it...danger danger little camper. Our telomeres help to minimize the risks from such things, letting the damaged cell die off rather than take over the body in a reproductive furor.
We also have an enzyme called telomerase which can check and even reverse the aforementioned process of limited cell division. This enzyme turns itself off, typically, during early childhood development, remaining active only in high cell turnover areas like the lining of our gut. In theory, turning on the telomerase enzyme everywhere in our body means we have the natural means to subvert the aging process, but it's also an invitation for head-to-toe cancer.
From Bret Weinstein's telomore.org:
Cancer is rarely if ever the result of a single mutation. Generally, several complimentary mutations must occur in the same cell to produce an ever growing tumor, which then experiences further changes, producing a cancer. One of the most striking features that distinguishes the vast majority of tumors and cancers from the normal tissue from which they arose is the presence of the enzyme telomerase. The logical connection being that, without telomerase, the cells in a tumor would quickly divide so many times that their telomeres would become critically short, cell division would be arrested as all the cells ran up against their Hayflick limits, and the small growth would likely go unnoticed. Over time, the cells in this 'proto-tumor would be lost through the normal processes that eliminate cells from the body and they would not be replaced. If that happens regularly in the body, as it seems that it must, it has not yet captured the attention of medical science.
When science investigates a particular tumor, it is because the tumor has followed another course. Medically important tumors have, almost by definition, become large enough to disrupt normal bodily function in some way. In order to grow large enough to capture our attention, some particular cell must have at least two mutations, each of those mutation amazingly improbable on its own. First, a cell must be genetically damaged such that it becomes insensitive to the signals that would normally tell it to stop dividing. When that mutation has run its course, the product will be a small colony of growth arrested cells, each of which contain that first mutation. In other words, all of the cells that descended from that first reproduction-committed mutant will also be reproduction-committed. They will, after all, have each inherited the mutation that set the needless cell division in motion. But, in spite of being prone to reproduce endlessly, these cells will be dormant because their newly short telomeres will have arrested the machinery of cell division. And that is where the process will end, unless one of those cells is unlucky enough to receive further genetic damage, this time in the area of the telomerase gene. If the a gene required to prevent telomerase from being produced is damaged such that telomerase is suddenly available, then the reproductively-prone, previously growth-arrested cell, will resume the growth juggernaut. But this time, there are no built in limits to be reached. With a propensity to grow, and telomerase maintaining the telomeres, a dangerous cascade is well under way. This is the beginning of a tumor.
Once a cell has mutated, losing it's function and connection with respect to its place in the human body, cancer becomes a roll of the dice as to whether that second, tumor-generating, mutation happens to the already genetically mangled cell. The best way to keep the odds of cancer remote is to keep the number of mutated cells as low as possible. Modern things like processed food, pesticides, and even radio waves conspire to boost the number of mutated cells we have at any given time, thus making it more likely that one of those mutated cells mutates again with the telomerese boost that malignant tumors feature.
The chemicals and partially hydrogenated oils we stick into processed foods practically beg cells in our body to either die or mutate upon exposure. Many of these chemicals have not been in our natural food chain long enough for our bodies to process them and expel them properly like we might an ancient plant toxin. Therefore, bits of pesticide-laced cottonseed oil, which is in every non-organic snack cake and potato chip you eat, goes straight into the bloodstream and then into individual cells. If your lucky, the cell in question just dies from the poison and that's that. But, if the cell is an especially hearty one, perhaps it still divides, but looks a little funny afterwards. Shouldn't we evaluate more closely, as a society, how we produce what we eat?
For a few months now, it's been hard to watch any length of TV without seeing a commercial for home pesticides and herbicides, such are the rites of spring. Usually these adverts come on either side of a grocery store commercial, which speaks to the amoral flexibility of capitalism better than Reagan's astrologer ever could. When I was a kid, my Dad used to salt the yard and garden with a half-dozen different death sprays. I always used to wonder, if it keeps the bugs off our apples and tomatoes, is it good for me? We've saturated the planet with so many vile pollutants that every single one of us has traces of such lovely poisons like dioxin, mercury, lead, and that 70s favorite and near-smiter of the bald eagle-- DDT. Every time I see a Raid commercial, I cringe. I'm pretty sure that whatever kills bugs dead can't do a hell of a lot of good for us.
