Rutgers v. Army at the New Meadowlands

I don’t go to many of my alma mater football games. In fact the last one was decades ago, when I went to the final Rutgers/Princeton game. Rutgers won that, 44 to 13. Rutgers was just starting to make its bid for big time football, and so needed to be in a different league than Princeton. It was surely an end of an era, since those two institutions began “college football” when on November 6, 1869, guys from Rutgers College challenged guys from College of New Jersey (now Princeton) to play football. Rutgers won, 6 to 4.

I have a sentimental place in my heart for Army, since my father used to take me to West Point to see Army play, usually against Notre Dame, and then we had to root for ND, of course.

The “new” Meadowlands looks a lot like the old one, a.k.a Giants Stadium. I saw a few games there in the LT years.

It was perfect football weather: cool but not cold with sunny skies. And it felt good to participate in this time-honored autumnal American ritual. Rutgers won in overtime, 23 to 20, but they really didn’t deserve to. Army was clearly the better team, but Rutgers scraped by and got lucky in many plays, except in one terrible play where Defensive Tackle Eric LeGrand sustained a neck injury in overtime. He's in the hospital, and his condition hasn't yet been reported, which doesn't sound good.

Update: The NYTimes is reporting that LeGrand is paralyzed from the neck down. How shocking. There were other injuries during the game, other players who didn't get up right away, so there was no way to know how serious Eric's injury is. Do there seem to be more injuries than in the past? As a kid watching games for years with my Dad, I don't remember any critical injuries. Everyone is praying for Eric.

I bought these tickets back in August, to go with an old RU alumni friend and her husband. It’s an odd twist of timing that the first game we go to for decades is just after the tragedy of Tyler Clementi put RU on the front page for troubling reasons.

Looking around at the RU fans, it’s hard to imagine any of them would have been so cruel to Tyler, even given that his sensibility was so different from their own.

And Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei: we’ve heard nothing more about charges against them. Why is that? Are their parents paying out to protect their privacy? Won’t that just suck.

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 Mapeel     10/16/2010     current events   

Another Really Important Birthday: Happy 10 Years Andrew Sullivan & The Dish

On the heels of John Lennon's big day comes this very important day in the blogosphere: The Dish is turning 10!! (Making it a Libra blog, uniting John, Andrew, and me :) For all of you who think blogging is a more recent phenomenon than that, take note!

(I love his party hat and cake for the dogs. The man knows how to celebrate.)

Andrew is the blogger’s blogger. I read him several times every day for the sheer scope of ideas, for his clear, interesting, provocative, comforting voice, for the postings from his readers. He is a true pioneer of the form, as he says, “in 2000, there was Mickey and me, basically, in the political blogosphere”—-he taught us all by doing. He is so much richer than just a “political” blogger.

His blog (along with James Wolcott and Matt Zoller Seitz’s House Next Door) is the reason I started blogging: I wanted to join this amazing, self-empowered conversation myself, first hand.

And it was a thrill when Andrew did that literally by linking to my St. David’s day post last year, simply because I had emailed him and asked if he would be writing one for the day. That connection is the essence of blogging. We gave a collective nod to the Welsh on their national day—Dydd Gwly Dewi Dedwydd--because we both find that sort of tradition important.

Andrew’s description of the blogger’s joy is a perfect encaspulation:

“The original appeal, of course: the dream every writer has ever had since history began. To be able to write directly to other human beings, with no editor or publisher, no censor or commercial pressure, to open the mind to other open minds, to speak with as little fear as possible and to see what happens. I saw that potential in this new miraculous medium the first instant this blog was born; I see it now more clearly than ever.”

The “Toast or Roast” posts from his peers in honor of the day is wonderful reading.

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 Mapeel     10/11/2010     blogs, current events   

Dun-na-nuh-neh-na-nah, neh nuh: THEY SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY TOO, YEAH;
THEY SAY IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY,
WE'RE GONNA HAVE A GOOD TIME;
I'M GLAD IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU.



I’m SO happy to see the Google animation for John. What a great way to take his 20th century doodles into the 21st century.

