This past week left no uncertainty regarding the season of the year. I sweat buckets while inhaling bottled water with triple digit temperatures making my old frame wither every time I go to douse a plant outside to keep it from simply igniting in the afternoon sun. For all the scorching going on in the Southern San Joaquin Valley, this part of the world looks very mild when you compare it to the climate bearing down on Happy Valley, Pennsylvania where the campus of Penn State cooks under the hostile glare of a stunned world.
I cannot imagine anyone in America not knowing something about this story. A former top assistant coach and key recruiter for the Penn State football program, Jerry Sandusky, gets convicted on 45 of 48 counts brought against him for various crimes of sexual abuse against children. Mr. Sandusky created a nonprofit charitable organization The Second Mile in 1977 to help at-risk children, some of the children became victims of the founder's sexual abuse. Sandusky also adopted six children, and one of them has also alleged he was sexually abused, although those charges were not part of the trial which concluded in June 2012. The convictions were for crimes committed from 1994 to 2009. Terrible crimes, and chillingly reminiscent of the many crimes against children some Catholic Priests have been convicted of this past decade.
And then we have Penn State University, and its total failure to do anything about these crimes 14 years after being alerted of serious sex abuse allegations being levied against one of their top assistant football coaches. The men at the top did nothing. Not the revered coach of Penn State, Joe Paterno. Not the Athletic Director of Penn State, Tim Curley. Not the Vice-President of Penn State, Gary Schultz. Not the President of Penn State, Graham Spanier. Not the Penn State Board of Trustees who oversee the University and all its policies and finances. As a matter of fact, after the first serious allegations at the university surfaced Jerry Sandusky was "allowed" to retire with full privileges and unlimited access to all campus facilities while getting a nice monetary parting gift of $168,000. According to CNN, "Top university officials said they had never known Penn State "to provide this type of payment to a retiring employee."
In its effort to get ahead of the crisis to blunt even more outrage, Penn State hired former FBI director, Louis Freeh, to investigate and report fully on the matter. The Freeh Report is 267 pages of condemnation of the University and the men who were entrusted to know and do better while running a state funded university. There are many who want to dig much deeper into this sordid saga of arrogance, abuse of power and greed, and think the current list of cut-out men ( a dead coach and three former executives of the university) is much too small.
All I know is that justice works very slowly in this country, and many trials will be forthcoming in both the civil and criminal courts with lots of sordid details to digest for years. What penalty will Penn State, and more specifically its vaunted football program, pay for such big crimes against young people who needed protection not sexual abuse. What the headlines and most of the pundit talk around the country regarding this story fail to acknowledge, or do so quietly with the full understanding that nothing will ever really change, is that this story just encapsulates the nation's brutish football culture that campuses of high schools and colleges have created while pursuing the gold that media conglomerates dangle like rabbit decoys in front of administrative greyhounds running in circles around a track.
A few weeks back I read a great Chuck Klosterman article on football and why Chuck finds it so fascinating today. Within this outstanding Grantland on-line column is a link to a debate on whether or not to ban football from college campuses. The debate comes courtesy of intelligence 2 (Squared) US on the New York University campus. The debate is lengthy, clocking in at nearly 2 hours. I've watched it three times, and have come away each time more convinced minor league football with big league revenues attached to it has no place on the campuses of our American universities.
The arguments from the two panel advocates, Tim Green and Jason Whitlock, who want to keep the game alive and well on college campuses focused on how the game builds character and team work. The two talked up the monetary gains for the colleges, and the benefits players receive for their devotion to the game. The thrust of the two panelists, Malcolm Gladwell and Buzz Bissinger, for banning the game from colleges and universities dealt with head and body injury issues to the athletes and how the economics works against most players and the schools with football programs throughout America.
Buzz Bissinger wrote the exceptional Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team And A
Dream. Malcolm Gladwell wrote the New York Times best-seller, Tipping Point: How Little Things Make A Big Difference. Gladwell is a New Yorker Magazine contributor columnist and has written 3 other best selling books. Tim Green is an NFL analyst on the Fox Network, and has authored 21 books of fiction and 3 non-fiction book titles. He is a lawyer who practices law in the state of New York. Jason Whitlock is a sportswriter for Foxsports.com and is a contributor to ESPN. The fascinating element to the debate procedure finds all those in attendance asked to give an indication on their leanings before the debate happens. Are they in favor of the proposal, against the proposal or are indifferent regarding the proposal? At the close of the debate the audience weighs in again with how they view things after hearing the debaters. This topic has been the biggest intelligence 2 (Squared) debate thus far.
The results of the debate surprised me, as did some of the statistics the panelists offered into evidence as support of their positions. This debate took place after the allegations surfaced at Penn State surrounding Jerry Sandusky, but before his trial started.
