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Cassette-Tape Revival? Hipsters Need a Primer on What They’re Getting Into
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Cassette-Tape Revival? Hipsters Need a Primer on What They’re Getting Into

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

In May of 2024, I was invited to start writing a monthly column for the daily newspaper serving our beloved twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn. Read the latest installment here. Be warned: Content at SunJournal.com resides behind a paywall. I would encourage readers, especially those here in Maine, to suck it up and subscribe. For one affordable price, folks get all the news from Greater L/A, the state’s second largest metro area; everything from sister paper, the Portland Press-Herald; plus access to content at the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. All of these local journalism operations are now owned and operated by the Maine Trust for Local News. While I strongly encourage you to support them with your money and eyeballs, the paywall does make it difficult to promote the product to non-subscribers. So I’ll be sharing the odd column here.

By Hal Phillips
It’s weird to learn via media report that specific, intimate aspects of one’s own cultural history are making “comebacks”. Maybe 15-20 years ago, a certain American demographic started collecting and playing vinyl records again, for example. Out of nowhere this became trendy. Today, folks of all ages are still giddily sourcing records from Discogs and investing in turntables, after a 20-year respite.

My Millennial son and daughter-in-law maintain a modest record collection today. Yet they have gathered these vinyl relics more or less at random, in small batches, from second-hand shops. They don’t even bother to seek out records from artists they like. Their enjoyment of this seemingly kitchy, analog activity is almost entirely ironic, like dressing as a steam punk, or churning butter.

I get it. Millennials do love their irony. But they are divorced entirely from the activities and emotions that once made vinyl-collection and record-playing irresistable.

Just last month, and in the same vein, I learned that cassette tapes are back in vogue after three decades away. I am not technically a part of this revival. I maintain two means of playing cassettes, and have for some time, because my mixed-tape collection — dating back to my own golden age of mixed tapes (1986-92) — has remained sweetly nostalgic to me. The idea of buying new tapes, or making them, feels rather anachronist, because the technical and interpersonal conditions that prevailed during this golden age no longer exist.

In short, one must have achieved a certain age — “old as dirt” is the technical term, I believe — in order to remember cassette tapes and what made them so special. But that doesn’t mean we should consign their fascinating 20th century narrative to the dustbin of history.

Until the late 1970s, there was no practical way for everyday folks to record music from vinyl — or off the only other practical music source then available, the radio. Cassette tapes changed all of that. The advance proved both technological and cultural: A friend who owned Jackson Browne’s album “Late for the Sky,” for instance, could just tape the whole thing for you. This saved money. Cassettes also stored more efficiently, in something as small as a shoe box. Critically, one could also play them in your car, if said vehicle featured a tape deck. This was huge.

Yet cassettes also transformed any schmuck into a legit DJ. Throughout the 1970s, radio was the only place where music consumers could experience a stream of individual cuts off multiple albums, from multiple artists. We take this phenomenon for granted today, thanks to Spotify, iTunes, Pandora and YouTube. Commercial radio originated this experience, however — with interruptions from advertisers. Our record players gave us commercial-free choice, but only one immutable album at a time. 

Cassette tapes cannily merged these multiple forms of music consumption. They allowed us to create those playlists for ourselves, from our own record collections. They enabled playlists using other folks’ collections, from songs highjacked off the radio, even from other tapes (if a stereo had two tape decks). This multi-valent ability, acquired during the first Reagan Administration, proved thoroughly mind-blowing and futuristic. Then Sony introduced the Walkman and we all felt like cinematic characters from Blade Runner.

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Oh, Pioneers! GenX Rediscovers the Moderate Joys of Microdosing

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Observing the proliferation of dope stores here in my former mill town is, by now, old hat. They’re everywhere across the Great State of Maine and their attendant foot traffic has even begun to attract pleasantly parasitic commerce, like the Casa Del Taco truck that took up residence beside one shop, the Cure Cannabis Co., before mysteriously disappearing three weeks later.

