RBG is not amused. |
Curmudgeon Central
"And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep." --Lord Byron
Saturday, March 30, 2024
The Opperman Foundation Renders Its Award (and Itself) Irrelevant
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Is the NCAA Selection Committee Stupid or Corrupt? ¿Por Qué No Los Dos?
Zillionaire basketball coaches who have been fired for
corruption even by a university not known for scrupulous ethics tend not to be at
the top of Curmie’s heroes list. Rick
Pitino is one such creature. But when he’s
right, he’s right.
Pitino made headlines recently when he savaged the selection
committee for the NCAA basketball tournament for not giving a bid to his St. John’s team. He then refused an invitation to the less
prestigious NIT tournament. Thing is, there
is no conceivable way the Red Storm should have been omitted from the “Big Dance.”
Readers who know Curmie personally are familiar with his “Totally
Objective But Not Necessarily Accurate” rankings. Of course, these rankings have proven to be
rather accurate, indeed. This year, they
predicted outcomes considerably better than did either the AP or Coaches’ polls. Curmie has had a bracket in the top 10%
nationally (on the ESPN site) several years in a row, and was in the top 1/10
of 1% a couple of years ago.
The most respected national ranking system is Ken Pomeroy’s KenPom.com. Other rankings
are the BPI (Basketball
Power Index) and NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool). All of these systems are based on objective
criteria: the location of the game, the outcome, the quality of the opponent.
All told, then, there are five different ranking systems Curmie
is referencing here (his own system has both a “right now” ranking and a “for
the season” ranking). Curmie would have
St. John’s as a 5-seed in the “right now” rankings, as an 8-seed for the season. KenPom would have them as an 8, the BPI as a
6. Even the massively problematic NET,
which Pitino blames for the snub, would have the Red Storm as an 8-seed. In other words, literally every
statistically-based system has St. John’s not merely in the tournament, but comfortably
so: they’re no lower that 32nd in any of these rankings; the top 42
are in.
Indeed, St. John’s ranked higher than no fewer than seven teams
receiving at-large bids—Clemson, Florida Atlantic, Nevada, South Carolina,
Texas A&M, Utah State, and Virginia—in all five categories! There were a couple others that barely edged
out the Red Storm in a single system.
Of course, Florida Atlantic was last year’s Cinderella team,
so they get in; South Carolina was picked to be near the bottom of the SEC and their
great start made them (for a while) a successful underdog (and their women’s team is really
good), and Clemson and Virginia are from the ACC, which always gets
preferential treatment. Usually, it’s
Duke; this year, the Blue Devils’ 4-seed is about right.
It’s apparently North Carolina’s turn to be absurdly
over-rated. Curmie had them as a 3-seed
for the season; KenPom and the BPI agree.
The NET and Curmie’s “right now” ranking have them as the last
2-seed. Who should be the last 1-seed
may be up for discussion—Arizona, Auburn, Iowa State, and Tennessee all have a
reasonable claim—but it sure as hell isn’t the Tarheels. What’s worse, they also get a first-round
play-in game (overall #1 UConn doesn’t), and they have by far the easiest
bracket.
In Curmie’s “right now” ranking, UConn and Iowa State are
the top two teams in the country; they’re in the same quadrant, so only one
can make the Final Four. Meanwhile, UNC
is #8, and can get to Glendale without having to beat anyone better than #12
Arizona. (All four other systems,
including Curmie’s ranking for the season, have Arizona ranked higher than North
Carolina, so there’s that…)
None of this, of course, means that those teams Curmie is
calling over-rated won’t win some games, or even the tournament, but seedings
should reflect the past and the present. There are a lot of teams that don’t
belong at all, and St. John’s has plenty of company in feeling… erm…
screwed. Ken Pomeroy has seven teams
that didn’t make the tournament ranked higher than South Carolina.
There is always, of course, some controversy surrounding Selection
Sunday. This year seems worse than most. Curmie can’t recall a year when a team that all
of those ranking systems agree should be an 8-seed or higher can’t even get a
play-in game as a 10, or one in which a 1-seed wasn’t ranked higher than 8th
in any of those systems, while two other teams from that same conference got bids
(or at least seeds) they didn’t deserve.
Curmie’s old, though… maybe he’s forgetting something.
As for the former: maybe Pitino is being punished for past
transgressions? Or he stole someone’s girlfriend? Or committee members are dumber than the
proverbial sack of hammers?
As for the latter: It is true that once upon a time, the ACC was the best college basketball conference in the country. It is also true that bell-bottom jeans were once considered stylish. Today, the only plausible explanation for the over-ranking of teams from the fifth-best conference is that the ACC Commissioner has compromising photographs of committee members and barnyard animals.
Wishing for a Little Less Painlessness...
