The Rugby World Cup is Underway

I've written a somewhat lengthy post over at the Foreign Policy Association Blogs about the early days of the IRB Rugby World Cup which is underway in New Zealand. In keeping with my work at the FPA, the focus of my piece is predominantly on the two African teams, Namibia and South Africa, with particular focus on the latter. And in keeping with the history and politics of sport and especially rugby in that country, I talk a bit about the issue of race and transformation and how that issue will linger for some time even if right now the focus should be on the Springboks.

9/11 Ten Years On

I was sleeping in my apartment in Falls Church, Virginia when I was awoken by a phone call. It was my ex-girlfriend who had moved out recently enough that the scars were still fresh. A phone call like that is rarely a good sign.

Had I been looking out the window just minutes earlier I might have been able to see the plane heading on its death trajectory toward the Pentagon. I spent the day out at the ex girlfriend's apartment further out on I-66 from my relatively inner suburb. The highway was quiet though there was a lot of talk about whether or not more attacks were to come, talk that would continue for days and weeks and months and years.

It is too easy to say that 9/11 changed everything but it surely changed a lot. And I avoided most of the televised commemorations during the football games today because it seems that in too many quarters bombast has become confused with remembrance and people too often try to play a game of more-maudlin-than-thou, a form of showy commemoration theater that is really about the person doing the showing.

I think about 9/11 sometimes when I hear the Sarah Palins dividing the country along the lines of real Americans and whoever their implied opposite is. New York City, and greater Washington, DC were the targets on 9/11. The east coast. More than 2900 Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom lived their lives in the America that Sarah Palin scorns for ratings, perished on that horrible Tuesday morning. It's useful to say that we were all victims on that day but of course some paid a far greater price than others.

9/11 became politicized as so much has in the past decade or so. I suppose I'm doing so now. President Bush handled those first few days when we were scared and angry and confused as well as anyone could have and there seemed to be a time when a terrible event might have united us as a country for the long run. Politics could have gone on but without quite the edge and without the implication that the person who thinks differently from you is somehow an enemy. That new era of consensus politics never came to pass and if anything things got more poisonous as 9/11 receded into the stuff of commemoration.

We all hope that we never experience an event of that magnitude again. But even as people blurt out or remind us on bumper stickers never to forget we seem to have forgotten much of the essence of what it is that we are not to forget. No one who lived through it will ever forget 9/11 and those who have tried to claim that day for their own agenda tend to be the most convinced that they need to remind us. I just wish we could do a better job of remembering exactly what we are not supposed to forget.

In Rotation

Thoughts about music I've been listening to of late.

Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi Present Rome Starring Jack White and Norah Jones: One of my favorite albums of all time is A Fistful Of Film Music: The Ennio Morricone Anthology (which warrants a slam dunk A+). Morricone is best known for scoring Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, most notably Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" series. That album also has the benefit of receiving the Mrs. Dcat seal of approval for what she calls "sleepytime music," which is to say music we can listen to at night while we sleep, and so we listen to it all the time. This collaboration between the producer Danger Mouse, who is fast achieving the status as a modern legend, and Italian composer, film soundtrack producer, and musician Daniele Luppi intentionally evokes Morricone's body of work with a contemporary spin. Adding Jack White and Norah Jones to the mix is just the cherry on the gelato. Grade: A-

Death Cab For Cutie -- Something About Airplanes and Codes and Keys: DCfC just rereleased Something About Airplanes, their first album, because, well, any band of note re-releases their albums these days, usually with just enough added material to make the upgrade worth making, at least for fetishists of completism like myself. And the re-release is worth it for me if only because it includes an extra batch of live songs from one of their earliest shows -- on at least two occasions they pimp that they are selling a cassette at the show for $3 (which I assume was You Can Play These Songs With Chords, their first ep, later issued on cd). The most amazing element of both the first album and the live show that preceded it is the fact that the essential elements of the Death Cab for Cutie sound are already established. A slight quiver in Ben Gibbard's tenor vocals, shimmery, jangly guitars, rich production that manages nonetheless to reveal a fondness for lo-fi, smart and visually-oriented lyrics that create an atmosphere. Earlier this year, meanwhile, Gibbard and company released Codes and Keys, their latest album. It is excellent, because just about everything Death Cab for Cutie does is excellent. The band is now on Atlantic (they spent the first half of their career on the indie label Barsuk) and have weathered the storm to a major label with no apparent issues. Somewhat quietly Death Cab has entered that realm of great bands that pretty much places them above their label as they clearly bring more to Atlantic than Atlantic offers them. An added biographical element: I have twice been to Bellingham, Washington, Death Cab for Cutie's home base (they came together at Western Washington University and especially in their early albums there is a lot of Bellingham-centric biography in the songs). The first time was for a conference at WWU in, I believe, 1998. The other was on my honeymoon with Mrs. Dcat in 2007. We flew to Seattle, rented a car, and spent three weeks cruising the Pacific Northwest with the vast majority of the time in the vast expanses of British Columbia. We stopped for a seafood lunch in Bellingham on the drive between Seattle and Vancouver. Something About Airplanes (Limited Edition Re-release) A- Codes and Keys A

