xxxmas 2008

Another awesome, low-key Christmas in the books, with our third-annual Scrabble tournament (Charles won) on Christmas day, as well as a resurgence of chess, lots of delicious food, Veuve Clicquot(thanks, Melinda!), tons of wine, Maker's, Jacques Torres chocolates(thanks, Apollo!) and Lakers-Celts. Couldn't have asked for a more perfect 24 hours.

some delicious champagne, and not a vowel in sight...

We watched the requisite year-end sports wrap on ESPN, and it was filled with great memories like Steph Curry's flurry of march madness 3-pointers, which propelled Davidson into the elite eight; Lakers-Celts NBA Finals; Tiger's US Open win on a bad leg against a persistent underdog who forced a monday tiebreaker; Federer-Nadal at Wimbeldon; the improbable Giants winning the Superbowl in the most ridicuoulous miraculous fashion you could imagine; The Olympics- China, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt and those tiny little gymnasts making for two weeks of absolutely riveting television; the Tampa Bay Rays making me care for a split second about a baseball team other than the Yankees; Texas Tech's amazing NCAAF run this fall, etc. etc.

I don't normally get riled up about things making or not making this sort of list. I feel like there are a lot of sportswriters and producers and such that spend a lot of time watching and analyzing and whatnot and that they probably have a better standpoint from which to evaluate the relative merits of each "accomplishment" or highlight clip from the past year.

This year, I definitely feel like I have been more involved in spectating than ever before in my life- I saw each and every one of the highlights or story lines I mentioned above unfold in real time, and many others beyond that. I doubt there is a major sports moment or story from 2008 that I did not see either as it was happening, or on the very next SportsCenter that followed it. However, normally I would STILL defer to the professionals who's job it is to put together these year end lists of greatness.

BUT, as of today, I do have a bone to pick with ESPN. And it has to do with Candace Parker. Now, I think I am a realist when it comes to disappointing sociocultural conditions affecting our country. I know full well that women's sports are still light-years behind men's sports in terms of the whole "people giving a shit" factor. And that absolutely sucks, bad, but it is not something that is going to change overnight, as the roots lie deep in our perceptions and preconceptions about gender, as well as in our inherent biases regarding the capabilities and viability of certain groups of people.

ESPN, as a for-profit television network, with sponsors and demographics and blah blah blah, obviously knows their viewership and caters to them as much as is necessary for them to continue to rake in the dough they desire to rake, at any given time. If you don't blink, you can occasionally find some women's basketball or softball on there. For the purposes of this post, my bone does not even have to do with the sorry state of affairs when it comes to the lack of parity for women's vs. men's athletics, because that is a gigantic, far reaching issue which I could devote a few days to ranting on about, an issue which in the end comes back to individual psyches and social practices more than anything specific that ESPN does or does not do.

The bone I am picking, then, regards the egregious oversight of not featuring in full prominence the accomplishments of one Candace Parker on ESPN's year-end highlight countdown. Not because women don't get the spotlight enough, or because Candace Parker doesn't get the spotlight enough(both of which are absolutely true) but rather more importantly because she did something in 2008 that no athlete, male or female, black, white, green, blue, rainbow or whatever, has ever done in a calendar year. The list of accomplishments she has compiled is not only unique to her as an athlete, but each individual part also represents a significant athletic achievement, many of these worthy, in and of themselves, of recognition in a year-end highlight special. Put them all together, and there is no question whatsoever that she deserves not only to be mentioned, but to be put in the spotlight, among the elite athletes of 2008 and the most memorable moments of the year.

I hadn't even heard about the full breadth of Candace Parker's 2008 accomplishments until TODAY(and even then, not from ESPN) and I watched all those events above in the past year and more! I watched SportsCenter every single day! I read the sports news! And the regular news! I think I am a pretty good barometer for the claim that this information was not being "highlighted" for the people. And, since I obviously think CP is so great, you know I would have been listening even if they did even the smallest segment on her.

Anyhow, let's discuss what Candace Parker "did" in 2008, shall we?

-In March, as a senior at Tennessee, she led her team, the Lady Vols, to their 2nd straight NCAA championship.
-She was the 1st pick in the 2008 WNBA draft.
-Received the 2008 WNBA Rookie of the Year award
-Received the 2008 WNBA MVP award
-Played on the 2008 USA Women's Basketball Gold Medal winning team in Beijing
-Won the AP's Female Athlete of the year award 2008


uh... Wow. Well, first off, to start trying to put this into perspective, here is a quote regarding her MVP and Rookie of the Year awards:

Parker joined the short list of rookies to win the MVP in their first year in the major sports. Wilt Chamberlain and Wes Unseld did it in the NBA, Fred Lynn and Ichiro Suzuki in major league baseball, and Jim Brown in the NFL.

Again, let me emphasize that the list above is all within 2008. 12 months, y'all. There are many, many great athletes who may at best have one of those accolades in a year, a few over a lifetime. Candace Parker accumulated them all since LAST JANUARY.

