I'm glad to see that someone else thinks there's a connection between baseball and politics.
A couple of years ago, when I was circulating a book-length manuscript called Bush-League America: George W. Bush and the Church of Baseball (its later subtitle was Conservatism and Cosmopolitanism in American Baseball and Politics), a couple of the agents I contacted said that they didn't see that there was any link between Bush and baseball. I found this puzzling, given that without his connection to baseball Bush wouldn't have been able run for Governor of Texas, let alone President of the United States. (You'll get the basic idea behind the book if you read this post.)
Reading Newsweek magazine this week, I was drawn to an article about Nate Silver, the man who devised the PECOTA forecasting system, which has proven incredibly accurate in predicting future performance by major league baseball players on the basis of comparisons to past performance by "comparable" players. (PECOTA stands for "Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm.")
Now, Silver is bringing his methodology to political forecasting, and he created a stir with his surprisingly accurate forecast of the the results of the recent Democratic primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. According to Silver, ""Baseball and politics are data-driven. But a lot of the time, that data might be used badly. In baseball, that may mean looking at a statistic like batting average when things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far more correlated with winning ballgames. In politics, that might mean cherry-picking a certain polling result." [Click here to read the Newsweek article.]
Silver's work will no doubt find a place in the next revision of Bush-League America, which I'm hoping to complete just after this November's presidential election. From what both agents and university press editors told me, the manuscript either needs to become more scholarly or much less scholarly. I'm choosing the latter, and, inspired by a reading of Shalom Auslander's memoir Foreskin's Lament, I think I have a revision strategy that will work. Stay tuned.
Thirty years ago, the Rolling Stones released their landmark album Some Girls.
For me, the album is indelibly associated with the death of a beloved teacher named Paul-Philippe Bolduc, who taught me French during my high school years at Trinity School on New York's Upper West Side.
I've written about that moment in my life over at ahistoryofnewyork.com.
Click here for the Wikipedia entry on the album. And here for the anniversary material available at RollingStones.com.
You'll notice that, at the bottom of the screenshot from MSNBC that accompanied last night's post on Barack Obama, the words "Obama: I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations."
MSNBC showed these words and others from Obama speech as he was delivering it. Midway through the speech, my wife read this statement about humility and limitations and asked me, "Did he say that? I don't remember it, and I've been listening pretty closely." I suggested that they were quoting from his prepared text, following the practice, which I find profoundly annoying, that some networks have of preceding commercial breaks during mini-series with quick shots of scenes to come.
But when Obama actually uttered those words at the end of his speech, I found myself moved anyway:
The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment -- this was the time -- when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals. Thank you, God Bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.
What if -- what if -- it turns out to be true? What if historians a century from now can point to this fall as the moment when the United States changed its course and finally began to promise of its founding?
It sounds naive, I know, but that's why having hope is, as Obama, suggests "audacious."
Some numbers related to my three previous posts:
Total Number of Delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August: 4,234
Number of Pledged Delegates: 3,409
Number of Superdelegates: 825
Number of Delegates Needed to Clinch the Democratic Nomination: 2,118
Number of Delegates Allocated to Barack Obama: 2,156 (1,762 pledged, 394 super)
Number of Delegates Allocated to Hillary Clinton: 1,923 (1,636, 287 super)
Number of Potential Running Mates for Obama Mentioned in CNN.com's Article: 18
[Figures from CNNPolitics.com as of 9:30 a.m.]