I don’t frequent these marijuana dispensaries (though I would pay to see the staff at Cure dressed up like Robert Smith). I know a dozen folks who’ve been growing their own for decades. When Maine legalized the skunk in 2009, when municipalities decriminalized possession in 2013, I got separate calls from friends familiar with my personal habits. You celebrating? they asked. No sir, I told them. My lifestyle hasn’t changed one iota.

But psilocybin? That’s another matter. After consuming my fair share of mushrooms during the 1980s, I didn’t partake for long stretches of my subsequent adulthood. There were a few one-off experiences during The Aughts, when I consumed the same 3 to 3.5 grams that folks routinely scarfed during the second Reagan administration. But I mainly left them alone — because a standard 20th-century dose of 3.5 grams could mean a 7- to 9-hour commitment. Easy to carve out, as a college student, over a weekend. Not so much when one is working 9 to 5, with a wife and small kids.

However, I’m here to report that shrooms are back, in a very different but curiously familiar way, particularly among my Gen X and late-stage Boomer cohort. Psilocybin products remain technically illegal in Maine, for now. But not in California or several other states… Ain’t federalism and the U.S. Postal Service grand?

The difference 40 years can make has proved both fascinating and nuanced. Four or five years ago, a buddy of mine revealed that he’d been procuring his mushrooms in a unique form: from a vendor who, when he wasn’t painting houses, gathered the particulate, or shake, from the bottom of a 1-gallon plastic storage bag. He’d fill and sell cute-little 1-gram capsules that, I discovered, represented the perfect microdose. Perfect for me anyway.

Nothing psychedelic, mind you. As with THC and alcohol, everyone processes these chemical compounds differently. I never got an acid-style trip out of psilocybin shrooms, no matter how many grams I gobbled. These 1-gram shake capsules produced a delightfully toned-down buzz that lasted 2-3 hours and didn’t continually lobby my brain for more, more, more. You know, like other white, powdery drugs I associate with the 1980s.

For example, I caught Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew’s spectacular “Remain in Light” review, early in August. They went on around 9 p.m. After parking the car and popping a gummy, I remained plenty wide awake and ready to have fun till midnight. A most pleasant stimulant. Plenty sober enough to drive home. No trouble sleeping afterward.

Today, of course, gummies are the in-vogue medium for shrooms and cannabinoid THC, and there exists an entire universe of delivery media: chocolate, root beer, oils and tinctures, salves and creams. I frankly prefer to smoke the kind bud: Its old-school results remain immediate and predictable, for me. Yet that’s precisely the noteworthy thing about these manufactured products: By paying attention to gram dosage, one can monitor and enable only the buzz one desires — no more, no less. Brands differ, but my older, wiser friends and I have found consistency within most any manufacturer’s product line.

That unknown variability had always annoyed me when it came to homemade hash brownies, or pot cookies: How strong are these? “Uh. I dunno, dude.” Not a science.

The corporatization of dope has its drawbacks, as well, but it has delivered to the marketplace consistent expectations and results on the buzz front. It’s no mistake that beer menus today routinely include the percentage of alcohol for each pint on offer. The legalization of weed and other products has influenced an entire industry in this way.

Critically, the active ingredient in shroom gummies is stronger and calibrated differently compared to the analog method. According to the National Institutes of Health, “a 25 mg psilocybin fixed dose is approximately 2.5 grams of dried Psilocybe cubensis mushroom. However, it is important to note, there is intra- and inter-species variability of psilocybin content.”

I’m intrigued by the way all these particulars, including our understandings of dosage, have evolved in the course and context of my own life. Back in 1985, the fall of my senior year in college, I went to visit a friend at UMass. A buddy of his had a bunch of mushrooms and asked me to move some for him, back at my own institute of higher learning. This I proceeded to do, in addition to partaking myself, chaperoning other folks on maiden voyages, and eventually microdosing — though that terminology had not yet been coined. Still, I’d pop a cap before a party. Another time, I remember downing a fat stem before the annual Nebraska-Oklahoma football game, the day after Thanksgiving. Nothing like a mild shroom buzz to watch nimble quarterbacks prosecute the triple-option wishbone.