I drove to this one, although it was nearly 500 miles from
Chez Curmie; that meant that on arrival I was both very tired and searching for
a place to get a good meal… and an adult beverage. It’s not uncommon for the kind of hotel I was
staying at to have room service, or at least a nice on-site restaurant. This turned out not to be the case, however,
as the in-house eatery was a chain sub shop… and it was closed, anyway.
This prompted me to break out the laptop and look for a good
restaurant I could walk to. It turned
out that such a place existed in one of the other conference hotels: indeed it
was the one where all three sessions I knew I was going to attend were to be
held. And I knew exactly where it was,
because my GPS, which had done an admirable job of directing me around the
flooding on the shortest route to the conference city and getting me on the
right street, decided to direct me to that hotel instead of my own. Walking a couple of blocks was no problem, in
other words.
I had a very good meal that cost a little over three times
my per diem for a dinner in that city, paid with my Discover card, and
was on my way. Ah, but there’s a step
missing there: I apparently didn’t collect my card and put it back in my
wallet. This was on Wednesday night.
Breakfasts were included with the hotel room, and both
lunches and dinners on Thursday and Friday were “working” meals, paid on the
organization’s debit card. That meant it
wasn’t until Saturday morning, when I played hooky from the conference to check
out the city’s art museum, that I noticed my card was missing. I called Discover, and the customer service
rep handled the situation admirably: she told me the last time the card had
been used was at that restaurant, and gave me the choice between freezing the account
while I searched for the card or cancelling it, setting me up with a new card
and a new account number. I chose the
former option.
When I got back downtown (the art museum is outside the city
center), I checked at the hotel, and sure enough, they returned the card to me
with minimum hassle. So now it was time
to call Discover and get the card unfrozen (thawed?). I first got the robovoice, which told me the
call might be monitored or recorded, and that they might use some sort of voice
recognition to make sure I was who I said I was. (Really?)
Robovoice also told me they didn’t have a record of my cell phone number
and asked if I’d like to include that in my profile.
I was then connected to a person who, like his colleague
from the earlier conversation, was affable and efficient. I identified myself by the last four digits
of my Social Security number, my date of birth, and my zip code. Then, presumably to prove I really did have
the card back, I had to read a number on the back of the card—not the security
number, a different number in smaller print.
And then I was good to go.
Except…
What if, instead of my card being left at a restaurant, my
wallet had been stolen and I didn’t know it (I thought I’d left it in my office
or something)? My SS card is tucked away
in there, and my DOB and zip are right there on my driver’s license. Maybe, maybe, they have a record that
the call to freeze the account and the call to unfreeze it came from the same
phone number… but it’s certainly possible that one of those calls could have
come from my office or home phone (or my hotel room). And
they didn’t have my cell number on file, remember, Gentle Reader?
One of my other accounts requires the answers to not one but
three questions—mother’s maiden name, best friend in high school, that
sort of thing. Another first demands a
password and then will send a security code to the email address they have on
file. Not so to get my card
re-activated. Indeed, I had to jump
through more security hoops to report the card missing than I did to get the
account unfrozen.
I’m grateful that the process was as painless as it
was. I also kinda wish it had been a
little less painless.
(Side note: Curmie’s actual Discover card has a shamrock design. It was good to have it back to use on St. Patrick’s Day.)
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Dartmouth's Basketball Team Embarrasses This Alum, But Not as Much as the NLRB Does
But “disappointing” isn’t the same as “embarrassing.” Not being very good basketball players is one
thing; being narcissistic little assholes is something else again. The reason the Big Green’s hoopsters are in
the news, alas, falls into the latter category.
The players voted today (as I write this on March 5) to unionize
(!), thanks to a heightened sense of self-importance by some rather mediocre
athletes and a remarkably inane decision by the NLRB’s Regional Director, declaring them “employees.” All 15 players signed the initial petition to join Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union, and 13 of them voted to unionize.
The Regional Director in question is Laura A. Sacks of the Boston office. (Curmie believes
people who do remarkably stupid things in their professional capacities shouldn’t
be able to hide behind an important-sounding title. Walking lawyer jokes like Jake Krupski ought
to be similarly disgraced.) The decision
itself is inane on its face, but the rationale is even worse.
Here’s the decision; let’s look
at a couple of key points. First off,
there is no argument with the college’s position that financial aid is offered
exclusively on the basis of financial need; indeed, four players on the team
receive none, whereas one gets a full ride.
Athletes don’t get special housing or other such perks. Again, no one claims otherwise. A fall term message to players “encouraged” them
not to schedule courses during potential practice times, particularly between
2:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon.
Conversely, that message told players they should “[F]eel
free to register for courses in the following time slots: 8S/8L, 9S/9L, 10,
10A, 11, 12.” Here’s where Curmie’s
experience becomes relevant, because he knows what that means. About 90% of all the courses I took as an
undergrad were in one of those time slots.