Then there are the radio waves-- a natural and ubiquitous part of our universe that we've harnessed, magnified, and multiplied for our own purposes. To our way of thinking, radio waves are invisible wonder signals that pass through us harmlessly, yet enable round-the-world realtime communications. A quick breakdown of the electromagnetic spectrum shows us what we are dealing with on a cellular level. We've been taught that we need only fear the Ultraviolet thru GammaRay portion of the spectrum. True, radio waves contain very little matter and energy, and thus almost always pass through us with ease, but occasionally they'll smack around a few atoms in our chromosomes (lodged within the nuclei of our cells) and sometimes things spin out of control from there. Again, looking at evolution, our bodies were designed to deal with a certain density and length of radio waves. Our world now most certainly far exceeds the amount of radio wave traffic, in both number and density, than our bodies were made to handle. Our way of life depends on instantaneous communication, so it's best to hope our bodies figure out how to adapt. It'll be interesting.
Before all is said and done, our society will have to come face to face with the fact that we've killed millions already and will kill millions more by what we belch into the air, burn into the ground, and stack high at our grocery stores. I just don't know why we've accepted it so readily. We can't make our world free from hazards, but we can sure as hell do better than this. Cancer costs us millions in lives and many billions in dollars. Surely our capitalist souls can see the cost benefits of making our environment, our bodies, our cells, a little less receptive to cancer.
- k
It's A Series Again
At least the Pistons refuse to surrender their titles like chumps.
I didn't have the heart or the stomach to write anything regarding pro basketball after the first two games of the finals. Detroit played like listless pussies, against a team with a pack of dilettante foreign stars no less. During two excruciating games in San Antonio, I watched in writhing agony as Big Ben Wallace was out-hustled and out-muscled by Nazr Mohammed. I cringed every time Bruce Bowen bothered Rip Hamilton's mid-range shot attempts. I and sighed forlornly every time Sheed chirped at the officials-- who never gave him a call, which is fine, since officials never give you the call if you're a big man who plays offense like a sissy. C'mon Sheed, just play in the paint, you don't need to drink it.
By the way, Rasheed Wallace has now been awarded 9 technical fouls in the playoffs. The next closest contestant has been blessed with 3. Sheed is 30 years old, and has been drawing an 8-figure check from the Association for many years now. Perhaps, just perhaps, the cat they call Roscoe might find a way to control his temper? Just a tad. The difference between Rasheed and San Antonio's all-world power-4 Tim Duncan rests in mastery of the fundamentals, and ability to control and channel passion for the game. As I've said, Duncan and Sheed are very similar with respect to their talents, but Duncan maximizes his talent in every way, and almost every game. Sheed, while always showing up to defend well, just doesn't give a crap on offense as often as he should, and my face turns blue when Sheed elects to spend half the goddamned game roaming around the 3-point arc. WTF? Memo to Sheed: Keep your temper in check and go to the hole.
But what do I know? Sheed was blah on offense last night, drew that 9th T, before Coach could send him off to timeout, and the Pistons still won 96-79. If you weren't watching the game till midway through the 4th quarter, you'd think it was a coast to coast blowout. Actually, with the Pistons playing as tough and ornery as they knew how-- and Detroit was throwing elbows and boloes all game long, just ask Manu or that hyperspeed frog point guard who's doin' the Desperate Housewife. Big Ben, Sheed, and Chauncey were smacking the living hell out of San Antonio and making clutch shots, yet the game was close until the 4th. That worries me a little. Detroit, for the most part, can't play much better, unless Sheed decides to participate on offence, wait, let me be more specific-- unless Sheed decides to take it strong into the paint early and often. I wanna see 15 drives to the bucket from Sheed from here on out. If THAT happens, and Detroit plays the swarming ball-swiping D they exhibited last night, we may do okay.
Both Manu and Duncan had terrible games last night, and that's not going to happen every time from now till the final buzzer of the series, or maybe it will. Hell I have no idea, and neither do you. If anyone had told me that Detroit's defense would do such a 180 from one game to the next, in the Finals no less, I'd say you need to get your place checked for a gas leak...prolly nitrous. Tell me that both Ginobli and the Big Fundamental would be sporting the Gomer Pyle face after Game 3 after so coolly destroying Detroit for two games straight, I would expect the sun to rise in the West. I suddenly feel silly trying to peer into the heads of NBA players, except the basket-cases like Sheed, because nothing makes sense, there are no reliable patterns, exept this:
It's said that Detroit plays best with their backs against the wall. It seems to be true, yet that very notion annoys the hell out of me.