While arguably ahead of their time, these casual microdoses eventually gave me pause. The worry: I was beginning to normalize the shrooms by microdosing them, however responsibly I may have been doing so. To my 21-year-old mind it felt immature, perhaps reckless, maybe even a slippery slope. When the supply was depleted, I didn’t seek out more. For decades, I considered shrooming only on special occasions, at the suggestion of others. A couple times I took the plunge but most of the time I demurred.

Now, on the verge of 60, all these folks around me are microdosing pretty much exactly as I had my senior year in college! What had seemed reckless back then is now prosecuted with great intention and precision, by demonstrably reasonable old people. And Talking Heads are back on tour in support of an album released in 1980. Amazing.

I’m not the least bit surprised the Maine Legislature approved last
September a commission to study the possibility of legalizing psilocybin; or that elsewhere shrooms are now being prescribed to people who struggle with depression and PTSD. Everyone’s different, and even the big doses never made the walls breathe or the trees talk — not to me. What they can do, for a time, regardless of dosage, is take one completely outside of one’s self, to a place where one might examine his/her own experiences in completely new ways.

I remember one young man in particular whom I chaperoned on his first psilocybin experience, back in the day. He was sitting on the tailgate of a gigantic ‘70s-era station wagon, calm and contemplative, but he’d clearly been laughing with great vigor. One could see it in his eyes. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” he told me, without any trace of irony, anxiety or pride. “I’m never doing it again.”

With the experience of decades, I wish I could have responded, Hey, I get it. Next time — if there is a next time — try taking one third as much.

It’s Been 20 years since I Eulogized my Cat

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments
Me and F. Scott, 1988-2004

Twelve years ago when I moved to Maine from Greater Boston I traded an apartment in a relativly leafy suburb for one in the heart of downtown Portland, an act which obliged me and my two cats, Scott and Zelda, to become urbanites. This, as I explained to Scott at the time, was admittedly counterintuitive. Not many Massholes go north to seclude themselves from the great outdoors. But I did assure him, as he was the more adventurous of the two litter mates, that someday he’d be an outdoor cat once more.

Five years later, having taken on a wife, child, dog and sole proprietorship, I delivered on that promise. We moved to rural New Gloucester and Scott, once an indoor cat against his will, was free again to roam the countryside as he pleased. Zelda did too, of course, but she’s always been more of a homebody. The former Ms. Sayre never experienced the thrill of the wild that her furry companion did. For months after our arrival in The NG, Scott would prance through the sliding door into the house and pause to look up at me, his whiskered face beaming with squinty-eyed satisfaction. “This is AWEsome,” he clearly communicated to me. “You’re a man of your word.”

Scott died Friday morning, so this particular memory and scores of others are rushing over me just now. He’d been sick: a horrible earache and weight loss associated with what the vet presumed to be kidney failure, a common and ultimately fatal issue for 15-year-old cats like Scott. I hadn’t seen him all of Thursday — a problem because he needed his anti-biotic pill. A couple weeks earlier, during an initial round of similar treatments, he had disappeared for 48 hours and I thought, with great sadness, that he might have taken off for good rather than endure the indignity of another forced pill-popping. But I did find him; he was under the bed in our guest room, resting amid the sagging, tattered under-linings of the box-spring.

That’s where Silas found him Friday morning. I reached in to give him a soothing pat before the tricky matter of extrication, but his fur was oddly cool to the touch. 

•••

I am a cat person. Dogs I’ve learned to appreciate but I shall always prefer a cat’s snuggability, cleanliness, independence and innate poise. They would appear possess a self-respect that lends more meaning to their affection. Dogs are great, but they appear to be pre-programmed to slobber love on humans regardless of who the humans are, or how they treat dogs, because it’s implicit that dogs will starve without human care. They are truly dependent whereas cats, if they feel mistreated, will withdraw their affections and treat you with the appropriate wariness, or they’ll simply run off and take their chances with some other human, dining on voles they kill and consume in the meantime.