Afternoons, certainly after 2:00, were almost always free. One doubts that much has changed, even given
the considerable interim.
Remember, too, that since Dartmouth is on a quarter system,
students take only three courses at a time, so there’s less likelihood of
scheduling conflicts at all; unless a particular course necessary for a
player’s degree plan was offered only in the afternoon and only during basketball season, problems are
rare if not altogether absent. It’s also
unclear why the team couldn’t practice in the evening, as there are multiple
places on campus with basketball courts, and much of “practice” is film study
or time in the weight room.
Also worthy of notice is the fact that NCAA and Ivy League
regulations prohibit teams from requiring too much practice time: “In-season,
student-athletes may participate in a maximum of four hours of CARA [countable
athletically related activity] daily and a maximum of twenty hours of CARA
weekly…. When a sport is not in-season,
student-athletes may participate in a maximum of six hours of CARA each week.”
Yet, curiously, Sacks and her minions based part of the
decision on the bizarre belief that athletes should be treated differently
because the demands on their time exceed those required of participants in, for
example, music, theatre, or journalism.
In a word, BULLSHIT. First off, those
activities are year-round; there’s no “off season,” and certainly no time cap. Curmie was required to spend more than four hours a day and more than 20 hours a week not
infrequently (especially but not exclusively during tech weeks) when he was in school, and he's certainly expected that kind of
commitment from students throughout his career as a director and technical
director in college and university settings.
The other variation on this theme was that Curmie realized
early on that if he was going to be an active member of the debate team, he was
going to have to spend a lot more than 20 hours a week. He opted instead for doing research to help
the team when he could, administering one of the divisions of the high school
invitational tournament hosted by the Forensic Union, and occasionally brainstorming
with more active team members. But those
active debaters spent dozens of hours a week working for the team. Same with the editors (at least) of the
college newspaper, the directorate of the radio station… the list goes on and
on.
It’s also frankly nuts to claim that the Ivy League is
taking students out of classes willy-nilly.
Virtually all league games are played on Friday night or Saturday. Wanna guess, Gentle Reader, how many road games
Dartmouth will play this year on a Monday through Thursday while classes are in
session? The answer is… wait for it…
one. Yes, one. Another came between the end of classes and
the end of finals. Yet somehow, we get
an official NLRB ruling with nonsense like “if, for example, the team is
traveling on a Monday…” Is Sacks
incapable of looking at a schedule?
Furthermore, there was no rebuttal to the coach’s testimony that players
sometimes missed road trips, with his blessing, because of class
responsibilities. In the Ivy League,
education matters more than sports. It
really does.
So the whole “taking them out of classes” business is
nonsense. Moving on. OK, get this: Cade Haskins, one of the
students who keeps getting quoted, says that although the college makes it
clear that “it is understood by both the faculty and coaching staff that class
attendance takes precedence over participation in athletics,” he often
prioritized basketball. The fact that he
can’t abide by the rules is an argument in his favor?
The precedent for this action is a decision a few years back
when the Northwestern football team successfully convinced the NLRB that they
were employees, but because they compete in a league that includes state
universities (Dartmouth doesn’t), federal law apparently makes it impossible for
the NLRB to make a ruling against the university in this instance. Of course, unlike Dartmouth or indeed any
other Ivy League school, Northwestern does give athletic scholarships, so, arguably,
players are indeed employees, doing a job in exchange for financial
considerations. Still, it’s ironic that
it would be Northwestern, a school far more noted for its academics than its
athletics, that would be the target for such a unionization effort.
There are more ironies at play, too. It would be impossible to name an athletic
conference that cares more about the importance of education relative to sports
than the Ivy League does, and there are few teams in any sport in the Ivy League
more inept than Dartmouth men’s basketball… well, with the possible exception
of Dartmouth women’s basketball. If
these folks are “employees,” Curmie would hate to see the amateurs.
Oh, but alumni contribute to the college because of the
basketball team! (Seriously, that’s an
argument!) Luckily, Curmie had put down
his mug before reading that part, or coffee would’ve come out his nose. There’s an alumni group, you see, Gentle
Reader, that contributed over $300,000 to improve the basketball
facilities! Curmie got a missive from
the alumni fund the other day. That
$300k for basketball would amount to about 7/10 of 1% of the unrestricted
giving to the college last year (that doesn’t count the tens of millions of
dollars designated for other specific uses.)
It goes without saying that the basketball team at Dartmouth
loses a lot more money than it brings in.
Don’t expect to see games televised except on ESPN+, and whereas
Curmie’s other American school (his MA is from a British university), the
University of Kansas, has sold out 16,300 seat Allen Field House every game for
the last 22 years, Dartmouth can’t fill 2100 seat Edward Leede Arena even half full
for Senior Night.
The fact that according to the NLRB decision, “[N]o current
members of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team participate in NIL activities”
sort of tells it all. They’re eligible
to do so, but local businesses don’t care enough to pay them as spokesmen. Why?