Days Until Election Day: 153
Days Until George W. Bush Is Out of A Job: 214
Last Night's Yankees Score: Toronto 9, Yankees 3
Number of Innings Pitched by Phenom Joba Chamberlain Last Night in His First Major League Start: 2.1
Number of Joba Chamberlain's Uniform: 62
Number of Pitches Thrown By Joba Last Night: 62
Number of Runs Allowed by Joba: 2 (1 earned)
Yankees' Record: 28-30
Yankees' Place in their Division: Fifth (Last)
Games Behind the First-Place Tampa Bay Devil Rays (!): 7
Last Night's Mets Score: Mets 9, San Francisco 6
Number of Innings Pitched by Veteran Ace Pedro Martinez Last Night in His First Start Since Injuring His Hamstring on April 1: 6
Number of Pitches Thrown By Pedro Last Night: 109
Number of Runs Allowed By Pedro: 3 (all earned)
Number of Hits Made By Pedro: 2
Number of Runs Batted In By Pedro: 1
Mets' Record: 29-28
Mets' Place in their Division: Fourth
Games Behind the First-Place Philadelphia Phillies: 4.5
Number of Baby Stick Insects Currently Resident in Our House: at least 12
Watching Barack Obama become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party tonight, I am reminded of my first visit to Washington DC. It was the summer of 1974, and it was part of a family trip that had already taken us to South Carolina to visit cousins on my mother's side and to Orlando, Florida, to visit the Haunted Mansion and the Pirates of the Caribbean. As luck would have it, we arrived in Washington on August 8. That evening, in our hotel room, I watched Richard Nixon become the first U.S. president to resign his office.
I remember tears springing to my eyes. I felt bad for the guy. I was 12 years old; I knew all about Watergate. But I still felt bad for the guy.
What I remember most vividly from that trip, however, is something the cab driver said when we were being driven from the Amtrak station to the hotel. My mother, sister, and I were in the back seat. My father sat in front with the driver, and they were talking about politics. I heard the driver say something like, "We'll never have a non-white president in this country. Not in our lifetimes." And then I saw his eyes glance into the rear view mirror and notice that a Filipino woman and her two brown children were sitting there. My father, a Parsi, is fair-skinned and, the driver had taken him simply to be a white person. "I'm sorry," he said, somewhat embarrassed. "But it's true."
I wasn't offended and don't remember thinking too much about it much at the time. I realize now that this was because I didn't disagree. Though I was never really subject to much racially oriented abuse during my childhood, I had nevertheless already come to believe that I could never really hope to be President of the United States.
When President Kennedy was shot, my father's eldest sister apparently called him from Pakistan and expressed the hope that I would never run for president. She believed that in the United States of America anything was possible. Her nephew could run for president.
I knew better. And so I never considered a career in politics. I was interested in politics and government -- interested, that, is in studying them. I put down "Government" as my prospective concentration in my application to Harvard. By the time it came time to declare a concentration, I'd switched to English. The rest, as they say, is history.
So it's striking to me to watch a man who is my age (Barack Obama was born two months and five days before I was), who is a cultural hybrid and a brown person (and an African American rather than Asian American brown at that), who entered Harvard Law School (which I had elected not to attend) while I was still working on my doctorate at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences -- a man, in other words, who has made very different assumptions and choices than I have -- become the likely nominee of the Democratic Party.
And, I firmly believe, the likely 44th president of the United States.
It took me a while to come around to Barack Obama. My mother-in-law, who was living in Illinois when he was elected to the Senate, was an early convert, and the car that we inherited from her last summer has a fading "Barack Obama for President" sticker on its rear window. I was originally more drawn to John Edwards's populist message, but after spending a good deal of time during my convalescence learning about Obama, I was ready to vote for him in New York's primary. And, I think, the moment that I was really hooked, the moment that I really began to believe in him, was when Teddy Kennedy endorsed his candidacy. (I bought a DVD of the endorsement and Obama's reply from C-SPAN to show my kids one day.)
As the weeks progressed, it became clear to me that Hillary Clinton was using the old playbook in a moment when we -- the Democratic Party, the American nation -- needed a new one. Electing Obama to the presidency would be a sign to the rest of the world the United States was ready to change its course, a far surer sign that electing Hillary Clinton and the style of politics that she embraced during the campaign.
The United States led by a brown man, an African American, a cultural hybrid, a cosmopolitan being? I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. And I can't wait.
My wife would say I'm jinxing it, but if I had to put down a bet, I'd bet on Obama in a near-landslide come November.
June 3, 2008: it is, in the words of the U2 song that accompanied Obama to the stage of the Xcel Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, tonight, a "beautiful day."
As the second month of the 2008 baseball season comes to a close, it's worth noting that the Mets and the Yankees are each in fourth place in their respective divisions with nearly identical records: the Yanks are 28-27, the Mets are 27-27. Both teams have been plagued by injuries.