By the same token, when a well-treated cat lets down its defenses and makes itself vulnerable to your love, it really means something. I’m not one to anthropomorphize unduly, but human-feline relationships feel, to me, more interpersonally genuine. 

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What Made Grandma Grandma? ‘Kantika’ Deploys Clever, Analytic Tool: Fiction

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Book Review

There is historical fiction. There are the literary cousins of memoir and family history. Then there is the canny, lyric hybrid Elizabeth Graver deploys in Kantika, the 2023 novel that tracks her own family’s 20th-century journey from Constantinople to America, by way of Barcelona and Havana. Don’t worry: Ellis Island and its many overworked tropes do not figure here. Those are generally reserved for Eastern Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews. Graver’s people are the decidedly Mediterranean, metropolitan and mercantile Sephardic Jews, first invited to the Ottoman capital by Sultan Bayezid II, in 1492, following the Christian Reconquista of Spain.

Four centuries on, the author introduces her great grandfather, the cultured, haute bourgeoisie owner of a textile concern, until he isn’t. After retooling his factory during The Great War, to produce military uniforms, the new Turkish government absconds with it. Or so Alberto Cohen tells his wife and children. Did Ataturk really take their livelihoods and social standing by eminent domain? Or did this charming-but-passive sensualist fritter or perhaps gamble it away instead? Such questions are rarely meted out for certain, not in real life, not within families, certainly not looking back across generations. Graver is unflinching in her fleshing and framing of such consequential gossip, yet the novelist can also absolve or blame or leave ambiguous all the saucy or ambivalent bits, pretty much at her whim. To the narrative’s great benefit.

And so Rebecca — our protagonist, the author’s maternal grandmother — decamps with her penniless relations for Barcelona, just as she comes of age. There she marries a largely absent dullard because four centuries on, in what would shortly become Franco’s Spain, Sephardic men are hard to find. She builds a business and bears two children, only to be widowed at 30. Her older sister, already emigrated to the U.S., makes her a speculative, trans-Atlantic match with another widower, Sam Levy, whom Rebecca meets in Havana. As a test. Twenty-four lusty hours later, they are married and aboard a boat bound for New York City.

Stories of American immigration tend to concentrate less on the old country, the conditions that obliged one to light out for the territory in the first place. I am grateful that more than half of Kantika is set abroad. Not everyone in a family might choose to emigrate, or is allowed to. Rebecca waits two years for her boys to join her in America, for example; her aged parents expire before their papers & passages are secured. What’s more, the ones who do manage to leave tend to self-select according to their strength of self, adventure and determination. To some extent, these metrics account for the can-do immigrant spirit that has, in large part, made the U.S. what it is. After the same fashion, it enabled and informed the distinct culture of the American West. In short, the sad sacks tend to stay home. The same goes for those immigrants who get dragged to a new world and never leave the old neighborhood. (In Greater Boston, where I grew up, they have a name for those folks: The Lace-Curtain Irish.)

There are plenty of sad sacks in the Cohen family, in any family, and this story does not ignore or pigeon-hole them. But Rebecca is determinedly bound not necessarily for bigger things but the next thing, all the while singing and cajoling, striving and faltering, dusting herself off and risking it all again. America and its celebrated dreams do not magically lift her blended family out of working-class hardship. In several not-insignificant respects, she was sold a bill of goods (by her sister!). Yet Graver still depicts Depression-era Queens and this new, extended family with a clear-eyed, richly detailed generosity, which feels deserved.