It seems like Big Ben plays best with his back against the wall. Why is that so? I don't know about you, but after dropping a big deuce on the floor of the SBC Center in Game 1, Ben should have been plenty motivates to come out like a scorned Tiger Shark during Game 2, but that didn't happen. Hitherto Spurs unknown Nazr Mohammed beat Wallace like a rented mule. It was tough to watch, like seeing your brother initiated into the Hell's Angels. Then, when all seems lost, Wallace come out in game three, and conjures up a couple steals, five blocks, and fistful of point all in the first quarter. He made Nazr look positively JV. Where was that guy in the first two games. This is the freaking Finals, and you can't just turn it on and off against a team like San Antonio...these are not the Pacers! They are so much better. Ben, please, no more crapping on the court.
What about Rip Hamilton suddenly figuring out how to shake defensive pest Bruce Bowen and drop 24 points in his best game so far. Rip went a combined 12 for 31 in the first two games. He was outscored by Bowen! San Antonio doesn't even draw plays up for that guy and for two games running he outscored Rip, straight up. That's recockilous. Furthermore, why did it take Chauncey Billips two-plus games to figure out that the best way to slow down Tony Parker was to knock him on his ass? It works. Billips knows this now, maybe he always did, but had let the info slip while he was busy looking for his shot.
Maybe everything came together because of home court, but I'm not sure if I buy that in this series. Both Detroit and San Antonio have shown they can win the biggest games on the road. They have that in them-- During the Conference Finals San Antonio clinched in Phoenix, and Detroit clinched in Miami. So home court is more for the fans in this case than the players...even though the players will say otherwise. It's wise to kiss up to those who pay your bloated salaries. Being a champion means you're supposed to be above and beyond all that anyway.
My favorite thing about sports is the combination of talent, discipline, and desire that's exhibited at the highest levels. The key to being great, assuming you have the talent, is being able to really go after it like your life depends on it every single day. Only the great ones have that in them. What WAS special about Detroit, and hopefully what will be special about them again, is their relentless pursuit of perfection. For the first two games of the Finals, the Spurs were playing Pistons basketball, and they looked damned good while they were at it. Hopefully Detroit understands what it's going to take from hear on out. If the Pistons' absolute best collides with the Spurs' absolute best, I still have no idea who wins, but I hope to find out. That's what it's about.
- k
Mo Motor Blues
Guess what folks? Everyone gets the GM employee discount. Everyone, including the 25,000 hourly workers GM plans to shed along the next three years...complimenting the 500,000 hourly workers GM has shed since 1979. Employee discounts for all. Word. Don't stampede your local Chevy dealership. There's plenty of GM product to go around. Thing is, no one wants GM's product. That's the problem.
James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly has speculated that a Japanese car company will purchase General Motors and Ford within the next 10 years. After watching a lifetime's worth of GM decline, my response is why in the hell would anyone want to buy GM? Parts? Credit rating? Health care liabilities? I'm wondering if I'm seeing an American institution in its death rattle.
Right now, General Motors pays roughly $1,500 in health care costs for every car and truck it sells. In other words, ~5.6 billion a year. A large portion of this tab comes from the health care needs of retirees, folks who are no longer working to help GM's bottom line. GM made a promise to support these folks, and they'd be in huge trouble if they backed out. Why would Honda or Toyota want to inherit that?
GM's health care crisis is an exaggerated microcosm of ours (America's). The crisis exists because GM has more retirees than active workers. GM has sliced its active US workforce by 510,000, from a 1979 peak of 600,000 to a projected 90,000 once these cuts have run their course. Automation and decline in market share have been the two primary factors driving these cuts over the years. Automation is a good thing, and we've seen over the years that automation actually creates jobs. Look at GE, Microsoft, or the telecoms. Each have had their special issues since the dawn of our information age, yet the all remain big and robust. GM, though primarily an automaker, is diversified enough, and wealthy enough, that automation in its manufacturing process should have increased company strength and market share, not the opposite.
Kudos to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, etc. for kicking so much ass over the past 30 years. The success stories of the Japanese auto makers are high testaments to the power of hunger, innovation, and adaptability. If you were to stop an average side-street American in 1975 and told them that Toyota would be the most popular, most beloved, most trusted automobile company by the turn of the millennium, you'd get both a funny look and probably some free advice...and maybe a dose or two of gratuitous violence, especially 'round these parts (Flint / Detroit). GM market share in the US has been sliced in half since its late-70s push towards automation. The slack, as I've intimated, has been taken up by the aforementioned foreign competitors. Clearly, with a dwindling market share and crippling (in fact, unsustainable) health care costs, GM deserves its junk rating. It has proven to be a world class institutional bumbler for decades on end.