The Paley Center for Media’s Tribute to John Lennon (in 2010), who would have turned seventy years old today, brought me into his early world and mind. I’ve had the genuine thrill of producing a gallery exhibit of early images from John’s life, “This Boy . . . John Lennon in Liverpool.” Working with Beatles historian Martin Lewis and curator Ron Simon, we brought together images of the child John—-from Yoko Ono’s archive; the teenage John—-from Rod Davis, one of his Quarrymen bandmates; and one image of John the man——from Bob Gruen’s classic, classic 1980 shoots, among other images.



The show really captures the beginnings of this great artist’s family/school life-—one of my favorite images is John with the neighbor’s dog, Squeaker. Then there is the most important date in rock ‘n’ roll history, July 6, 1957, when John is playing with the Quarrymen at the town fete and Paul is standing in the audience (the visitor’s own POV). The next image is the first time Paul played with the band, and the image after that is George, Paul, and John captured at a friend’s wedding.



Then there is a glimpse of the lads at an audition for Billy Fury. John is doing Elvis, and he’s asking for Billy Fury for his autograph!

Along with the exhibit, the Paley Center screened the Sam Taylor-Wood’s biopic of the same era, Nowhere Boy, with the Quarrymen, who played some of the old tunes after. And closed the week with American Masters LENNONYC, a superb documentary of John’s last ten years. It will be on tv in late November and I strongly recommend it. It’s a incredible time capsule of the 1970s with amazing footage of John you’ve never seen.

The Real Thing
There has been a veritable forest worth of trees and an ocean of ink and a googol of pixels dedicated to thoughts/scholarship about the Beatles, John, John and Yoko.

What has struck me in this special week is the wit and intelligence and struggle of a man trying to balance his extraordinary talent with the entire range of human situations and emotions: longing, jealousy, growing up in the spotlight, rage against the establishment, desires of every kind, loss, bliss, generosity, early middle age.

John’s relationship with Paul fascinates because of its depth and what it gave to the world: an insane number of musically exceptional songs that resonate deeply in the hearts of generations. John’s love for Yoko had such extreme consequences, from furthering tensions within the Beatles to fatefully bringing him to live in New York.

I’m not a big fan of John’s solo career, nor the underlying nihilism of “Imagine,” but I am a huge fan of his spirit of looking for peace: in the world, in his group, in his family, in his own heart.

John, I really hope you were wrong about the "no heaven" thing, and that the seraphim and cherubim are rockin’ with you to celebrate your birthday along with all of us down here.

"In My Life" from Anthology.  The perfect Lennon/McCartney song perfectly set to images:





(Exhibit photos, Reuters. Quarrymen, Michael Priest)

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 Mapeel     10/09/2010     current events, music   

Dark Days on the Banks of the Old Raritan

Sol iustitiae et occidentem illustra
Sun of righteousness, shine upon the West also.

Irony now swirls around the Rutgers sunburst seal, with its adaptation of the Latin motto of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, connoting the original college’s early affiliation with the Dutch Reformed Church.

Rutgers is my alma mater, specifically Rutgers College, New Brunswick, College Avenue Campus. Rutgers used to be known for these people: Paul Robeson, Joyce Kilmer, Milton Friedman, George Segal, and more recently, James Gandolfini, Kristin Davis, Calista Flockhart, Mario Batali, and Pulitzer Prize novelist Junot Diaz.

Now it is known as the college where Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei toyed with the life of Tyler Clementi for their own twisted amusement, after which he jumped from the George Washington Bridge.

People have been cruel and stupidly cruel to one another forever. But the hurt that can be inflicted with the speed of a tweet or the upload of a video is of course our own age’s contribution to man’s inhumanity to man, which, by the way, is a line from Robert Burns’s 1787 poem “Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge,” written 21 years AFTER Rutgers was chartered as Queens College in 1766. Rutgers is one of the oldest universities in the country.

“My father sent me to old Rutgers, And resolv'd that I should be a man”

Rutgers College only went coed in 1972, so the words from its school song from 1869 can be forgiven.