Because they aren’t going to attract positive attention. Curiously enough, the “whiny loser” image isn’t
one that advertisers choose to foreground.
They’ll do their own ads or hire actors who know how to read a line.
But if NIL threatens merely the idea of collegiate sports as
we know them (see Curmie’s commentary here,
here, and here,
for example), the prospect of having to remunerate student-athletes will—nay,
should—spell the end of intercollegiate sports altogether. Many colleges are considering cutbacks to
athletic programs as it is. Curmie wrote last year that another Ivy League school, Brown, “had to cut some varsity sports a couple
of years ago: losing money on athletics was one thing; losing that much
money was untenable.”
Whereas part of Curmie says “Good!”, the fact is that
cheering on the home team is, or should be, very much a part of student
life. Curmie saw dozens of athletic
events—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, ski jumping—as a
student and doesn’t want future generations of students to be denied that
opportunity.
But if pampering a cohort of mediocre narcissists will cost
even more time and/or money than it already does, the tipping point draws
nearer. There are some outstanding
colleges and universities that don’t have athletics teams at all, or who play
only in Division III or the NAIA: Brandeis, CalTech, MIT, NYU, and the University
of Chicago come to mind. Brooklyn’s St.Francis College []
recently eliminated all its Division I athletics programs, citing
finances. Indeed, only a handful of
athletic departments break even; most lost millions of dollars a year, the
shortfall made up by increased tuition and fees borne by other students, a
goodly number of whom couldn’t care less about whether the basketball team is
any good.
It's also probably worth mentioning that the two players
quoted in the Politico article linked above are, predictably, not among the
best players [https://dartmouthsports.com/sports/mens-basketball/stats/2023-24]
of even the remarkably unsuccessful team on which they play. They’ve totaled 153 points and 50 rebounds in
26 games (let me save you the math, Gentle Reader: that’s less than 6 PPG and 2
RPG between them); both have more turnovers than assists. They… erm… have little hope of a career in
professional basketball. Yet they seem to
be at the center of the self-glorification.
Figures.
To be fair, there will be appeals after appeals, and it’s
unlikely that college officials will have to negotiate for the services of
hoopsters in the near future. That doesn’t
make the initial Regional NLRB ruling any less ludicrous. Ultimately, the argument comes down to this: are
athletes are treated significantly differently from participants in other extra-curricular
(or co-curricular) activities? If the
answer is no, then there’s no case. If it’s
yes, then the rationale is that because jocks have been coddled in the past,
they should be even more coddled in the future.
Color me unimpressed.
Curmie is loath to quote Donald Trump with anything even
bordering on approbation, but on this one, he’s got it right. If these guys want to be considered
employees, the correct response is “You’re fired.” Laura Sacks ought to hear those words as
well.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Court Storming and the Absence of Sprezzatura
Duke star Kyle Filipowski is helped off the court after being injured in a court-storming |
In a 2004 court storm, Tucson H.S. star Joe Kay suffered a stroke & was partially paralyzed. “It’s way too long that we've been putting up with this,” Kay told ESPN Sat. after Duke’s Kyle Filipowski got hurt. “I’m completely in favor of banning court storms & field storms.” Now 38, Kay said, “The police should arrest people for going places they are not allowed to go… enforce the rules as they do at other places. It's exactly the same thing.” “Hopefully people will now come to their senses.”
It’s got to stop but it’s not going to. There’s no appetite in college basketball to stop it. The SEC has a rule against it but the institutions are happy to pay the fine because they like the visual. And the truth is, we in the media like the visual too. We put it at the end of every highlight. Years ago, when people used to run out on the field or on the floor, we wouldn’t show it. That was our policy. We don’t have that kind of policies with court stormings. We like it. It’s not stopping and it’s a shame.
Thursday, February 8, 2024
Just What You Needed: More on Taylor Swift
Curmie has two partially-written posts, one of them soon to pass its sell-by date and the other getting closer and closer. He’s promised Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms a guess post on plagiarism, which would also be published here. He’s got a book review due (ahem) imminently and hasn’t finished reading yet. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. So… let’s talk about Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs.
Curmie assumes that you, Gentle Reader, know the basics of
the brouhaha. A few notes on Curmie’s
position in all this:
Curmie has no interest in whatever romance may or not have
developed between the two thirty-something stars of their respective
industries. He hopes they’re happy. That’s it.
Curmie will be rooting for the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, but
that’s because for seven years he lived closer to Kansas City than he ever has
to another (American) city with a major sports franchise. He never saw the Chiefs play live, but he did
see a few Royals games. Anyway, the
Chiefs are a secondary favorite in our household, behind the New York Jets and
the Cleveland Browns, the decades-long favorites of Curmie and Beloved Spouse,
respectively.