GM's announcement regarding its latest cuts, 20 percent of their remaining American work force between now and 2008, or 25,000 jobs, boosted their share price for a second, but no one expects it last. The capital value of General Motors rests almost exclusively on its infrastructure-- it's modern plants, nice computers, and fleets of engineers, but not its business. The idea that Fallows of the Atlantic was fleshing out regarding a Toyota purchase of GM pertained to the old Carl Ichan method of raiding a company for its parts, since its function, its purpose, was a joke. We might be closer to that point than some people think. Luckily, the health care liabilities ought to scare the vultures away, unless the government assumes those liabilities. That would be a hoot.
The 25,000 jobs to be lost are a drop in bucket in relation to the American work force / economy. Flint's already lost twice that number of jobs since 1980, as has the Detroit area. It's another kick in the nuts to a region that should know how to wear the stainless steel cup by now, but somehow still leaves its gear in the sock drawer, meanwhile holding onto the false hope that the a mature heavy industry will rise from the ashes and deliver. I fear it's a bit like waiting for lilies to grow in an oil slick.
General Motors needs some serious institutional changes. Their only way out of this mess is to grow their revenue to a size capable of comfortably handling their liabilities. I'm pretty sure even drunken instructors remember to mention these kind of things in high school business classes, and I certainly hope folks know this truism across boardrooms everywhere. GM, I'm sure, wants to perform better. No one likes to live with a loser hanging around the neck, but GM has a corporate inertia that seems to fend off every attempt at real change. Sure, the manufacturing plants are cleaner and more efficient. The engineering talent is still impressive, and GM can still tap into mountains of capital despite their junk bond status. They're even leading American auto manufacturers towards fuel-cell vehicles. Certainly, executives at GM plan to survive, but their product has been so goddamned boring, that we're all going to forget about them. We would have already if not for the constant reminders of GM's financial plight.
Boring product lines, especially in non-SUV and truck models, have hurt GM for decades now, and if I remember this year's North American Auto Show at Cobo last January, the future seems to promise more of the same. We're facing years and maybe decades of jacked up fuel prices, and there is not one single compact/mid-sized car model off the GM floor that's created a buzz. It's not that GM doesn't have the marketing, it's that GM doesn't have the product. Here is where the inertia of GM's institutionalism can be seen slowly strangling its host.
A GM design concept has to jump through so many hoops, through so many departments and divisions, often across the desks of non-creative, non-engineering, bean-counting drones, that the finished product is inevitably a watered down husk of the original idea. Take a look at your average Chevy Lumina or Cavalier. Check out your average mid-sized Buick. Go ahead, Google'em up. Aesthetically, such models can not complete with Volkswagen Jettas or Passats, Honda Accords, or anything rolling out from Toyota. Nor can the compete on the platforms of quality and price. Since the other companies have no where near GM's liabilities, they get to play with more cash.
GM's workers certainly want to build nicer vehicles, but once a vehicle is being assembled on the lines, all the design and engineering decisions have been made. Sadly, stagnant design and engineering vision hurts the blue collar work force, since they are the first to go when GM needs to tighten its belt. Engineers in this country can always find work...plant assembly workers can not, especially at UAW wages. This bleeding has taken a brutal toll on the supposed American middle class. In my travels around this country over the past few years, I've noticed more stratification than ever. You're either in or you are not.
Part of the American social compact is that the controllers of wealth, private enterprise, create vehicles for the average American to lead a good life. I'm not talking the super-innovative, rags to riches American, those cats can always take care of themselves. I'm talking about the honest industrious worker. Someone with a decent vocational skill set and the aptitude to learn new technologies as needed. We have a shitload of folks just like that who are being squeezed out. Since the American way dictates that private hands control the purse-strings, it is up to private hands, folks like GM executives, to power through and find solutions. Otherwise, eventually, the left-behinds rise up and put all the purse-strings in governments hands...and that never works.
Now go on and get them GM cars you've been drooling over. Their cheaper! With OnStar navigation! It's like charity...but with more physical residue.
- k
Pistons : Onward
That was close.
The Miami Heat, in their house but with a hobbled starting five, came within a few possessions of dethroning the current champs, but they couldn't close the deal. It was one of the best G-7s I've ever watched, and my team won. Nice.
A couple things about the Pistons stood out. Chauncey Billips earned again his nickname of Mr. Big Shot by draining four clutch free throws at the end, and Rasheed Wallace ( 20pts/9rb ) showed that when he's playing his A-game, the Pistons, as they say, are a tough out.