The Mets currently have bragging rights by virtue of their sweep of the two Subway Series games at Yankee Stadium two weeks ago, though those games hardly turned out to constitute much of a turning point for the Mets. Indeed, they went on to a humiliating four-game sweep in Atlanta, with ancient nemesis Chipper Jones once again dashing their hopes, en route to a 1-6 road trip. They've won 6 out of 14 since the series with the Yankees.They've put Willie Randolph's job in jeopardy and their inconsistent play has kept last year's collapse fresh in the minds of their fans.
The Yankees, meanwhile, have gone 8-and-4 since losing to the Mets. No one's talking about firing Joe Girardi.
The Mets are hoping that this homestand will turn things around. They took two out of three from the first-place Marlins and have taken two out of three from Joe Torre's Dodgers. And they're putting Johann Santana out on the mound tomorrow night for the final game of the series.
With luck, however, Santana will win but won't be the big story of the week. With luck, the big story will be the successful return of Pedro Martinez to the mound on Tuesday night after missing seven weeks.
But Pedro may not get the back page of the tabloids on Wednesday morning, because the Yankees also have some interesting pitching plans for Tuesday night: they're finally going to start their bullpen phenom Joba Chamberlain.
Let's hope that Tuesday serves as the start for a better brand of New York baseball than we've seen over the last two months.
We had despaired of our stick bugs' ever having babies. My older son, whose science teacher had given him the three stick bugs that I described in an earlier post, had told me that one of his friend's stick bugs had had babies very soon after they were brought home from school -- and that the parent bugs proceeded to eat all their babies!
I'd read that the insects produce eggs after a certain number of moltings, but I figured that we were well past that number by now. I was also beginning to think that my son's science teacher was correct: that they didn't reproduced parthenogenically, there were male and female insects, and that we'd somehow managed to get three of the same sex.
After eight months, the stick insects had grown quite big and were now indistinguishable from one another. Then about six weeks ago, one of them went toes up, leaving us with only two. I think my wife was looking forward to being stick bug-free in the not too distant future.
And then yesterday, when I was adding a bit of lettuce to the cage, I noticed something on one of the bugs' legs: a miniature bug! Look, I shouted to my wife, the stick bugs have bred! And then, looking more closely at the cage, I began to see little stick bugs everywhere and tiny stick bug casings lying in the soil. (I'm hoping it's because the little fellas have already molted. The alternative would be that the parents have sucked the juice out of the little carcasses.) I ended up pulling about ten from the cage, luring them onto chopsticks, and putting them in our original cage, safe from the clutches of their parents.
So much for the stick bug-free future! Meanwhile, I haven't been able to convince anyone else in my household that we should take the two big ones out of the cage and let them roam around a bit, maybe race down the hallway -- a little fling before they go the way of all things.
What do you suppose would be on a stick bug's bucket list?
The crystal skull that serves as the MacGuffin in the new Indiana Jones film is a "highly magnetized object" that attracts all kinds of metal.
This morning, I discovered that The Crystal Skull has similar properties. Leaving my building, I had every intention of turning right and heading to the gym. But, like the film's Professor Oxley (played by John Hurt), I could hear the Skull beckoning: "Return!" I found myself turning left and heading to the 11:30 showing at the AMC Loew's 19th Street, returning there a mere nine hours after I'd left. (This is the quickest I've ever been back to see a movie a second time.)
Was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull worth watching a second time? For me, the answer was an emphatic, Yes! Indeed, I found myself fonder of the movie after the second time through.
In the recently released volume The Complete Making of Indiana Jones by Laurent Bouzereau and J. W. Rinzler (Ballantine Books), Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying: "I want people to come to this movie and say, 'Oh, my old friends are back. And one of their friends will be the style in which we shot the previous films. I want audiences to come to this movie and make new friends, but rediscover that their old friends haven't changed all that much."
That's exactly how I feel about this movie.
I've just returned from a 12:01 a.m. showing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I wanted to make sure that I saw it before I had a chance to read any of the reviews.
I'll admit I spent most of the day worried that the movie was going to be a disappointment, because I couldn't avoid hearing about some pre-release negative commentary on the internet and a lukewarm response when the film was shown on Sunday at Cannes.