Curmie will, however, be cheering for Kansas City a little
louder than usual this year, although he has nothing against the 49ers, simply
to piss off the right-wing idiots (apologies for the redundancy).
Curmie is not a Swiftie by any stretch of the
imagination. He could name a couple of
her song titles, but only because they’ve been mentioned as obviously witty
comments by friends; he wouldn’t recognize one of her songs if his life
depended on it. Curmie does, however, have a dear friend
who, for a couple of years, occupied the office directly across the hall from
his in the poorest sound-proofed building you can imagine. She is far more attuned to popular culture in
general than I am, and she is a Swiftie.
Occasionally, if she’d had a bad day, she’d knock on my door and say,
“I’m sorry; I just need some Tay-Tay.”
She’d turn on the tunes. She’d keep
the volume low, and with both our doors closed I could tell there was music
playing, but not much else. That’s the
closest I’ve ever come to knowingly listening to a Taylor Swift song.
Just because Curmie isn’t a fan, though, doesn’t mean he has
anything against her or her fans. (Let’s
face it, sexagenarian men aren’t exactly her target audience.) She is arguably the biggest pop music
phenomenon since the Beatles, or at least since Michael Jackson, and she wears
her celebrity extraordinarily well. She
is generous with both her time and her money: visiting terminally ill young
fans, giving the bus drivers for her tour literally life-changing bonuses,
contributing tens of millions of dollars to food banks in cities she performs
in… the list goes on. It’s estimated
that she gave away something in the neighborhood of $100 million last year.
True, she can afford it, but so could a lot of other folks
who hoard their wealth like a dragon in a cave or build shrines to
themselves. She appears to be a
genuinely good person, which is pretty rare amongst the glitterati. Everyone who’s actually interacted with her
finds her, in the words of Ed Kelce (Travis’s father), a “very sweet, very charming, down-to-earth young
woman.” Travis’s mom and brother,
and his coach, Andy Reid, echo those sentiments. The only people
who have anything bad to say about her, apparently, are the incel crowd of
babbling reactionaries.
Travis Kelce is no slouch at his job, either. He is arguably the greatest tight end in the
history of the game, and if he isn’t at the very top of that list, he’s pretty
damned close. He’s also become a
sought-after endorser of everything from credit cards to insurance to
vaccinations. He isn’t exactly in her
league in wealth or international fame, but he’s a multimillionaire and a legitimate
celebrity, so the couple have the benefit of not being in the same business (and
therefore not competing with each other) but also understanding the vicissitudes
of notoriety.
Oh, and this is the fourth time in five years Kansas City is
making an appearance in the Super Bowl.
They were good before Tayvis (Travlor?) even met; they’re good now. Still, Vivek Ramaswamy, perhaps the only person in the country to challenge Donald Trump for both narcissism and stupidity, has proclaimed that the Super Bowl will be rigged to favor the Chiefs (against the team representing the city most associated with good ol
The paranoia had already reached epic proportions both before and after the AFC Championship game between the Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens. Games with the referee assigned to this game, you see, are won by the visiting team more often than games with other referees are… and (OMG!) the Chiefs were the visiting team. QED, right?
Well, even apart from noting the small sample size, it’s
worth mentioning that the referee, out of all the officials in the game, is
probably about the least likely to actually affect the outcome of the game. Yes, he’ll make (or not make) offensive
holding calls on some pass plays, but so does the umpire. But the most significant calls, especially in
the NFL (as opposed to college), are on pass interference, and the referee, who
lines up 15 years behind the tight end, is pretty unlikely to be involved in a
call 40 yards downfield.
Of course, there was one no-call on a pass play in the
endzone that resulted in a Chiefs interception instead of a first-and-goal for
the Ravens. Replay showed that a Chiefs defensive back made contact with the intended receiver
prior to the arrival of the ball. (NFL
fans know that the surest way to know it was a bad call is that “rules
specialist” Gene Steratore said it was a
good one.) But that replay also showed
that there was no conceivable way the pass could have been completed. Should it have been a penalty? Yeah, probably, but it was a close call and the
zebras will always get one or two of those wrong.
Naturally, the biggest complainer was Ravens receiver Zay Flowers,
who pretty much said he expected the officials to be crooked. Zay…
Dude... If you really want to see the
person most responsible for the Ravens’ loss, look in the damned mirror. Taylor Swift didn’t follow up a good play
with a much deserved taunting penalty that moved the ball out of the red zone. The officials didn’t fumble just outside the
goal-line for the Chiefs to recover for a touchback. The NFL brass didn’t prove their childishness
by slamming their hand into a bench and getting injured in the process. Grow up, bro.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists want to have it both
ways: if the Chiefs win, it’s for some nefarious purpose; if they lose, it’s
because Swift is a “distraction,” and therefore bad not only for the Chiefs,
but for football in general. You know, like
how the Marilyn Monroe/Joe DiMaggio relationship destroyed baseball. (To be fair, the Yankees went “only” 103-51
that year, failing to reach the World Series.)