A Sports Illustrated column from March of 2011 written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Ketayian explored a twist on the Top 25 ranking of college football teams. These are the top poll ranked football programs of 2010 and the number of players in their programs with criminal records playing for those universities. Pittsburgh came away with the top ranking for utilizing the most players in their program (22 players) with a criminal background. Iowa and Arkansas tied for second with 18 apiece. Lo and behold, what team do you think tied with Boise State for third place in using players with criminal backgrounds? Penn State you say? Yes, indeed.
Let's not kid ourselves here in thinking just the top 25 teams utilize players with criminal backgrounds, or find their student athletes engaged in alleged criminal behavior. The people in Missoula, MT are living the Happy Valley, PA nightmare as the Justice Department investigates multiple rape allegations from 2010, and prior. The identity of this town of 86,000 in Western Montana has been all about their Grizzlies football team. The university had more than 80 reported rapes over the past three years. Probably not the learning environment message you want to employ to recruit bright young people to your campus would be my guess.
Here in the Southern San Joaquin in September of 2011 there were two dozen Fresno State Bulldog football players implicated in a welfare fraud case involving the Department of Social Services. And the beat goes on.
It would be one thing if all colleges and universities with football programs made money to help underwrite tuition costs and other school fees, but 42% of all collegiate schools with football programs lost on average $2.9 million for 2010 according to a report by the NCAA. A USA report found students footed a $795 million bill for sports programs in 2009, which was up 18% from 2005.
I find it absurd seeing football coaches salaries at the astronomic levels they are today. Knowing Jeff Tedford, the coach at Cal, is the highest paid UC system employee, and the highest paid state employee to boot, makes me want to take a serious life long sabbatical from college football. Alabama pays Nick Saban $5.62 million per year. Ask any Miami Dolphin fan about Nick Saban's character, and his willingness to tell the truth when up against it. Nick's daughter appears to be a chip off the old feisty and publicity seeking Saban block. The list of overpaid football coaches is now legion in America, where the costs of getting a higher education get further and further out of reach, and student debt is now the great source of debt in this country surpassing credit card and mortgage debt this past year. The total debt of student loans is now over a trillion dollars in this country. No shock to see a stagnating wage world in America with soaring tuition coasts and the lowest state and local spending on higher education in 25 years create this debt disaster for families.
Over a million young guys strap-it up and play football in high schools throughout America. Of that total only 66,000 get to play college football, and of those only about a third get a scholarship. All this, and those players battling it out on the Saturdays putting the butts in the stands don't get a dime as the actual talent of the game.
You'll never hear the analysts and play-byplay announcers call for ending their meal ticket. And the conglomerate media networks will never do the right thing and take a step back to see what despicable social reality they have created, since their only right thing has to do with making their top executives, major investors and top talent oodles of money.
So, in a day or two a verdict will come down on Penn State, and Penn State alone. But, Penn State was not created in a vacuum. Penn State is just the reflecting glass of our current university culture that allows abuses of power like Sandusky's to permeate our society, and gives passes to major indiscretions and infractions to those who fill a stadium and get a television contract.
I will never follow college football again. I have been a football fan for most of my life, and have no issue with the game itself. If the business of football wants a minor league system of club teams not affiliated with universities by all means go for it. Have the USC, Ohio State, Nebraska, Alabama, Florida, Miami, Oklahoma, Boise State minor league teams play their hearts out any day of the week they choose. We just need to remove this caricature of a game from places where higher education should be the sole focus. No other nation on earth uses their hallowed halls of academics as the venue for head-banging entertainment.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Julius Comes Again
Julius Caesar's month arrives.
With apologies to Glen Frey, "the heat is on" throughout the days and nights. This time of year the Beach Boys always came to mind when I was younger. I was never a huge fan of the brothers and cousin from Hawthorne, CA and their many additions/subtractions over the years, but always thought many of their seminal hits catchy, and now find several other tunes of Brian Wilson's evoking a sadness nostalgia wrings from an old sentimental brain when tweaked by a riff. Surprising staying power for a band trapped in a regional location tied firmly to one decade, the 1960s.
It's not that the Beach Boys didn't make good music after the Sixties, but no one knows or remembers those songs much, if at all. Everyone remembers all the lyrical names of the California Girls from Help Me Rhonda and Wendy to Barbara Ann and an old lady from Pasadena, but after the Seventies crossed the big dial in the space time universe the band had a tough time selling records. Cameron Crowe found a nugget from the under appreciated album, Surf's Up, which Carl Wilson wrote with Jack Rieley titled Feel Flows. He included it on his rock nostalgia masterpiece film, Almost Famous. The song is so unlike the usual Beach Boy offering in theme and instrumentation, but when you hear the harmonies you have a real good idea of who you're listening to while it takes you on a transcendental groove that was already out of time by its original release but has remained timeless due to its great production values with an exquisite layered mix of vocals and instrumentation .