The Cohens and Levys will never be confused with the high society Sephardim of Steven Birmingham’s esteemed 1971 history, The Grandees. But neither did he create characters as earthy and captivating as Rebecca. Working in non-fiction, he didn’t create them at all. The humans who populate Kantika, while technically the fabrications of a novelist, nevertheless feel markedly genuine — because, in these pages, the reader recognizes them as actual historical figures, relatives and literary characters all at once. This genre Graver cleverly contrives here: It can’t be her own invention, can it? Either way, her sketches of fin de siècle life by the Bosphorus, the portraits of her great grandparents in particular, and the language of those newly arrived in Barcelona, then the boroughs of Gotham, all ring very true. As do the black & white photographs that headline the chapters. I took the time to study each one, delighting in my recognition of these blood relations we’ve come to know via the unfolding drama. These components and others all deliver such splendid narrative impact because, it seems to me, they strike the reader as more authentic and intimate than mere details in a work of fiction, while never succumbing to the gloss of memoir or family history. Because the author is clearly moved by the epic sweep of this tale, so are we.

The word “kantika” means “song” in the old Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, the accent of which Rebecca never shakes. One imagines that Graver herself — a Boston College professor whose 2013 novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the National Book Award — was enthralled by her grandmother growing up. And perhaps a bit intimidated by such a robust, borderline domineering, still-rather-foreign figure. Graver and I attended Wesleyan University together in the mid-1980s; we didn’t really know each other, but we did share several English classes. Perhaps the cynical, white-bread nature of the New England small college initially led her to dismiss as mere mythos her grandmother’s literary potential. Credit the free-thinking Jesuits in Chestnut Hill and maybe a tenure track for leading her back to subject matter, a legit heroine’s journey, that was there all along.

The NBA Didn’t Require Ernie D… Dave Gavitt and The Big East? Oh yes.

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

It’s never too late to mark and quantify the impact of Ernie DiGregorio. Not in New England. Not when the subject is college basketball. Yet here’s the immediate news peg, the reason to contemplate Ernie D and his attendant rabbit hole early in 2024: It was 50 years ago this week that DiGregorio set the NBA rookie record for assists in a game: 25, for the old Buffalo Braves, during a 120-119 win over the hapless Trailblazers, in Portland, on New Year’s Day 1974.

This particular moment in NBA history, in and of itself, packs enough meaningful hoops serendipity to justify an entire 30 for 30 documentary:
• Ernie D led the Association in assists that 1973-74 season, his first. He led the league in free throw percentage, too.
• The Trailblazers were indeed terrible enough to earn the no. 1 pick in the June 1974 draft. They took a guy named Bill Walton.
• The Braves coach that record-setting January night? Dr. Jack Ramsey, who left for Portland the summer of 1976, whereupon he and Walton immediately led the Blazers to their only NBA championship.
• After acquiring Nate Archibald in September 1977, Buffalo let DiGregorio go — to the Lakers, who waived him halfway through the season. Boston signed him but didn’t offer a new deal. Just like that, Ernie D’s NBA run was over.
• That same summer, Buffalo owner John Y. Brown Jr. swapped franchises with Celtics owner Irv Levin, who promptly moved the Braves to San Diego.
• A year later, the newly christened Clippers signed Walton, meaning Ernie D missed playing with The Big Redhead by only a couple Degrees of NBA Separation.

Consensus NCAA Player of the Year in 1973, at Providence College. NBA Rookie of the Year in 1974. Out of the league by the summer of 1978.

Today, that sounds like an epic tale of crash and burn. Yet the mid-1970s did represent the most turbulent period in NBA history. The league had battled the ABA for talent and eyeballs the previous 10 years, before absorbing its competitor prior to the 1976-77 season. Free agency was instituted at roughly the same time. Many on-court careers were cut short or otherwise doomed by the ensuing roster consolidations, by franchise-swapping owners, by drugs, by a decidedly incoherent league promotional strategy. In the pre-cable age, television networks weren’t at all convinced the NBA would ever prove marketable as a major sporting enterprise. One reason why: The newly merged league was far more Black (the pre-merger NBA was so lily white, there was meaningful playing time for not one but two Van Arsdales!). Would middle America ever watch something so “urban”? Ultimately, yes; it would. But as late as June 1980, two full years after Magic and Larry showed up, CBS was still showing NBA Finals games at 11:30 p.m. EST, on tape delay.