I have followed Rasheed Wallace off and on since I was a student at Maryland and he was a dominating big man at N. Carolina. Tim Duncan played down the road at Wake Forest, and at the time both men took a back seat to Maryland stud, and NBA stiff, Joe Smith. It was a glorious time for ACC basketball. We were catching our first sustained look at passing athletic big men who could run like freaked-out deer, bang inside, and shoot from 23-feet in. Joe Smith eventually won NCAA Player of the Year honors in 95, right before he and 'Sheed left after their sophomore year for the bigs. Duncan stayed on 4 years at Wake and went pro in 97 as the number one pick for the Spurs.
Tim Duncan has turned out to be one the best power forward in NBA history. His game is magnificent-- graceful and economical and unstoppable. I've always loved Duncan's style (commitment to fundamentals), and I love his attitude. Conversely, Joe Smith is a work-a-day journeyman hack in Milwaukee. He never had the mettle to run the NBA game. Actually, he never had the size, speed, grace, or basketball smarts. Joe's a decent guy and a good citizen, which is why he can always find work.
Sheed is lodged strangely between Duncan and Smith. The goofy looking cat they call Roscoe has all of Duncan's talent, and he's even happy to play defense, and play it well. It's on the offensive side that Rasheed sometimes forgets to give a crap. There are also the outbursts...the technicals...the chirping. His tenure in Portland made him into an herbal legend. B-ball fans up in the Rose city still grit their teeth when mentioning Wallace by name, even though the names they use are usually reserved for violent or vulgar acts with farm animals or family members. Sheed put up decent numbers there (~ 18 / 8), but he had a max contract with Portland, and as far as I know, you ought to put up killer numbers with a max contract, ala Duncan (~ 22 /12.5).
I've always pinned most of Wallace's eccentricities on his love for weed. I know this kind of behavior biblically-- alternately inspired and indifferent, smart and knuckleheaded, mellow and enraged. We all know a gifted pothead or two. Thing is, I don't know for a fact that Sheed still worships at the bong of the herbal Bhudda, but his attitude of a sir-smoke-a-lot still exists. It leaves the following conditional:
If Sheed plays his best ball in the finals, the Pistons will win. Simple as that. Sure, San Antonio will field three of the best five players on the court. They also have a better bench, and they also have a coach in Greg Popovich who is every bit the equal of Piston vagabond guru Larry Brown. Thing is, Ben Wallace, thankful to be free from the clutches of Shaq is due to explode like he's not done in a couple weeks. Duncan will take a beating from big Ben, mark that down. Tayshaun will elevate his game and frustrate the begeezus out of Manu Ginobli, and Rip and Chuancey will do typical Rip and Chauncey stuff. Tony Parker is a fast and gifted player, but he's gonna either have to chase Rip through a million screens or bang against the strongest point guard in the Association in Chauncey.
Again, that leaves Sheed. I'm hoping he puts the pipe down for a couple weeks and plays on Duncan's level. He has the tools to do it, and that's why Detroit has an extra gear.
Game on.
- k
Going Down With Brown
It's a little cheap and distracting to write about Pistons internal scuttlebutt, aka Larry Brown's Employment Situation, while my hometown 12 is chest deep in a playoff series against Diesel, Flash, and their 10 Heat helpers. These two teams are throwing the kitchen sink at each other-- evidenced both by mutual surly demeanors and the insane number of fouls called, especially in games 3 through 5.
While I'm on the subject. The refs for Pistons v. Heat 2k5, and in the playoffs generally, suck ass. Bunch of rabbit-eared hacks. It's the Conference Finals, not junior's Congeniality League. Both the Pistons and the Heat are noted for their defense, and both teams like to bang. You put the Wallace Brothers, Shaq, and Alonzo on the same floor and folks are gonna get hacked. Everyone knows this. Few things in sports bother me more than officials who think that they are part of the show. The ideal officiating crew understands that they should be as invisible as possible while enforcing league rules regarding on court conduct. They are also supposed to allow MORE FREAKING CONTACT in the post-season. Has David Stern handed down an edict telling officiating crews to call ticky-tack fouls this post-season? Is Stern trying to attract the ballet demographic?
The officiating has clearly bothered just about every player on both teams. There was a point during game 3, when Rip basically scraped a pinkie against one of Dwayne Wade's wrists, after Wade had released his shot, when the ref promptly called Rip for a foul and I came a little close to smashing up some living room furniture. If you're a Miami fan, the lousy officiating is made bearable only because the Heat are up 3 games to 2, but still there is no flow the games, and despite the fact that Wade suffered a minor injury last night, the refs are not allowing enough contact in and around the paint. On the play where Wade went down, he drew a charge off Rasheed Wallace-- who was trying to finish to the basket, one of his two flashes of determination during an ugly performance. Down there in the post, the big men should always get the benefit of the doubt. If you look closely at that play, Wade was still shuffling a foot when Rasheed released the ball. It was Wallace who should have gone to the line instead of drawing his 4th foul.