There is at least a little rationale for the fear that Swift might endorse Biden; she did so last time, after all. But her support of Biden, like Curmie’s, seems more to be a rejection of the alternative (see here and here, for example) than enthusiasm for an octogenarian who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer a couple of decades ago. And I feel confident that such an announcement, should it occur, will take place not at half-time, as some moron suggested, but after a discreet post-Super Bowl interval. The woman is too smart and too classy to do otherwise.
Moreover, the effect of any such endorsement is likely to be negligible at best: the same poll that said that 18% of voters would be more likely to vote for a Swift-backed candidate also revealed that 17% would be less likely to do so. Luckily, both numbers are unadulterated bullshit. Curmie is likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift because our politics are more or less aligned, not because of the endorsement. There
The terror is real, though, amongst the red cap
brigade. James Carville has a point in arguing that “it’s massively entertaining to watch people this
stupid go public.” It would indeed be rather amusing if it weren’t so
pathetic.
Taylor Swift is not responsible for the fact that every idiot
producer (again, apologies for redundancy) for Fox or CBS or ESPN or whoever
wants to show her reactions to whatever happens on the field; in fact she has
repeatedly asked them to stop. The only
good news here is that some little girls get to share some dad-bonding when their
heroine is shown on-screen for an average of about 26 seconds per 3 ½ hour game.
In MAGAland, however, this amounts to Swift’s setting
herself up as an idol—this
from folks who worship at the feet of the world’s most narcissistic grifter (or
is it the most grifting narcissist? Both,
I guess). Among other things, she has
been called “ugly” (remind
me not to go to that guy’s optometrist).
She took her private jet to the game in Baltimore, and
according to Fox News it “belch[ed] tons of CO2 emissions.” Of course, if she’d travelled commercial, she’d
be held responsible for congestion at the airport. Moreover, Curmie isn’t so sure about those
numbers. According to a table on the Guardian
website (accompanying an article urging readers not to fly because of environmental
concerns, so it’s not likely to under-estimate the emissions), Swift’s short
flight would generate barely 100 pounds—5% of a single ton—of CO2. That’s still a lot, but those Fox News
numbers are looking rather sketchy.
Imagine that!
Fox Chief Conspiracy Theorist talking head Jesse Waters pushed the idea that she was a Pentagon psy-op asset. (Well, he didn’t say she was one, only that they’d considered the idea, but he said it in a tone that suggested that his nothingburger of a revelation actually meant something, and the average Fox devotee is too stupid to recognize the dissonance.) The Pentagon shot that down, and rather cleverly, at that. When was the last time, Gentle Reader, the Pentagon was the more trustworthy source in a dispute? Miracles happen!
And, of course, there’s The Donald himself getting all hot and bothered that he wasn’t Time’s Person of the Year, proclaiming himself more popular than she is and with more devoted fans... and declaring a “holy war” on her should she dare to express a political opinion. Trump proves yet again how mentally unstable he is, and that he is not even close to being an appropriate candidate for the presidency, much less actually winning the election. But that has been clear for a long time, well before the incompetence of the Hilary Clinton campaign got him elected.
Swift was even criticized for not mentioning her
boyfriend in her acceptance speech for winning the Best Album Grammy. It pretty much goes without saying that the
project in question was completed before she even met Kelce. Instead—OMG!—she thanked her
collaborators on the album! What is that
about?
Curmie’s favorite, though, has to be this post from “Alpha Male” Nick Adams: “By being on the team that won the AFC Championship, Travis Kelce will receive a bonus check of around $70,000. For those wondering why Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce: are things beginning to make sense now?” Curmie has a reasonable retirement portfolio and a fair bit of home equity. That said, if you were to pay Curmie the same percentage of his net worth that $70,000 is of Taylor Swift’s, you’d get plenty of change back on a $10 bill. To be fair, Curmie has seen it argued that Adams is really a leftie troll, similar to the character created by Stephen Colbert a few years back. If so, he (she? they?) is brilliant. But a glance over a few days’ worth of his X account suggests that he really is just another nasty moron.
What is this all about? Is Taylor Swift the target of the broflakes (what a delightful term!—kudos to whoever came up with it) because she’s a successful woman who terrifies weak men? because she is precisely what their pseudo-Messiah pretends to be and isn’t? or just because she’s a decent human being and they avoid those folks like Dracula avoids crucifixes? A little of all three, one suspects.
Saturday, January 27, 2024
On the "Barbie" Snubs
Gentle Reader, you are no doubt at least as au courant
with popular culture news as Curmie is, so you’ll already know that the anthropomorphized
doll movie was a huge box office success.
