Make It Stop...

Someone at ESPN must have gone to art school, look at this use of contrast!

sigh...

How Many Days Until Pitchers and Catchers?

No words, just no words....

Marathon Training

Ran 15 miles at the NYC Marathon Tune-Up Run today in 2:21:08 which comes out to 9:25 per mile. The race was 18, but I'm only up to 15 so I just walked the last three.

Comments:
I'm in pretty scary territory now that my long runs are getting into the upper teens. I felt great in the first six, but I started to feel serious pain in towards the end of the second six and was able to muscle out the final 3 miles to get to 15. I don't know if I could have made it to 18 and I sure as hell don't know where I'm going to pull the final 11.2 miles from.

Jimmy Rollins for MVP! (maybe)

Watching the Phillies play DC today has got me thinking about Jimmy Rollin’s yearlong saga from goat to hero…

When I first read Donovan McNabb’s comments on HBO about being a black quarterback, I thought “no big deal”, white journalists probably ask him stuff /say stuff about him all the time that they wouldn't say about white quarterbacks and don’t even realize they’re doing it. Does it mean McNabb’s saying that that white journalists are going home burning crosses and putting on white hoods and are out to stamp out the black quarterback? No, but its not outlandish to say we live in a racist society and that we all (even the mental giants that we call sports journalists) probably act differently towards people based on their appearances more than we want to admit.

That’s why I loved reading about the study that analyzed 13 years of referee foul calls in the NBA, because the study took a population that’s rigorously monitored to ensure neutrality (refs) and controlling for a ton of factors, STILL found evidence of racial bias. I shudder to think what you would find if you analyzed my behavior towards people of different races that rigorously over 13 years.

Unfortunately, the issue in the media became about labeling which referees were “racist” and “not racist” (as if they were either/or categories like pure good and pure evil) rather than an opportunity to learn about what unconsciously guides our behavior towards others.

…several prominent academic economists said it [the study] would contribute to the growing literature regarding subconscious racism in the workplace and elsewhere, such as in searches by the police.

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

So McNabb, who was just answering a question honestly, is now the center of controversy because some idiot white sports journalists can’t possibly believe they could ever in the slightest bit be biased in their coverage of athletes of color.

Which brings me to my Jimmy Rollins for MVP campaign (only IF they win the division, which I am rooting firmly against).

As a Mets fan, let me say up front that I detest the Phillies, and by association, Jimmy Rollins.

But in spring training, I watched in fascination as the overwhelmingly white sports media piled on him for saying the Phillies, and not the Mets, were “the team to beat” in the NL East.

Apparently, Rollins was not showing enough deference to the defending NL east champs and running his mouth and not letting his actions on the field speak for him. I love my Mets, but I didn’t give a shit that Rollins said what he did. He was trying to get his team inspired and believing in themselves (a franchise that’s been mired in negativity for way too many years), but instead of praising him for his “leadership”, he became just another trash talking overly brash black athlete.

Watching the double standard towards black athletes unfold with Rollins was amazing. I couldn’t believe he was getting crap for such an innocuous remark, there was no way a white athlete would have been treated the same way for trying to get his team amped. It turns out now that Jimmy Rollins has had an MVP year full of clutch hits and great defense and his team might actually (*gulp) pull off an incredible upset.

If the Phillies win the East, I gotta say, Rollins for NL MVP.

But, Lets Go Mets!

Ya Gotta Believe!!!

WE'RE TIED!

Magic number: TWO

Fall for Dance

Thursday night, I went to the first of the three nights of the Fall for Dance Festival I had gotten tickets for. It was the first "real" dance performance I had ever been to (maybe formal is a better word) not counting the countless performances I’ve been in the NY On2 Salsa scene.

I've been looking for some inspiration in dance. After having been locked into salsa for so long I was really excited about these shows. I've been talking to one of my salsa teachers about what I think is the overall lack of creativity and artistry in the on2 salsa scene. There are some amazing technical dancers, but not enough musicality, creativity and artistic vision. It seems like everything is about doing the most complicated routine with no regard for music, risk-taking and expanding how salsa as a dance is defined.

I find salsa dance and music fascinating because you can't separate it from issues of diaspora and postcolonialism and have found that dancers from all backgrounds (ballet, jazz, hip hop, African, ballroom etc.) have easily found a pathway into salsa because it has roots in so many dance styles and cultures. And vice versa, (in my case) it’s a great dance to work backwards from because you’ve already learned the very basic vocabulary of other dance forms through salsa.