Officiating aside for a moment, the Pistons, and especially Sheed, were terrible in game 5. The guards took all the shots, and Rasheed had one of his classic just-wrecked-my-best-bong-from-too-much-action games. He played like Marc Blount three days into an ether and 'lude binge. Wallace took three shots, made one, and was an absolute ghost on both ends of the floor. Part of being a professional, and damn sure part of being a champion is fighting through the fatigue and strange officiating and swarming defenses and making it work, by any means. Led by Sheed's ineptitude, the entire Pistons squad, save Rip Hamilton, looked rudderless for about 60 percent of the game. Sheed is fond of saying ball don't lie. Well, 88-76. Heat up 3 to 2. That's what it is. Game five was a prime example of a basketball team needing a coach it could absolutely trust, and obviously the Pistons do not have that.
What kind of prima donna asshole refuses to put out a rumor fire regarding future employment while he's still doing very sensitive and high profile work with his current organization? Larry Brown has been the center of this kind of crap all season, even though with his health issues one would think he'd either want to stay put or take a year or two off...not coach the Knicks or become President of the Cleveland Cavaliers. No wonder Pistons players have essentially tuned him out at every level aside from game-time strategies.
Larry Brown is a fantastic coach, and he is also a drama queen. Piston President of Basketball Operations, and former star, Joe Dumars, knew this when he booted Rick Carlisle and hired Brown. He knew that Brown was not a long term solution, but he figured that the Pistons might get a title or two out of him, and Dumars and the players would learn from a master...and Dumars is smart enough that he's assimilated Brown's coaching philosophies and strategies and he'll pass this on to the next coach he hires. The Pistons would not have won a title last year with any other coach. Pros and armchair pundits have covered some of the important angles as to why Larry Brown is behaving in a distracting fashion. It's safe to say that long-term health problems will make you a bit selfish, that's just human nature, hell it's animal nature. When you're wounded you tend to number one first. It sounds like the man hasn't been able to piss right, because of complications from a hip-replacement surgery, since last fall. But these health issues alone, and even combined with Brown's legendary vagabond style do not explain this callous display is disrespect and disloyalty to the Pistons organization. Larry Brown is a tough man, he can ignore the pain when he deems the cause worthy of his mental toughness...much like the Pistons' players.
Brown, I think, carried over some bitterness from last summer when he invited Rip Hamilton and Ben Wallace to join the USA Olympic Basketball Team in Athens. Both players declined because of security concerns-- remember half the western world had running betting pools as to whether Athens would get blown off the map during the Olympics by mad hoards of terrorist assheads. If Team USA had won the gold, then I suspect no harm no foul, and Brown's disposition this year would have been more up to speed...even with his health issues. However, and primarily because he didn't play LeBron and Wade, the Brown-guided Team USA took bronze only, and Brown took it as an affront...he is a man of great pride and he felt like an ass being the first man to come to The Games with NBA All-Stars only to have his ego and grille ventilated for his trouble. Again, Mr. Brown, play Bron Bron and Flash, and Team USA does better, common knowledge, especially now.
Brown started the season, again with these nagging health issues, but also with the demeanor of a man who had just spent a couple years in the ass-violation yard in Jackson State Penn. The disappointment over his Olympics showing surely weighed on his mind every day, and when he saw his rested cornerstones, Ben and Rip, bouncing around in practice, well, that's the kind of thing among us humans that's been known to cause a rift or two. After the legendary brawl at the Palace against the Pacers, Brown had his excuse to make his funk even more public, and of course it was in large part because he felt stiffed by his players on a world stage. The Pistons players, and Dumars, all know that the perceived Olympics slight from Big Ben and Rip has caused Brown to stew for months. It's injected a measure of poison into the relationship that obviously can not be purged. No one is talking about this angle, and it's just as big as the health issues, and just happens to blend in nicely with Brown's traditional bitching whining hop-a-long past.
The Pistons players are undoubtedly touchy, and periodically deflated, because they feel they're playing against too many factors beyond their control. I imagine that Association Commissioner David Stern could argue effectively that the refs are doing a fine job, and that the Pistons are playing two degrees too sloppy to be effective. I think I could shoot some holes into that argument-- disparity in contact allowed from play to play being uneven, between 70 and 100 free throws per game, too many technical's per game, etc. Again, this is the Eastern Conference Finals, but refs will be refs and unless someone with Stern-like powers calls the league's head ref and says let them freakin' play, the ticky-tack stuff will be an enduring blight on this series. Should the Pistons pull this series out of the hat, and I think they will becuase their players are that good and that tough, coach or no coach, it shall stand as a testament to their team chemistry. The have had to battle two major distractions: The officiating, as I've already mentioned, and they've also lived with knowing that their coach is not 100 percent with them.