Shortly after I graduated, Rutgers went from distinct, independent colleges—-Rutgers College, Douglass College (which Robin Morgan of Sisterhood Is Powerful fame once called “the cradle of feminism”) and Cook College (where the Rutgers tomato was cultivated)-—to a federated university system. For instance, it went from each college having its own English department/faculty, to one University-wide English department. This was part of a bid to be the Michigan of the East, with a football team to match it. I know this because I was asked to speak at a trustee dinner about the academics at Rutgers when this plan was talked about.

And I didn’t really get to say what I wanted. The academics at Rutgers were excellent, but in the 1980s it had an air of anti-intellectualism. The frats were in their heyday, and they weren’t as charming or clever as Animal House. Only two full classes had graduated since women had been admitted, and the status quo was still adjusting.

It was less of an adjustment for the “artistic” dorm I was in called Demarest, which had Special Interest sections. We were all feverishly worldly in the Petri dish of hormones and cerebral gymnastics that is dorm life. Everyone at Demarest was a little off center from the mainstream, in various ways, and so being different was embraced.

Demarest remains the Special Interest housing, and I am certain that Tyler Clementi would be alive today if he had been placed there instead of his dorm on Busch campus, more of a bastion of regular old Jersey boys. It’s a sad, chilling, tormenting thought about how something like a housing lottery can have such an effect on our lives.

A Course in Civility
What the hell is going on at Rutgers in general? Since when do you try to teach civility at a university level?

Completely separate from this tragedy, Rutgers had initiated what it calls “Project Civility, a two-year, university-wide dialogue at Rutgers, sponsored by the Offices of Student Affairs and Undergraduate Education at Rutgers- New Brunswick.”

It so happens that the kick-off event was Sept. 29, “Choosing Civiltiy,” with another “Can We Be Kinder Towards One Another on the Rutgers Buses?”

Rutgers runs free buses between the campus of College Ave., Cook, Douglass, and Busch. What the hell is going on on these buses that such intervention is necessary?

As I said, in my day the frats went too far in hurling verbal abuse at women walking to class on College Ave., but they were reigned in. (I see Phi Gamma Delta [FIJI!] lost its charter. It was a great place for dance parties, but that was before ruffies.)

Clearly, there is some sort of atmosphere at Rutgers that is souring the experience of the young people going there for their college experience. The university still has 70 Greek charters, but there's no evidence that the frat system is at the root of today's malaise.

As for Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. For whatever reason they thought it was acceptable to maliciously tape anyone in an intimate moment and post it on the internet, well, they were fatally wrong.

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 Mapeel     10/01/2010     current events, family   

Crosby's Unexpected Gift to Baseball Fans

It’s a surprise to see Bing Crosby, pop culture’s most important forgotten man, on the homepage of the New York Times online, but there he was on Thursday night, a beautiful black & white picture from 1947.

The subject: baseball. A complete video of Game 7 from the 1960 World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees——"the best game ever"——was found in his wine cellar last year by an archivist going through his video collection for potential DVD releases. MLB Network has now struck a deal with Crosby Enterprises for the game to be broadcast with interviews and wrap-arounds with Bob Costas.

Crosby had a passion for the technical side of his trade—microphones and magnetic tape sound recording equipment. The story is oft told that a guy named Jack Mulligan, a U.S. Army Signal Corps engineer during World War II, discovered the advancements the Germans had made in high-fidelity recorded sound and brought them to Hollywood. He got a meeting with Crosby, who immediately saw the practical and commercial value of the technology, and he invested in both the tape technology and the machines to replay it. Crosby preferred the relaxed atmosphere of a recording studio to the that of a live radio session. With recording he could control the final product. He could also produce shows ahead of airdates, and so could go fishing and hunting more often.

One of Crosby’s other passions was baseball, which he exercised by his coownership of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The two passions came together when his superstition about the World Series lead him to leave the country, lest he bring them bad karma, and simply listen to the game on the radio in Paris. But he knew he would want to see it once it was over, and so he had it recorded.