Deerhunter -- Halcyon Days: Doesn't the name "Deerhunter" make you think that these guys are going to be some sort of country-metal hybrid, maybe Molly Hatchet moved inland a couple hundred miles? Yeah, well, this ain't that band. This is lo-fi indie sludge for the bed and breakfast set more likely to appeal to wannabe writers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn than wannabe big-game hunters in Williamsburg, Georgia (Yeah, I did the Google legwork just to create a syllogism that works. That's value added!) And Deerhunter is, in fact, from Atlanta (Circle: squared!) even if they sound like they could be from Britain. B+

Roky Erickson With Okkervil River -- True Love Cast Out All Evil: Roky Erickson's autobiography is in many ways a classic tragedy. He was a pioneer of psychadelic rock as a co-founder of the 13th Floor Elevators in the 1960s. But he suffered from mental illness, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, was arrested in his home state of Texas for possession of a single joint and because the politics of Texas sucked even worse then than they do now, he was subject to a decade in prison. Instead he was placed in mental hospitals where he was subjected to various forms of electroshock and drug therapy, including a forced regimen of Thorazine. This album, with Austin's outstanding Okkervil River serving as his backup band, represents Erickson's first new recorded music in nearly a decade-and-a-half. Far from his psychadelic roots, Erickson explores various versions of country and western, gospel, and other roots music. Don't buy the album because of the biography. Buy the album because of the way the biography informs the music. B+

Fleet Foxes -- Helplessness Blues: This is the second album by beard-rock revivalists Fleet Foxes, a (rightfully) critically lauded band from Seattle whose sound somehow reminds us that people in the northern US have always worn flannel as a practical matter and that it wasn't just a grunge fashion statement (which was not, until the zeitgeist got hold of it, a fashion statement at all -- for once in my life some of the most worn shirts in my closet were cool without effort or expense. But I digress.) It's lush and beautiful and shows that these guys were not just one-album wonders. This is the perfect music for a giant party in the woods and in the listening you would not be at all surprised if wood nymphs and sprites came out of the darkness for a pull at the keg or at something a little more herbal. A-

Me on African Politics (Or: There is No Love Like Self Love)

It's been a while since I posted. All of the usual excuses hold: Travel, family in town, laziness, the new semester is underway. Plus a new one: I am now President of the UTPB Faculty Senate, which has occupied an enormous amount of time already.

In any case, believe it or not I have been using my brain here and there. For example, I am quoted at length in an article in today's Christian Post about the Libya situation. Short version: we need to wait and see before we really know what it all means.

And ISN Insights has published my latest piece, "The ANC: Historical Irony on the Horizon?" In it I explore the current state of South African politics while wondering if President Jacob Zuma is going to face a bum's rush akin to the one that Thabo Mbeki faced in 2007-2008. Zuma was the greatest beneficiary of those events. Will he now find his presidency in jeopardy based on a similar wave of discontent?

Happy reading.

Presidents and Their Debts (dcat Mentors Watch)

A while back The New York Times' periodic "Room for Debate" feature addressed "Presidents and Their Debts: FDR to Bush," and of the eight featured debaters, two were my grad school professors at Ohio University, including Joan Hoff and my friend and mentor Lon Hamby.

We're Number One! (Work Hard, Play Hard Edition)

Well, dcat's alma maters have been on a roll lately. A hard working, hard drinking roll.

Forbes just released its college rankings list, which rates all colleges and universities in America irrespective of classification (ie: liberal arts, research university, Masters comprehensive, etc.) and the number one college in all of the land? That would be Williams College. Suck it Amherst (and Harvard, and Princeton, and Yale, and UT Austin!)

Meanwhile, Princeton Review has released its list of the top 20 party schools. Number One? Ohio University. Court Street is going to drink like, well, like it's a Friday night on Court Street.

The Little Team

You probably saw this on Deadspin, but if you didn't, watch it. It is just excellent.