Whatever happens to the rest of this season, I say thanks and goodbye Mr. Brown. Have fun in Cleveland, or New York, or wherever the hell you plan to hang your hat over the next couple of years. We'll get Phil Jackson or Flip Saunders, Darko will emerge as a force, and the world will continue to spin. I wish Coach Brown good health and continued success. I also wish he could have kept his selfishness and latent bitterness in check for just a few weeks more, until after his team had finished battling for their playoff lives.
- k
#24 of 100 best albums ever: Neil Young - On The Beach (1974)
 | 'Heart of Gold' put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. - Neil Young |
When I was a kid, I spent 2 weeks per summer at my Grandma's place in then-bucolic Ada, MI, on the west side of the state about 15 miles from Grand Rapids. This before sprawl turned Ada into a bedroom community packed with gated McMansions and soccer moms in capri pants. But 20 years ago the area was a great place to do kid stuff-- explore the surrounding woods, fish, and generally be away from the freaky and sinister vibe of Flint. My Grandpa died in '72 and Grandma never remarried, so she had this hilltop house and a good spread of land to herself. Eventually she came to take on the occasional lodger, always the offspring or friend of someone she knew, for help with yard work, and for company. During one summer in the early 80s, Greg, a 20-something genial longhair automotive type, spent several months in a spare room, at least his belongings did. Serious love for weed made Greg quiet and flaky, and I suspect that love for weed contributed to his magnificent lp collection.
Greg had a girlfriend in the area, so he was rarely home, which worked for almost everyone: Grandma still got her rent money and, with Greg's red-eyed blessing, I had unfettered access to his record collection. Greg's taste ran towards classic rock, though no one called it that back then. He had everything by The Allman Brothers and Pink Floyd, and just about everything from a 100 different artists and comedians. To that summer, my experience with Neil Young was limited to what I heard on AOR radio stations, primarily WWCK in Flint (Flint's Best Rock...before they changed up formats and embraced lowest common denominator mouth-breather-pleasing pop), which meant the typical cuts-- Old Man, Heart of Gold, Cinnamon Girl, etc. I liked those cuts, but I wasn't too clued into his Crazy Horse period, and I sure as hell didn't have a grasp of his Ditch Trilogy (Times Fades Away, Tonight's The Night, On The Beach).
I hear some people, been talking me down.
Bring up my name, pass it around.
They don't mention the happy times
They do their thing, I do mine.
Greg had a half dozen Neil Young albums, among them, On The Beach. I looked at the cover-- a well-dressed man on the LA shore near a beach umbrella, and thought, hey, I didn't know that Neil Young made a bouncy summertime record. I put it on the lp player, thought well of Walk On, even though the lyrics were a bit cranky the tune rocked. Then See The Sky Start To Rain starts up with it'd lonesome warbling organ and I'm starting to think this is not a happy record. Being about 13 at the time, my powers of detecting subtle anger and angst were most undeveloped. By time I heard Ambulance Blues for the first time, I wanted to give the poor bastard a blanket and a bowl of soup. Even the rockers on that album, the aforementioned title cut, and the uber southern electro-bluesy Vampire Blues, had the feel of a tired man pinned to the mat. I had never been to SoCal at that point in my life, and if what Neil was saying was true, then those bastards could keep it to themselves.
Full disclosure: I spent more time listening to Zeppelin and Bad Company that summer than On The Beach, but a seed was planted. I thought it was a shame that I never heard the title track and Ambulance Blues on the radio, and I was close to appreciating the darkness and dry humor of juxtaposing a bright album cover and a SoCal setting with such dank doomy material, but I wasn't ga-ga for it. I didn't go out and buy the album, or even record Greg's copy onto a cassette. I was 13 for crying out. I thought Judas Priest was the bees nuts...and so it was.
Some years later, in Alaska, during a marathon drinking session in CTT1 Mike Balker's crib, I heard a familiar refrain through the haze:
Some are bound for happiness,
some are bound to glory.
Some are bound to live with less,
who can tell your story?
My crew chief was playing On The Beach. Being 19 at the time, and having gained an armful of knowledge regarding doom, wry humor, and SoCal, plus the fact that I was sloppy drunk on mid-grade bourbon (which always makes plaintive music sound better), I focused as best I could on the music while my shipmates talked longingly about families stateside, warm weather, sports, girls, and them pesky Russians. That lonely keyboard and delicate slide-guitar on See The Sky About To Rain sounded different than I remembered, somehow bigger, and more important.