Long story short, I'm looking for some inspiration and Fall for Dance was a great start. Here's what I saw and what I thought (please note that I'm no dance critic).

Paul Taylor Dance Company
"Arden Court" Choreographer: Paul Taylor
This was by far my favorite of the night. I found out later that this is one his most famous works. I had seats that were really high up, but it was perfect for a piece like this. The choreography uses the whole stage and the overall forms he creates are so beautiful, I thought he had a visual arts background. The movement of the dancers feels like pure expression of the music (I want to listen to more William Boyce now). The dancers move in perfect harmony with each other; at different tempos (men from women), darting, crawling and leaping across the stage. This piece also requires an incredible amount of strength, especially on the part of the men. I was reading that this is considered by many dancers a very "masculine piece", which is still a hard adjective for me to use when describing shirtless men prancing around in pastel-colored pointilist tights, but you know what, the strength required by this piece is straight-up Herculean. There is one part where the men stand on one leg, their other leg fully extended, their backs flat (or slightly arched upwards) and the women leap and land on the small of the men’s backs, and tuck into a ball and just sit there. And the men don't move, they don't flinch.

I looked carefully to see if I could catch any shifting or adjusting (I'm a dick like that), but nothing. Holy fucking shit. There’s no way the woman will hit the man’s sweet spot every time they do that move so move so they just have to compensate a slightly different set of muscles (hamstrings, abs, back, calves and God knows what else) to maintain that effect each time.

Wow.

Kirov Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg
"Middle Duet" Choreographer: Alexei Ratmansky
This was technically incredible, especially the female dancer. The choreography demands a lot of the woman dancer who has to make near instantaneous switches in her foot position to full plie and back again. On one hand, I should have liked it because it was a ballet dance with shades of Latin partner work (sharp breakbacks, crosshands, turn patterns, multiple spins by the woman led by the man), but I didn't find it visually that compelling. The woman's technique and body control was really incredible though.

Shantala Shivalingappa
"Varnam" Choreographer: Shantala Shivalingappa
This was Kuchipudi "a classical dance style from South India". It was a solo dance accompanied by a live band of Indian musicians. My seat was too high and far to the side to see the musicians which sucked. I couldn't get into this piece, the woman was a very sharp, clean dancer and dancing solo is incredibly difficult, but after awhile the movements started to feel montonous. When she got to the part where she was vibrating her body while standing on a brass plate ("the varnam") it got interesting again, but that ended up being near the conclusion of the piece.

Juilliard Dance
"Deuce Coupe" Choreographer: Twyla Tharp
Tacky. That was the first thing that came into my mind, and the piece just kept reinforcing it. First off, the backdrop was some big busy faux graffitti backdrop with "peace" in huge letters that didn't seem to relate to the music (a beach boys song), the dancer's costumes (weird 50s-style all-American collared shirts and pants) nor the dance movements itself (an awkward mix of classical ballet and herky-jerky 50s teen party sock hopish movements). The dancers looked stiff when they were asked to do anything other than ballet (the men's shoulders were hunched and slouched when doing non-ballet moves which bothered me). I might have been missing what her vision was, but it just seemed like a lot mismatched pieces that didn't sing well together.

Philly-DC

4-0!!!

They hear the footsteps...

Philly-DC

3-0 Nats!

That's what happens when Subway Jared shouts out Ryan Howard's defense.

Philly-DC

5:02PM And another Phillies pitching change!

Phillies-Nats-Mets-Marlins

Adam Eaton is out of the game!! Go Washington! C'mon Manny, we helped kickstart your managerial career, hook us up!

In other notes, John Maine's start had better woke up the Mets, what a fucking clutch start.

Marathon Training

Tempo run

2 miles to Astoria Park Track

4 miles at 8:54 pace
My actual splits:
8:34
8:42
8:37
8:14

1 mile cool down (shuffle/jog/walk) back home

Total: 7 miles
Comments:
My legs and back were aching more than any tempo run (back from dance classes and legs from the Queens half on Sunday), I think I might be reaching the part of my training where my body aches more and I’m going to have to suck it up. Given that, I was glad my splits were all on target, its probably going to take more mental strength to maintain that (I really wanted to stop after the first mile).