Friday Sox Talk: AL East Battle For Supremacy

I suppose there is something apt about the Red Sox and Yankees being tied for first place on a weekend when the Yankees arrive in Fenway for a three-game series. Heading into these games that will decide first place, at least for the time being, in the American League East the Yankees have been absolutely mashing the ball. It seems like every time I look at the scores New York has put up a dozen runs on some hapless pitching staff. Meanwhile, the Red Sox have been stumbling a little bit and are coming off of a split against the Indians in which scoring was a chore.

But I'm not convinced that form going into these series really makes much of a difference to either team. The Sox in particular tend to play to the level of their competition and almost always rise to the occasion of a series against the Yankees or most any other good team. Plus they get Lester and Beckett in this series, which represents about as good as it gets for a pitching staff that has been blasted by injury. The trade deadline brought Eric Bedard who went last night and did not set the earth on fire on the Fenway mound. But Bedard's arrival is perhaps overshadowed by Buchholz going on the 60-day disabled list and quite possibly being done for the season.

I suppose that in the eyes of some the playoff format diminishes the meaning of these games to some extent. After all, barring meltdown both the Sox and the Yanks are going to the playoffs. But I doubt you'll be able to convince the fans of either team or the players on either roster that these games do not matter. The rest of the country can claim to be sick of Red Sox-Yankees. And then more of them will tune in to these games than to any other up to now this season. Because with first place on the line, and the Red Sox against New York, these games matter.

Hypocrisy Watch

Here is how it apparently works among the new wave of GOP debt-busters, with their supposedly fierce anti-earmark bona fides: If you do it, it's pork. If I do it, it's a project of vital importance.

AP & Me on Stadium Security Post-9/11 (Self-Indulgence Alert!)

I was interviewed by a writer from the Associated Press on the issue of stadium security ten years after 9/11 largely on the basis of this piece for The Public Sphere that I wrote about three years ago. And when you get quoted in a story by AP it ends up appearing everywhere. (My personal favorite is Sports Illustrated via SI.com).

In Heavy Rotation: Was "In the Changer"

It's been a while since I have written about whatever it is that I have been listening to. I used to call this "in the changer," and now I really do not have a clever name for it. "In Heavy Rotation" is what I'm going to roll with now, at least until the next time, when I forget this name.

By the way, even though all of my music does end up on my iTunes, I still actually buy most of my music (though not all) on cd if only for the dual virtues of permanence (I always want a hard copy of music and documents -- call me paranoid) and sound quality. The actual sound of downloads kind of sucks. Plus, while I have satellite radio, I have to move the little gizmo from house to car and so except for long trips I use my cd player in my car to listen to new cds. So I still do actually listen to a large percentage of music in that dead tree format.

Arctic Monkeys -- Suck it and See: So, the group almost always referred to at some point in any review or feature as "Sheffield lads" has produced their most mature album yet, which they obscure with their most juvenile album title to date. In addition to building on their own growing body of work it seems that Arctic Monkeys must have holed themselves up in a room and listened to a lot of Kiss at some point, because there are a couple of songs here that seem to be aiming directly for denizens of Detroit Rock City (see "Brick by Brick" in particular). Ok, so maybe maturing upward to Kiss is a sign of incrementalism rather than evolution, but just how much evolution do we want in most of our rock music anyway? Grade: B

Beastie Boys -- Hot Sauce Committee Part Two: This is a good Beastie Boys album. They manage to build on what they have done in the past without repeating themselves. Their delivery is as good as ever, maybe better. I have enjoyed listening to it. So why do I get the sneaking suspicion that other than when a song appears on random shuffle I will never listen to this album in its entirety again? B

Best Coast -- Crazy For You: This is excellent indie pop music redolent of girl groups and sunsets over California surf and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound and chewy, confectionary goodness. In a just world, this is what mainstream radio would sound like. In this world, we get Lady GaGa and I don't listen to mainstream radio. A-

Broken Bells -- Meyrin Fields EP: This is the second production from Danger Mouse (nee Brian Burton) and James Mercer, the songwriter, lead singer and guitarist for the Shins (I really want them to release a new Shins album, by the way). It's an ep, so it only consists of four songs, all building on Broken Bells' eponymous lp. It's just as good but too short. Have I mentioned how much I hope the Shins put out a new album? A-

David Byrne & Brian Eno -- Everything That Happens Will Happen Today: New wave gets mature? Postpunk reflects on its post-postpunk years? Brian Eno helps Talking Heads lead singer find a sport coat that fits? Grownups on parade? Whatever it is, I hope I age this well. A-