I wasn't disappointed.
Like the other Indiana Jones films, it's a rollercoaster ride, though it's a rollercoaster whose twists and turns we've been taught to anticipate by the previous three Indy rides. The film doesn't have the wonder of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the over-the-top kineticism of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or the wonderful character development of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And it doesn't need to. It's like a reunion, in which old friends get together to remember good times and have a few new adventures that are fun even if they don't quite match the thrills of yesteryear.
Where the three previous films paid homage to 1930s-style serials, the Crystal Skull pays homage to the sci-fi films of the 1950s -- and to the three films that preceded it. Indy's older now, a little thicker around the middle, as is his old flame, Marion Ravenwood, but it's still great to see them back in action. Especially Karen Allen as Marion. (I had the same crush on her back in the day that David A. Kaplan describes in this column from Newsweek.) Part of the pleasure of the film is the way in which it refers back to moments from the earlier films (and to moments in Steven Spielberg's pre-Indiana Jones films). The earlier sequels had some of the same referentiality (remember Indy and the two swordsmen in Temple of Doom), but the new film is chock full of them. Some made find it a little too nostalgic, but it reminded me of the way in which I felt back in 1981 when I first saw Raiders. It didn't produce the same feeling, but the reminder was enough.
The plot is silly in a kind of 1950s sci-fi film way and not nearly as muddled as the critics are suggesting. Sure there's a Maguffin that ostensibly drives the plot like the ark, the Sankara stone, and the Holy Grail in the earlier film, but like it's predecesors the film is really about something ese. Let's just say that like Raiders it's about rediscovering old feelings; like the Last Crusade it's about sons getting to know fathers.
Of all the reviews that I've sped through before I sat down to write this post, this one from Salon comes the closest to capturing what I felt about the film.
Oddly enough, I managed to marry a woman who has never seen an Indiana Jones film, but she knows how much I love them and has agreed to watch them with me. I think I'll show her Raiders and Last Crusade and take her to Crystal Skull. They make a nice trilogy.
Yesterday, I went with a group of students from the NYU residence hall in which I live up to the IMAX Theater on Broadway and 68th Street to see Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert documentary, Shine a Light. The film was shot two years ago up Broadway at the Beacon Theater by an all-star team of cameramen, and it's more than just a filmed concert: it's a concert reimagined through the cinematic imagination of a filmmaker who happens to be a life-long Stones fan.
The craggy faces, hands, and instruments of the Stones fill the screen in extreme close-up, and they look great, wrinkles and all. The cameras hug Jagger as he careens about the stage, struggling to keep up with him. Every now and then, the camera lingers for a moment on Keith's or Ronnie's fingers and guitar, and the riff that's being played jumps out of the soundtrack for an added shot of presence. The film's editing is kinetic, and Scorsese manages to capture the pure joy of being the Stones on stage. The film isn't about trying to understand who the Stones are; it's about representing the larger-than-life selves into which they transform themselves when they're playing live. And in IMAX, they're larger-than-larger-than life.
The film shows us the late-model Stones at their best: they've gotten tighter on stage with age, and I've often entertained the heretical notion that the Stones sound better with Darryl Jones on bass than they did with Bill Wyman. And there are three terrific guest appearancs: a worshipful Jack White III singing "Lovin' Cup" with Mick; Buddy Guy inspiring worship from none other than Keith on "Champagne and Reefer"; and Christina Aguilera injecting a growling jolt of sexual energy into her duet with Mick on "Live With Me."
The Stones no longer "matter" in the way that they did back in the day, when they seemed to be dangerous countercultural voices, and their last album, A Bigger Bang, was entertaining but not nearly as significant as, say, The Rising by Bruce Springsteen. The Stones are an oldies band these days, but for my money they're still "the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the
world."
Scorsese caught the band during two marvelous shows in an intimate venue, but if you'd been there you wouldn't have gotten to see what you see in Shine a Light. You need the light that Scorsese's cameras shine on the band for that.
If you're a Stones fan, a Scorsese fan, or a fan of concert films, make sure to get uptown and see it in IMAX. It may only be rock 'n' roll, but chances are you'll like it.
[Click here to see a brief clip of Mick and Christina doing their thing.]