Time to get ready for Jillian’s wedding.

Marathon Training

Did the Queens Half marathon today. 13.1 miles in about 2:10 (I didn't look at the clock when I crossed the finish line).

Marathon Training

Ran 7 miles Thursday morning, easy run. This Sunday, Queens Half.

Marathon Training

Tagged along with the Team in Training workout in Central Park, just did some hill work, nothing crazy, but it was a good workout.

Dead White Men

"undergraduates often arrive unprepared from high school and seeking courses “in what we might have thought of as the old-fashioned approach” — broad surveys. But many young professors aren’t interested in teaching outside their narrow specialties, nor are they generally prepared to do so. And colleges are loath to reinstate the core curriculums they abandoned in the ’60s. “Because we lack cultural self-confidence, we’ve lacked the ability to say, ‘This is a good book and should be taught, this isn’t and shouldn’t,’ ” said Judt, who was dean of the humanities at N.Y.U. in the early ’90s."

Very, very interesting article in the Times Book section. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially in the context of arts education and what it really means to “expose kids to the arts.” That phrase, thrown around a lot, is so loaded. It can be paternalistic, almost colonial (i.e. how do we “civilize” poor minority kids by exposing them to "great high artworks” and) or it can be empowering, helping kids find what’s beautiful and profound everywhere, even in their own experiences (which is my thing with 7ARTS).

But you don’t want the pendulum to swing to far in either extreme, how do you strike the balance between pushing someone outside of their comfort zones by providing "historical context" and reaching deep into the traditional "canon", but also exposing kids to works by people that are culturally relevant to them? As much as I believe in the opening of what we consider "the canon" (though I think the concept of one common canon a is long dead concept") I have begun to feel huge gaps in my own knowledge of Western culture, especially because I went to an art school focusing on studio art, my liberal arts education was much less broad than it could have been. I completely identified with this:

"As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

I never thought I’d reach an age where I actually began to see some merit in where E.D. Hirsch was coming from with his concept of “Cultural Literacy.” Maybe I’m just getting older and more Republican.

Bring on the dead white men, stat!

Marathon Training

Did 11 miles this morning at the NYRR long training run. I ran with the 10 minute/mile group. My legs were on fire at the end, I went to Djoniba's class on Wed and Fri and had my speed workout Thursday.

Go New York Go (away)

I’m done with the Knicks until Dolan and and Zeke go.

They were the first team I ever really closely followed beginning in the early 90s and to watch the franchise devolve from a hard-working team that scrapped and clawed for everything they earned in the league into a bunch of overpaid underachieving players has been extremely painful.

This whole Anucha Brown Sanders case is the final nail in the coffin though, it reveals how fucking completely amok the franchise is and that responsibility goes straight to the top at Dolan. This guy couldn’t lead people out of a fucking paper bag, let alone a franchise.

Stephon Marbury, the Knicks’ star guard, testified in federal court yesterday that he had sex with an intern for the team after a group outing to a strip club in 2005. The intern worked for Anucha Browne Sanders, who is suing Isiah Thomas, the team’s coach and president, for sexual harassment.

Asked to recall what he told Kathleen Decker, the intern, Marbury testified, “I said, ‘Are you going to get in the truck?’ ” She agreed, he said.

Earlier, Browne Sanders, a former senior vice president for marketing for the Knicks, testified that Decker was one of several employees who told her about abusive behavior by Hassan Gonsalves, a cousin of Marbury who worked for Browne Sanders in a low-level job. Gonsalves got the job through Marbury’s request to James L. Dolan, the chairman of Madison Square Garden.

Gonsalves was later fired for sexual harassment.

NY Times

I expect pro athletes participate in their share of sexual shenanigans, but this is about managing your workplace and it reveals how Dolan simply doesn’t have control of it. It seems he’d rather be liked then set limits, from giving Zeke free spending reign without demanding any accountability (and extending his contract early despite his own stated requirements), to letting Steph’s cousin be hired for some bull shit job (Starbury’s already on already on contract, you don’t have to hire a knucklehead from his entourage if you don’t want to).

What’s also been clear from the coverage of this case is that Sanders repeatedly had difficulty getting Thomas and the Knicks to participate in marketing for the team.