Cut Copy -- Zonoscope: A little dance-y, a little trance-y, a little indie rock. And probably a little emo because I really don't know what the fuck emo is and yet everything these days is emo because 20 year olds apparently always think they invented bringing emotion to music. And I swear they stole some riffs from Fleetwood Mac, which is a pretty good source to steal from if you can get away with it. B

[Saturday] Sox Talk: Is It Hot in Here, Or Is It Them? And: Steroids, Jeter, and Thome

Now some of the rest of you get to experience weather that is de riguer for summer in Texas. It seems like the entire country is in the grip of 100+ degree temperatures.

But the Red Sox, about whom I have not written of late, are also pretty damned hot. They are 8-2 in their last ten games, have the second best record in baseball, and have hit the 60 win mark faster than at any point since the Fred Lynn-Jim Rice "Gold Dust Twins" era. And they have been doing it all with a depleted roster that has been beleaguered by injuries -- 60% of the starting rotation is on the disabled list and Carl Crawford just returned.

I'd like to think that all of this means that this team is not even close to peaking. Which is good for at least two reasons. For all of their accomplishments just past the midway point the Sox are still only two games clear of the Yankees, who are the only team with an even better run differential than the Yankees, which is the key factor in figuring out Pythag projections. And if we are willing to project to the end game I hope happens, the likely National League champion right now seems to be a Phillies team that looks even better than the Sox do and that has what is clearly one of the better rotations in a generation or more, surpassed only by the 1990s Braves in my memory.

The Sox just started a twenty game stretch of games that should help clarify things. They host Seattle now, facing a wretched Mariners team and will follow that up with a Kansas City visit in which the away team's rallying cry is "we're not quite the worst team in the AL!" From there they get a three game trip to Chicago to face a White Sox team whose most interesting element their cumbustible manager but who are probably still in the running for a mediocre AL Central. Then it is back home to face Cleveland, which had every sign of a team ready to fold it in after setting the world on fire in April and then collapsing soon after but that is back in the running of the aforesaid Central. Three games in Fenway against the Yankees should give us a really good sense of the direction the divisional race will take, though that is likely not to be the last clash between these two teams, and then the Twins meet up with the Sox in Fenway before the Sox get their next off day.

A few words on Derek Jeter and Jim Thome. Both have hit or are about to reach monumental landmarks, Jeter becoming the first Yankee to reach 3000 hits and Thome about to surpass 600 home runs. Jeter is surely a great player even if he is simultaneously a vastly overrated player. Thome is probably rated right about where he should be given that we do not really know what power numbers mean anymore even for those of us who think the steroid scandals, while bad for the sport, created ginned up outrage among the media that did not really reflect fan outrage to the same degree. But while we are on the steroids thing, let's just keep in mind that a lot of those same media members are now saying that Jeter and Thome have never been tainted by steroids. And it would be unfair to do so without evidence (not that lack of evidence has stopped the speculation before, but the media loves Jeter in a way that they never loved other guys). But one of the forms of circumstantial evidence that people happily used against, say, Barry Bonds was that OMG Look How Big He Got. And his head grew!!! Ok.

Jeter as a rookie:




And Jeter more recently:



All I'm saying is that using the head growth argument as a form of evidence brings us down a slippery slope because, and I want to be nice here, Jeter's current head appears to have swallowed his rookie head and left room for seconds.

And Jim Thome:

Rookie:



And now:



(Please do your own Google image searches because obviously this is an imperfect measurement -- which is, of course, my point).

See, when journalists say that an athlete "has not been tainted" the passive construction masks who tends to do the tainting, which is, of course, that selfsame media. Now, before anyone goes crazy, I do not have any reason to believe that Jeter or Thome (or for that matter Cal Ripken, who also got a lot bigger over his career, and whose longevity streak happens to coincide with the one thing that we know that steroids do even more than increasing power, which is increase the ability to fend off and recover from injury) ever took steroids. I'm just saying what I'm saying, which is that there was always an asymmetrical approach to steroids (by a media that managed to miss almost the entirety of the steroid era while it was happening, by the way, and yet managed to be the most outraged constituency of all once they caught up to the story) that was based as much on personality as it was on concerns about journalism.

Quotation of the Week, Possibly the Year

I'm not certain if truer words have ever been spoken:

"One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case," - Larry Summers on the Winklevoss twins.

Big Tip of the Hat.

Rock is Dead. Long Live Rock!