So I think the word "egregious" is necessary and the term "oversight" is appropriate, when trying to understand why CP's year isn't up there with talk of the Giant's Superbowl win, or Tiger's US Open victory. At the very least!

CW and I were discussing this whole thing earlier and decided that the only other comparable sports accomplishment of the year is Michael Phelps' record breaking gold medal tally in Beijing. I can't understand why other, more influential people wouldn't see it that way, but I can hazard some pretty cynical guesses. Case in point: to write this post, I googled "Candace Parker" and the first results were her official WNBA page, Wikipedia, an article about her eloping with her husband, Sacramento King's bench warmer and former dukie Shelden Williams(not hating on Shelden, don't worry) and then finally a story from The Canadian Press about her AP award. The Canadian Press! What about the United States?!? You know, the country she is from and where she plays? As it is, the Canadian article was undoubtedly the most popular because her brother, Anthony, plays for the Raptors.

Anyhow, this is ridiculous. Candace Parker deserves to be just as big a sports story as Michael Phelps, yet she is pushed way back behind every other little blip on the radar. Texas Tech, for instance: they were outstanding for three months, yes, absolutely. But in the end they got their ass handed to them by Oklahoma, Graham Harrell got to stay home from the Heisman ceremony and they are now playing in the Fort Worth Credit Union Petting Zoo Cowboy Hat Bowl or something. Not nearly as impressive as my girl Candace Parker.

Start showing some love, ESPN. Especially when it's a no-brainer like this one. Totally unacceptable.

808's and Heartbreak

on sunday afternoon, i transferred the new kanye, 808's and Heartbreak, to my ipod and headed out into the cold afternoon to buy my friend mike a bottle of maker's mark for his birthday. as i briskly strolled the streets of east harlem, the icy wind whipping my face, the first strains of the album reached my ears and i was immediately intrigued. the (very minimalist) synth line of the first track Say You Will has been in my bloodstream ever since.

of course, i had previously heard about the concepts- the common denominator of the Roland TR-808, the use of auto-tune, the album as a "response" or chronicle of kanye's very rough year, the fact that kanye "sings" the whole album... etc etc. it was hard to know what to expect, and plenty of people speculated on what this whole endeavor might sound like...

let me tell you, in my humble opinion, it sounds good...

since sunday, it has been in near constant rotation on the pod, which is typical of every previous kanye album. kanye on the brain is not easy to shake off. my first impression on the street that day, after two songs, was that this album was once again kanye being absolutely, totally, unapologetically, kanye, which i love. annoying or not, whatever. if you were to say that he isn't always exactly himself, you would be really wrong. and, if you ask me, you would just be trying too hard to hate on the yeez. which is really silly and a total waste of your time.

he's going a few different places here, subject-wise, and i think he is the most successful when he is admitting to feeling a little lost. there is a vulnerability there that totally appeals to me, and i think it manages to stay on the sweet side of vulnerable, without slipping into the ridiculous. it's funny, but i thought of jenny lewis a few times, actually... jenny lewis when she turns the sarcasm down a little bit. on rilo kiley's first couple of albums there was a lot of vulnerability, in her lyric, and i hear something similar here. a plea for help, in that ever elusive pursuit of "direction"...

i hear that on Street Lights. there is just something really honestly sweet in his delivery of "see, i know my destination, but i'm just not there..." it's a great example, because out of context, sitting there written out on my blog, those words seem like they could have been penned by a melodramatic teenage girl on the pages of her unicorn-emblazoned journal. but he pulls it off! i don't know how, but he does. kanye manages to put a phat enough sound behind teen-angst caliber pleas to make me totally buy it! normally, you can't pull that kind of shit off unless you are a pasty white dude from england writing songs in the early to mid-eighties, but as i live and breathe, here is kanye west...

as for the other tracks... my favorite song, besides Street Lights is Say You Will which i think is the real masterpiece of the album (at least that's what i think right now) and the similarly new-ordery-erasure-esque Paranoid that's another attractive aspect of this album... the highly stylized, all electronic production is so right on. As per usual for Kanye. CW found it detrimentally retro(retro is a pejorative to him) but i find it deliciously reminicent of these fave bands from my youth. and the yeezle isn't even emulating them, persay, as much as he is extracting a bit of their essence and infusing it into something that is very much his own.

i heart 808's and Heartbreaks, yo. big time. the only missteps are RoboCop, which i wouldn't even bother listening to, although maybe i haven't given it enough time yet. i will refrain from condemning it all together for a bit. the other problem is the live track at the end. maybe it's a great song, but i will never know because you can barely hear it. it sounds like it was recorded from the taper-section at a phish concert. having audience noise as the primary layer on a new album track is a mistake, dude. if it was a classic we all knew already, maybe it would work better. however, the standouts on this album make these issues pretty much moot in my mind.

xo kanye. well done.

Listen!

06. Kanye West - Street Lights

Say You Will