It collected a passel of Oscar nominations, as well, including for Best
Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor/Actress—Ryan Gosling and
America Ferrera. Ah, but the two driving
forces of the project, director Greta Gerwig and title actress Margot Robbie
were not nominated in those categories (see below for the ”yeah, but…”).
On the one hand, there are certainly ironies at play. The meme you see here is one of many
variations on the theme. Yes, it would
be logical that if a film is nominated, then its director and star would be,
too. It’s certainly worthy of raising an
eyebrow that in a film with such feminist undercurrents it would be Ken, not Barbie,
who got recognized.
But “Past Lives” also got Best Picture and Screenplay nods
without either a directing or leading actor/actress nomination, so it’s not a
complete anomaly. Plus, there’s the
simple fact that there are twice as many nominations for Best Picture as there
are for the other categories, so some major contributors to nominated films are
inevitably left out.
This has not prevented howls of protest from the movie’s
fans. There are the usual, frankly
rather tired, allegations of sexism, for example. How could Ryan Gosling be nominated and
Margot Robbie not be? Well, perhaps the
voters (all actors themselves—you can only vote in one category) liked his work
better. Perhaps there were more
outstanding performances from female leads in other films than there were from
supporting men in other films. Gosling
and Robbie wouldn’t be competing with each other, after all. Perhaps Gosling just did better work than Robbie.
Perhaps, too, the directors who voted in that category just
thought the work of Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos, Christopher Nolan, Martin
Scorsese, and Justine Triet was better. All
of their films were Best Picture nominees, too, after all. And those folks aren’t exactly rookies. Between them, they had one Oscar win and ten
other nominations in directing, and that doesn’t count their work as writers or
producers, or awards like Golden Globes or BAFTAs, or wins at festivals like
Cannes and Banff.
There is not, indeed cannot be, any great conspiracy to
“erase women’s work” or some such nonsense.
Robbie didn’t get nominated because some other woman did. Gerwig didn’t get nominated, but another
woman did. Yes, there will be those who
claim that somehow all those voters secretly got together and decided that
precisely one woman should get the nod.
Curmie sees <checks notes> zero evidence of that. If, Gentle Reader, you think the “Barbie”
women were better than one or more actresses or directors who did get
nominated, that’s fine. Curmie thinks something
similar in virtually every category virtually every year. But that’s a matter of taste, not backroom
machinations.
It's also worth noting that the meme isn’t quite
accurate. No, Gerwig didn’t get
nominated by name, but that’s because the award is for Best Adapted Screenplay,
not Best Adapter, although exactly what she is alleged to have “adapted” is
beyond Curmie’s ken. (Get it? Ken?
OK, moving on.) Robbie, as one of
the film’s producers, also has a nomination to call her own.
Importantly, virtually any recognition for a film like
“Barbie” is significant. It may be that the
movie wears its feminism a little ostentatiously, but the adjective Curmie’s friends who liked the movie have employed the most is “fun.” The film may not be Curmie’s mug of lapsang
souchong, but Curmie will take “fun” over “self-consciously earnest” ten times
out of ten. No, Curmie hasn’t stopped
being an intellectual elitist, but he does believe that Hollywood is generally
a lot better at entertainment than at intellectual stimulation.
In Curmie’s experience, most Oscar nominees are rather
boring exercises in pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness. Of the last several Oscar winners that Curmie
has seen—he hasn’t bothered with some of them—there are more truly terrible
films than excellent ones. That’s just
Curmie’s opinion, of course, and you should consider yourself under no
obligation to agree. But hopefully,
Gentle Reader, you’ll grant that “fun” is not an adjective applied to most
Oscar winners. If “Barbie” changes that,
it wouldn’t be a bad thing.
Curmie would also bet that individual accolades are less
important to Gerwig and Robbie than the success—in all the different
definitions of that term—of the overall project… or at least they’ll say it is. And so we move on to one of the most
oft-referenced statements by a nominee ever, by Ryan Gosling :
I am extremely honored to be nominated by my colleagues alongside such remarkable artists in a year of so many great films. And I never thought I’d being saying this, but I’m also incredibly honored and proud that it’s for portraying a plastic doll named Ken.
But there is no Ken without Barbie, and there is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.
No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius.
To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.
Against all odds with nothing but a couple of soulless, scantily clad, and thankfully crotchless dolls, they made us laugh, they broke our hearts, they pushed the culture and they made history. Their work should be recognized along with the other very deserving nominees.
Having said that, I am so happy for America Ferrera and the other incredible artists who contributed their talents to making this such a groundbreaking film.
It is a gracious statement, expressing both appreciation for
his own recognition and disappointment that his colleagues on the production
were not similarly honored (well, they were, sort of, but we know what he
means). True, it has a little of the aroma of a press release, but there’s a legitimate
possibility, even a probability, that it’s largely heartfelt, whether he actually wrote
the thing himself or not. People do tend
to be loyal to friends and colleagues.