Husker Du and Sonic Youth were a couple of my favorite acts at the time, a mile away and beyond my early teen cheese-metal addiction. My sonic antennae told me that this On The Beach record was both folkie and punk. Folkie for it's sorrow, beauty, and tenderness, and Punk because of it's paths of distortion, anger, and brilliantly sloppy moments. Here was good ol' Neil, raging on about Manson (the CrazyHorse-esque sounding Revolution Blues), Nixon (Ambulance Blues), Big Oil (Vampire Blues), empty LA assholes in particular, and human lameness in general. Righteous anger was, I thought at the time, the highest level of human expression, and to me it seemed that Neil was doing it in a brand new way-- no screaming, no smashing guitars, no stream of f-bombs, just shaking his head sadly and pointing fingers between riffs. Hours later, when Mike shut down his crib for the night/morning, I asked to borrow On The Beach.
Don't f**king scratch it, Mike said. It's hard to find.
I gave my word that I'd treat his album like the Rosetta Stone and Hope Diamond all in one. Back in my barracks space, I listened again to the album, recorded it onto cassette, and made a large-type mental note to score On The Beach on cd as soon as possible. Except On The Beach wasn't available on cd, not then, and not until about two years ago. Neil felt that the warmth of a good analog vinyl recording was not captured properly on the compact disc. I guess it depends, as usual, on the equipment. A few days leter, I returned Mike's album and listened to On The Beach on cassette, alone in my barracks room, more often than what was prolly healthy in an overcast isolated tundra environment.
The world is turning, I hope it don't turn away.
The world is turning, I hope it don't burn away.
I picked some background info from Mike and others (there were many serious music freaks in my corner of Alaska). I found out about Neil's state of mind while recording On The Beach, especially the perceived shallowness of SoCal and Neil's peers, and the lingering aftershock from the death of guitarist Danny Whitten of a heroin od (which was chronicled specifically on Tonight's The Night, but chronicled karmically during On The Beach). I played the hell out of that cassette for the next couple years, until the sound quality diminished to a point that I finally hunted down a copy of the lp in a San Francisco music store in the spring of 1990. Then of course my interest diminished. On The Beach was great social commentary, I thought, but there were other sounds and visions catching my eye. Fear of a Black Planet, and hip-hop in general seemed like better social commentary, and as a bonus you could dance it. Months at a time went by without me listening to On The Beach, for many years, until I grew up.
On The Beach, like The Great Gatsby, is tough for anyone to fully appreciate before coming into sight of their 30th birthday. You need have experienced some successes and failures, watch peers excel, watch a couple die before their time, and understand at a deepest level the onerous inertia the guides your life. When I left DC for San Francisco in '97 I was grappling with a new sense of humility and mortality. I was no longer particularly angry with the world as I was with myself for not always doing my part to make things better. I was resigned to reality, and yet I refused to harden myself. That's when On The Beach opened up to me. It's when Neil Young became an icon in my eyes, on par with Dylan, and better than Springsteen by a nose. Neil has always cared about doing the right thing, and during this period in his life, he fell into danger or not caring at all...a bout of the existensial numbness that can stalk us all when we've seen enough to know that all truth does not purify.
Oh, mother goose, she's on the skids,
Sure ain't happy, neither are the kids.
She needs someone that she can scream at,
And I'm such a heel, for making her feel so bad.
I guess I'll call it sickness gone,
It's hard to say the meaning of this song.
An ambulance can only go so fast,
It's easy to get buried in the past,
When you try to make a good thing last.
Ambulance Blues: the sloppiest masterpiece ever committed to tape. Honestly, I still can't get my head around how something can be so dissonant while being cohesive, opaque yet clear, brooding yet fiery. It's Neil's best ballad, and without it, On The Beach is still a pantheon-type album. Though Ambulance Blues is one of the quietest tunes on On The Beach, but it's also the angriest. Thing is, I came to realize that Neil wasn't as angry with the world-- Exxon, Nixon, the Manson family, or any other of a million social ills, as he was angry with himself for being in such a funk. A master artist must lift himself above the fray, and Neil felt as though he was being consumed by it, so he lashed out at others, but it was projection...Neil was really lashing out at himself for letting his personal environment go so dark.
Indeed, On The Beach is not a happy record, but it's the best thing Neil Young ever recorded, which means that it's simply one of the best albums ever recorded.
- k