Certainly, over my listening years a lot of artists (huge, obscure and everywhere in between) have mined the hot season with some great songs. Lovin' Spoonful's Summer In The City, Sly Stone's Hot Fun In The Summertime, Alice Cooper's School's Out, Don Henley's The Boys of Summer, Diesel's Sausalito Summer Nights, Janis Joplin's or Miles Davis' versions of Cole Porter's Summertime, Jimi Hendrix's Long Hot Summer Night, Meatloaf's Paradise By The Dashboard Lights with inspired baseball commentary by Phil Rizutto, and Green Day's Wake Me When September Ends all pop into my skull as good sun-season melody fodder. I'm sure you have some other tunes that come to mind that wring out beach towels of of memory-dripping summer madness.
Maybe this month's heat fried some of my circuitry, but I can't think of one British rock act circa 1960s onward that owns a good tune that really means summer. I know there have been plenty of tunes about sunshine from many a Brit band, or artist, but the feeling is that a day of sunshine is one of those rare and sparkling events to be celebrated as a gift, certainly not the American styled season of sweat. The Beatles could pop out Good Day Sunshine and Here Comes the Sun, but those certainly in no way evoke a summer spirit. The Rolling Stones have a great tune, Winter, but no song of summer. The Kinks coined the title, Autumn, but never for the season preceding it. I guess it makes sense when the nation's latitude falls where Southern Canada's rests that odes to warm months would be sparse, much like summer itself in those climates. But, that curious Canadian, Bryan Adams, had a modest hit with The Summer of '69 back in the early 1980s. Of course, Bryan had his eye on the American market back in those days and summer has been a somewhat topical treatment here in the states.
I say somewhat topical, because only two major rock era acts post the Beach Boy's 1960s moment in the pop sun truly make summer, and what the season really stands for in this country, their stock and trade. Just my little opinion here on the blogosphere, but only Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger have owned summer in the rock world.
When you listen to these two great artists, and especially their defining work from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, the themes and energy surrounding so many of their songs just screams high temperatures and perspiration born of passionate desperation for youth on the cusp.
Bob Seger's best material exudes a sexual heat, a longing and an elusiveness of the all-too-brief moments of long days and short nights that quickly were over. His usual persona for many of his memorable songs always looks back in Night Moves, Roll Me Away, Main Street, Brave Strangers and Against the Wind. Other songs like Fire Down Below, Come to Poppa, Sunspot Baby and Her Strut all have beat and thermometer set to sauna levels. "Like a wildfire out of control" ... "young and restless running against the wind." Lines define the time.
Bruce Springsteen means summer in a completely different way for me, although he and Bob share the motorcycle as a metaphor on more than one occasion. The three major album releases- Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River all deal with summer's promise and agony for youth looking to escape the inexorable determination of their forged fates. Years ago the sameness of some arrangements and beat on several of the Darkness on the Edge of Town's songs bothered me, but as time passed and gave my ears some distance I began to greatly appreciate the force of those slow hammer blows that marked these songs and the everyday intense repetitive drudgery causing the drive to escape they evoked. For Bruce, summer is/was no vacation time, nor a sexual metaphor in the great body of his work. Summer is the grind, it begets work-sweat and meets desperate encounters trying to outrun the inevitable. The earlier songs more defiant, but by The River a resignation has emerged in the author's voice. Later albums channel many of these themes with differing colors. The mixes get better while the July driven eloquence of his youth dims, as it must with age and vantage point, but Bruce Springsteen will always define summer's sound for me.
As Prove it All Night goes into the seventh minute of a long ago live recording, and Wrecking Ball awaits its third run the through all the tracks I can hear an M-80 explode nearby in the neighborhood. The dog now frets and pants, his anxiety at a very high level. The cats look about, in better shape than the dog, but they're old and probably don't hear as well. I turn up the music a bit, like I am forced to do every July 4th holiday to ease the critter nerves. Good speakers with summer melodies help.
Thanks for stopping by.
With apologies to Glen Frey, "the heat is on" throughout the days and nights. This time of year the Beach Boys always came to mind when I was younger. I was never a huge fan of the brothers and cousin from Hawthorne, CA and their many additions/subtractions over the years, but always thought many of their seminal hits catchy, and now find several other tunes of Brian Wilson's evoking a sadness nostalgia wrings from an old sentimental brain when tweaked by a riff. Surprising staying power for a band trapped in a regional location tied firmly to one decade, the 1960s.