You can be forgiven your skepticism, Gentle Reader. But please do not countenance descriptions of Gosling’s comments as “the baby goose’s insufferable blubbering,” “virtue signaling,” or “whining,” which apparently is what a fair number of people whose demographic profiles (but not politics) match Curmie’s seem to be suggesting to anyone who will listen. Doing so would serve as evidence of precisely the attitude the film apparently seeks to lampoon. Paranoid, mendacious, and bitchy is not an attractive combination. There are more than a few walking exemplars of fragile masculinity to whom the truth of the foregoing sentence would seemingly be a revelation.
To sum up: 1). Curmie neither knows not cares whether Gerwig and Robbie “deserved” to be nominated as director and leading actress. 2). An ironic coincidence is not the same as evidence of a conspiracy. 3). A lot of old white guys need more bran in their diet.
In other words, no, nothing new here.
Thursday, January 18, 2024
In Memoriam: Peter Schickele
Curmie won’t get an obituary in the NYT, but he hopes he’ll at least get an equivalent photo to this one. |
One of the first things Curmie read this morning on his
Facebook feed was the news that Peter Schickele had died at the age of 88. To be honest, it never occurred to me that he
was still with us; I hadn’t heard anything about him in years, and I’d always
assumed that he was at least a dozen years older than he actually was.
He had, of course, stayed on my mind. Beloved Spouse and I often refer not infrequently to the
University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, and I’ve more than occasionally
wished I could have worked there—their theatre program didn’t have the
reputation of their music program, but the school clearly appreciated the arts. 😉
More to the point, Schickele was instrumental in forming my attitude
towards life in general in ways I hadn’t really thought about until this
morning. He was, of course, a gifted
musician—he wrote over a hundred pieces of serious music: for symphonies, for
Broadway, for Hollywood—but, like Victor Borge and Spike Jones (both of whom
were more beloved of Curmie’s parents than of Curmie), he gained fame more for his
wit and cheerful irreverence than for his composing or playing.
Still, the musicianship was there. Schickele’s “discovery” of P.D.Q. Bach, the “last
and by far the least” of Johann Sebastian Bach’s manifold offspring, clicked in
Curmie’s mind in a particularly impactful way.
In a memorial tribute in the New York Times,
Margalit Fox writes, “Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator
that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like
Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him
a tab or two of LSD.” That’s about right,
both denotatively and tonally.
The “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” in particular struck a
chord early on with Curmie, one of whose clearest memories of childhood was
eating at a Horn and Hardart automat during a class trip to New York City
sometime in the mid-’60s. You have to be
good to write the serious part of that piece; you have to be more than a little
off-center to write (and perform) the rest, complete with such “musical
instruments” as glass sliding doors with sandwiches behind them. It meant something different to Curmie at
first hearing, but now it is an emphatic reminder that Art can be… well… fun.
That combination—the clear understanding of the form and the
willingness to play with it—is what was, and is, so appealing. Can Curmie’s scholarly interest in
adaptations of Greek tragedy be traced to “Iphigenia in Brooklyn”? Probably not.
But Schickele’s saucy approach to inherited material certainly planted a
seed. Curmie loves word play, although
he’s not quite the punster that some of his friends are. Peter Schickele was one of the first to inspire
that appreciation. But it’s more than just
plays on words.
Over the years, Curmie developed a repertoire of bits that re-occurred in his classes. The Athenian politician Solon had the voice of a Good Ol’ Boy when warning that make-believe might find its way into “our serious bidness.” Apollo sounded like Barry White when propositioning Cassandra, but was utterly fabulous when appearing as the deus ex machina in Euripides’ Orestes. The possibility that a gunpowder-based bomb might have been implanted into a straw dummy when the title character’s body was “rejected by the earth” (launched by an underground catapult) in the Cornwall Death of Pilate became “’splodin’ P-Square.” Hamlet was caught in the existential crisis of whether to be Goth or Emo. And so on.
Importantly, the playfulness inherent in these performances was
intended (and, one hopes, received) not as an attempt to ridicule the sources,
but rather to provide a hermeneutic access to them. Irreverence for its own sake is always smug
and usually boring. But, as such philosophers
as Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have demonstrated, play, or rather a
particular kind of play of which these snippets of pedagogical quirkiness are
examples, is central not merely to our intellectual life, but to our humanity. Huizinga even suggests that our species would
more rightly be called homo ludens, replacing the Latin word for wisdom (sapiens)
with the word for play.
Would Curmie’s lectures have been fundamentally different were
it not for Peter Schickele? Probably not,
but it’s possible. It’s even possible
that there would have been no lectures at all, that without having developed a
taste for the slightly naughty intellectual irreverence he found first in
Schickele and later in the theatre, Curmie would have continued in the pre-law
program he began as an undergrad. He
would then have been considerably richer.
And immeasurably poorer.