I remember thinking that the TV promos on MSG for the Knicks featuring local New Yorkers interacting comically with life-size cut outs of different Knicks were clever and endearing, but I wondered why none of the actual players were actually participating live. Apparently, because they had frozen Sanders out refusing to work with her, a movement led by Zeke. How the fuck do you allow this Dolan? You may not care about creating a hostile-free workplace for your female employees, but this affects your bottom line. I’m going to guess that all standard NBA contracts have clauses requiring participation in marketing and PR for the league and franchise. If I’m the team owner and my marketing director tells the players to be part of a campaign they better hop the fuck to it and play nice. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to get paid.

But, it seems like Dolan wants to be one of the boys so bad, that he didn’t intervene in that and other situations and which is why this whole shit has spiraled into the mess it is.

Duck Folan

Marathon Training

Speed workout

2 miles warm up to Astoria Park track

1 mile at 8:06
800 meters jog
1 mile at 7:57
800 meter jog
1 mile at 7:25

1 mile cool down

total workout: 7 miles

Escalating Commitments

After my 9-mile run, I headed to NYC Center to try to get the jump on their Fall for Dance Festival. Tickets are 10 bucks and each night is four very different types of dance troupes. After being not too inspired by the shows I saw at the most recent NYC Salsa Congress (and downright horrified when I saw Al "Liquid" Silver put on blackface for his James Brown impersonation-you know that feeling of horror and fear you get when you're experiencing someone doing something incredibly racist that's not aimed at your ethnic group? That's what I felt, I was kind of waiting for him to get jumped by all the black people in the audience, but everyone loved it, go figure. That routine merits its own whole other blog entry actually at some point) the City Center Shows seemed like a good chance to broaden my exposure to dance.

Tickets went on sale at 11, I got there right at 11 and the line stretched around the block.


I was willing to wait about 3 hours and I thought I would wait and get a sense of the pacing and see if it was worth it. The first two legs took about 2+ hours so I thought the final leg down 55th street to the box office wouldn't be much more than an hour. I don't know what the hell happened but I didn't make it to the ticket booth until 4:00. The final block was a backbreaking 3 hours. I can't figure out why it took so long, but at that point I had committed too much time to back out and I kept adding to the amount of time I had originally been willing too wait. Flashback to grad school and sunk costs and escalation of committment. But in my case I'm sure the dance shows will be all worth it and my behavior was completely rational.

Marathon Training

Schedule called for 9 miles in 10:29.

I did 9 miles in Central Park in 1:27:45 which comes out to 9:45 a mile. I'm a little concerned that I'm running this far below what my splits are supposed to be, but I'm not running harder than what a long run pace should be (conversation pace). At first I thought that maybe that the times were going to get much faster later in the schedule, but they don't. I may be pushing myself too hard or the runners world training calculator grossly underestimated what I'm capable of (haha).

Marathon Training

I experienced the first hitch in my training schedule, I skipped my workout yesterday (too tired after a long day at work), but made it up tonight:

Tempo run 7 miles total

2-mile warm up

4 miles at an 8:59 pace

My actual splits were:
1 in 9:01
1 in 8:38
1 in 8:48
1 in 8:21

1 mile cool down.

To be honest, the cool down was a mix of walking and jogging, actually running the cool down is getting harder and harder after my tempo runs, but I figure its still part of my mileage so I gotta work that out.

The Eye of Sauron

It is Mr. Díaz’s achievement in this galvanic novel that he’s fashioned both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves.

Michiko Kakutani on Junot Díaz’s “Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

I guess this is why she gets paid the big big bucks to review books and I don't. She's prettty much summed what impressed me so much about the book which is how seamlessly Diaz manages to move from the big picture (the grand narrative of history to the small picture) the micro view and more importantly connect the two without privileging one over the other.

The way Trujillo dominates the lives of their characters makes me think of Park Chung Hee and the conflicted place he must hold in the psyche of many Koreans. On one hand, he's the father of modern Korea (try getting my father to say anything bad about him) and arguably the reason South Korea is not a third world country today, but at the same time a pretty damn Trujilloish dictator in his own right. Ironically, I didn't immediately think of the dictator to the North like the reviewer in the Voice did, calling Trujillio, the DR's very own Kim Jong Il. But I guess its easy to forget that it took some time for democratic elections to take root on the American client side of Korea too.

Marathon Training

Did my long run today, was supposed to do 8 miles at 10:29 but I didn't have a timer but I did do 8 miles in Central Park this morning.