It's not that the Beach Boys didn't make good music after the Sixties, but no one knows or remembers those songs much, if at all. Everyone remembers all the lyrical names of the California Girls from Help Me Rhonda and Wendy to Barbara Ann and an old lady from Pasadena, but after the Seventies crossed the big dial in the space time universe the band had a tough time selling records. Cameron Crowe found a nugget from the under appreciated album, Surf's Up, which Carl Wilson wrote with Jack Rieley titled Feel Flows. He included it on his rock nostalgia masterpiece film, Almost Famous. The song is so unlike the usual Beach Boy offering in theme and instrumentation, but when you hear the harmonies you have a real good idea of who you're listening to while it takes you on a transcendental groove that was already out of time by its original release but has remained timeless due to its great production values with an exquisite layered mix of vocals and instrumentation .
Certainly, over my listening years a lot of artists (huge, obscure and everywhere in between) have mined the hot season with some great songs. Lovin' Spoonful's Summer In The City, Sly Stone's Hot Fun In The Summertime, Alice Cooper's School's Out, Don Henley's The Boys of Summer, Diesel's Sausalito Summer Nights, Janis Joplin's or Miles Davis' versions of Cole Porter's Summertime, Jimi Hendrix's Long Hot Summer Night, Meatloaf's Paradise By The Dashboard Lights with inspired baseball commentary by Phil Rizutto, and Green Day's Wake Me When September Ends all pop into my skull as good sun-season melody fodder. I'm sure you have some other tunes that come to mind that wring out beach towels of of memory-dripping summer madness.
Maybe this month's heat fried some of my circuitry, but I can't think of one British rock act circa 1960s onward that owns a good tune that really means summer. I know there have been plenty of tunes about sunshine from many a Brit band, or artist, but the feeling is that a day of sunshine is one of those rare and sparkling events to be celebrated as a gift, certainly not the American styled season of sweat. The Beatles could pop out Good Day Sunshine and Here Comes the Sun, but those certainly in no way evoke a summer spirit. The Rolling Stones have a great tune, Winter, but no song of summer. The Kinks coined the title, Autumn, but never for the season preceding it. I guess it makes sense when the nation's latitude falls where Southern Canada's rests that odes to warm months would be sparse, much like summer itself in those climates. But, that curious Canadian, Bryan Adams, had a modest hit with The Summer of '69 back in the early 1980s. Of course, Bryan had his eye on the American market back in those days and summer has been a somewhat topical treatment here in the states.
I say somewhat topical, because only two major rock era acts post the Beach Boy's 1960s moment in the pop sun truly make summer, and what the season really stands for in this country, their stock and trade. Just my little opinion here on the blogosphere, but only Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger have owned summer in the rock world.
When you listen to these two great artists, and especially their defining work from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, the themes and energy surrounding so many of their songs just screams high temperatures and perspiration born of passionate desperation for youth on the cusp.
Bob Seger's best material exudes a sexual heat, a longing and an elusiveness of the all-too-brief moments of long days and short nights that quickly were over. His usual persona for many of his memorable songs always looks back in Night Moves, Roll Me Away, Main Street, Brave Strangers and Against the Wind. Other songs like Fire Down Below, Come to Poppa, Sunspot Baby and Her Strut all have beat and thermometer set to sauna levels. "Like a wildfire out of control" ... "young and restless running against the wind." Lines define the time.
Bruce Springsteen means summer in a completely different way for me, although he and Bob share the motorcycle as a metaphor on more than one occasion. The three major album releases- Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River all deal with summer's promise and agony for youth looking to escape the inexorable determination of their forged fates. Years ago the sameness of some arrangements and beat on several of the Darkness on the Edge of Town's songs bothered me, but as time passed and gave my ears some distance I began to greatly appreciate the force of those slow hammer blows that marked these songs and the everyday intense repetitive drudgery causing the drive to escape they evoked. For Bruce, summer is/was no vacation time, nor a sexual metaphor in the great body of his work. Summer is the grind, it begets work-sweat and meets desperate encounters trying to outrun the inevitable. The earlier songs more defiant, but by The River a resignation has emerged in the author's voice. Later albums channel many of these themes with differing colors. The mixes get better while the July driven eloquence of his youth dims, as it must with age and vantage point, but Bruce Springsteen will always define summer's sound for me.
As Prove it All Night goes into the seventh minute of a long ago live recording, and Wrecking Ball awaits its third run the through all the tracks I can hear an M-80 explode nearby in the neighborhood. The dog now frets and pants, his anxiety at a very high level. The cats look about, in better shape than the dog, but they're old and probably don't hear as well. I turn up the music a bit, like I am forced to do every July 4th holiday to ease the critter nerves. Good speakers with summer melodies help.
Thanks for stopping by.
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