It is likely the most evergreen of all tropes about rock and roll. I swear I read something about it once a year, once a month, maybe once a week and have done so for my entire life as a fan of music. And that's the "rock is dead" proclamations (and its counter-genre, which includes this post, the "rock is not dead" rejoinder.) But news of rock's death is always premature.

Look, no matter what your particular preferences, the best time to be a fan of rock music (or for that matter hip hop or soul or anything else -- let's just subsume it all under the category of "pop" and not be too snobbish about it, eh?) is right now. Right this very minute. And if you are reading this tomorrow at 12:52, then the answer is "right this very minute." And the answer is so not because the music coming out now is better than the music coming out at any other time, but because that music does not disappear and there is always something worthwhile now. There is more moment at this instant than at any point in human history until the next moment, which will supplant this one.

Don't look at the charts. The best stuff rarely makes the top 40 or top 100 or this or that countdown. In fact, what tops the charts often sucks, is insipid pap that makes you lament the very state of the republic, indeed the planet. But the charts not only don't tell the whole story, they tell very little of the story at all. So ignore the cottage industry pronouncing "rock is dead" and the folks telling you that this band, this album, this movement, is going to save rock.

On FPA Blogging (Self Indulgence and All That)

Ok, after a couple of rough weeks I think I am back up and running and blogging at the FPA's Blogs, which, you'll note, have undergone a quite radical format change. I still oversee all of the Africa-related blogging, including writing regularly on African Affairs. But the format is geared toward feeding into one master blog that you can break down into constituent areas rather than emphasizing the constituent areas that can be compiled into a master blog, if that makes sense.

In any case, my meatiest post in a while is up. In it I use the current wave of strikes to explore the state of South African politics and especially the relationship between COSATU and the ANC.

Friday Fun

Dan Drezner (a Williams alum, by the way) imagines the lead paragraphs of prominent world affairs pundits if they covered the Women's World Cup.

Freedom Riders, Emmys, and IMDB (Self Indulgence Alert)

Well, I've made the big time. As a result of my role in Freedom Riders, I now have an IMDB page. A barren, consequenceless IMDB page, but an IMDB page nonetheless.

But I've buried the lede. Freedom Riders has been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, including "Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking," "Writing for Nonfiction Programming," and "Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming."

And a reminder that Freedom's Main Line is available in paperback.

Dealing With Drought

Much of the country is dealing with drought conditions but nowhere has been hit worse than right here in West Texas. In all of 2011 Odessa has received .16 of an inch of rain -- yes, 16 100ths of an inch of rain in seven months (and we had not gotten much precipitation before that -- 13 or so inches in 2010, which was not an outlier one way or the other). The fact that it has been over 100 degrees virtually every day for weeks on end has not helped. The region is parched. Lawns, if they still exist, are beyond relief for anyone adhering to the watering restrictions (many, many people are not adhering to those restrictions because people are selfish pricks).

This is the real danger of the potential devastation of climate change. It also reveals the possibilities of a serious resource scarcity that has the capacity to undermine not only American, but global stability. If you want to imagine a war of all against all, imagine if most of Texas finds that its access to water has been severely restricted.

There will be a certain irony in Texas scrambling to access potable water given that folks in this state have often been fond of festooning their vehicles with bumper stickers reading "Burn more oil and freeze a Yankee." Well, Tex, northerners can use electric heat or fire up the wood stoves. Good luck drinking your precious unrefined oil. Of course then I remember: I live in Texas now.

In any case, it's hot as hell and dry as a bone in Odessa. And while there have been hints of relief coming -- it was banner news in the Odessa American when West Odessa, but not the rest of the city, got rain last night -- we will believe it when we're wet.

Back in the USA

After 48 or so hours of traveling, I'm back in Odessa. The reasons for my early return are pretty horrible, related to deaths in my wife's family, and I certainly wish I could have stayed in South Africa. But it's always nice to be home. Hopefully I'll be back to regular blogging soon.

Happy 4th of July

Happy 4th of July everyone!

Over the past fifteen years or so I have almost certainly spent more Independence Days abroad than in the United States. This year is no exception, as I arrived in East London late this morning. I spent the night in Mthatha in a B&B whose second B gave me killer food poisoning this morning. I decided not to head on to Alice after driving some 200km on a very delicate stomach to get here. So I'll move on to Fort Hare for research tomorrow instead.

By the way, for bizarre reasons the blog was down for at least a while today/last night. I have no idea why. Hopefully there are no further issues.

Now go eat something grilled and drink something fermented.