Like the MLB’s archivist said in the article, it’s an amazing time capsule. The snippet on the MLB website shows the game in its purest, black and white best. No high production values, no virtual advertising on back field walls, just great athletes, like Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, and Bill Mazeroski playing the game at the highest level.

And best thing about it, the Yankees lost.

Update: The online comments on the article are just great. So many memories for so many people. And the passion of the fans comes across strongly. Here's my favorite:

"As for Maz's homer for the ages, that ranks with my first kiss, my first time behind the wheel of a car and watching the birth of my first child for all time thrills."
Martskers, memphis

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 Mapeel     9/23/2010     current events, music   

The English, and History with a Capital “H”

The picture of the octogenarian Queen receiving the octogenarian Pope in Scotland as a head of state is History, with that capital “H.” The Queen, the defender of the faith that came down through Henry VIII and built an Empire, with the successor to St. Peter.

Political and religious enemies for centuries, besides the fact it’s an Englishwoman receiving a German, both who were alive during the London Blitz. The 20th century is not yet entirely over.

From The Guardian's post visit editorial: "The pontiff's taking of tea with a Queen whose coronation oaths swore her to defend "the Protestant reformed religion established by law" is quite something. The papal praise poured on Sir Thomas More – the martyr who died defending the pope's power against the crown – in Westminster Hall would once have been likened to the gunpowder plot. The 5 November celebration is a reminder of the historic reach of anti-Catholicism in popular culture, just as the Act of Settlement is testimony to the sectarian origins of Britain's high politics."

The Pope addressing Parliament, the Pope in Westminster Abbey, two events connected to the very heart of English history. We’ll have to see if these actions will have any actual meaning for our 21st century.

I admire English Catholics. When the Reformation came, staying true to Catholicism meant financial and social ruin and possible death. It’s that supreme individual understanding of the point of it all--a belief that they would lose their eternal souls if they followed Henry--that makes the criminal acts of the 20th century institutional Church all the more obscene, if that’s possible.

Pope Benedict made several non-apology apologies on the visit for the moral bankruptcy of the church that allowed pedophile priests to work freely within its ranks. Every statement he makes about it angers me because he continually deflects straight out responsibility. Just one example from hundreds:

"I think of the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the Church and by her ministers.”

“Especially within the Church and by her ministers” !! This is a debating tactic, to connect the specific to a larger situation to imply that the specific is not unique. Well, the pope is not responsible for the generic concept of children who are abused, so nobody cares what he “thinks” about that larger suffering. Just take responsibility for the “especially” part, and cooperate with civil authorities to see that priests are punished under the law of the land, as well as those who enabled them.

Garry Wills explains how even the beatification of John Henry Newman is an intellectual manipulation by Benedict:

“Pope Benedict XVI is the best-dressed liar in the world. And in England he presided over the best set-designed lie imaginable.”

And Then There’s the Real Church
Though England is a secular Christian country, there is a very real “otherness” for its Catholics. When I was at University in Southampton, I was put in a particular dorm flat where everyone was Catholic, from Wales, Scotland, and England. And everyone on the other floors were not. It's the only time I was segregated like that as a Catholic. I can respect that given the history there, it was the safe thing to do.

But the "others" are of course in the stream of life too. When I was in London last summer I was shopping in Selfridge’s and wanted to get to the noon Mass at Westminster Cathedral, the main Catholic cathedral, but not a real tourist definition.

I didn’t have much time so I jumped in a cab. Because I’m American I thought the cab driver would assume I wanted the tourist destination of Westminster Abbey, so I repeated Westminster Cathedral, not the Abbey twice, and the driver said, in one of those great colorful London accents, “I know it well, luv, I got married there 40 years ago.”

That’s what’s important. English Catholics in simple, daily life.

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 Mapeel     9/19/2010     current events   

Reader Appreciation Post

Whenever I need a quick laugh I read through the New Yorker cartoons collected in the New Yorker cartoon bank. This one really made me laugh.

And it reminded me to say ‘thank you’ to you who stop by here and read my posts.

You have many other options for your reading (and flying) pleasure, and I appreciate the time you spend here.

I will try to keep any actual barking to a minimum.

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 Mapeel     9/13/2010     blogs