It’s no coincidence that college basketball first planted its own flag during the Seventies, this period of marked NBA chaos/weakness. In this sliver of broadcasting daylight, especially, college hoops created a viable toehold in the culture. And it was the college game where Ernie D would prove a far more influential figure.

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RIP Robbie Robertson, A Man Who Understood Branding a Bit Too Well

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

[August 12, 2023]

My parents, like so many elder Americans, loved The Band. And so it was no surprise the Aug. 8 passing of lead guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson resulted in a widespread outpouring of praise and reflection. Yet very little of The Band’s long-term renown never made obvious sense, including why its reputation has proved so very durable and Robertson himself so controversial.

It doesn’t follow, for example, that the group responsible for founding the Americana movement would feature a lineup that was 80 percent Canadian.

During the late Sixties and Seventies, when the rest of rock and roll grew increasingly psychedelic, star-driven and glamorous, The Band emerged as a countrified ensemble whose oddly antiquated sound was driven by collaboration and the vocal abilities of not one but three superb lead singers.

Robertson wasn’t even one of these front men. Instead he played lead guitar and wrote songs about rusticated figures from the Civil War era. As he would later explain, The Band got famous by zigging when the rest of the rock world zagged.

When one picks over Robertson’s legacy, these signature zigs — and his role in formulating them — come easily to mind. It was Robertson, along with pal Martin Scorsese, who organized and filmed The Last Waltz, the much-praised concert movie and easily the most effective, brand-building farewell in music history. Robertson went on to make a bunch of movie soundtracks for Scorsese, including one for the 2023 release, Killers of the Flower Moon. The two collaborated again on When We Were Brothers [2019], a classy rockumentary that framed The Band in a gauzy historical context of Robertson’s devising. Note the title tense: Before anyone else did, Robertson’s former colleagues came to resent him for these canny legacy-building skills.

This is not to underplay the man’s artistic gifts, or The Band’s. When Music from Big Pink was released in 1968, it was rightly billed as a transcendent debut from Bob Dylan’s O.G. electric backing band. Dylan himself contributed to the album — and to The Basement Tapes, recorded around the same time, bootlegged for years, but not formally released until 1975. These two works alone set The Band’s collaborative reputation in stone. Yet Robertson had started writing/arranging most of the songs on subsequent albums because, to hear him tell it, those three lead singers — pianist Richard Manuel, drummer Levon Helm, bassist Rick Danko — had all started abusing a wide variety of drugs in unsustainable quantities. Eventually all three took issue with Robertson’s claims to sole authorship (to say nothing of the royalty money), right up until the day they all died.

I play in a couple bands that cover several Band standards: The Weight, Makes No Difference, Up On Cripple Creek, Rockin’ Chair… They never fail to elicit from Boomers and Gen X folk visceral, sing-along responses that often veer toward the ecstatic, and/or the weepy. In fact, folks of all ages, including younger country and bluegrass fans, tend to respond the same way. These songs come from a curiously nostalgic place, one that Bruce Springsteen has remarked upon: “It’s like you’d never heard them before, and like they’d always been there.”

Robbie Robertson wasn’t solely responsible for this music. Yet, in large part, he did prove responsible for curating, over the course of decades, these ideas and feelings about The Band. He may have understood branding a bit too well, and many longtime fans of The Band reviled him for that, too. Right up till the day Robertson died last week.

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Play-in, Schmay-in: Just give every D1 team in the nation an NCAA bid

Play-in, Schmay-in: Just give every D1 team in the nation an NCAA bid

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

351 image

Let’s take the gloves off and settle this, right here/right now, for the greater basketball good: Another bout of March Madness is nearly upon us and the current NCAA men’s basketball tournament format — 68 teams, with 8 playing off/in to create a field of 64 — begins with the worst sort of capricious, competitively arbitrary folly. From the moment the current play-in gambit was instituted, in 2001, the slope got very slippery indeed. At first, just two small-conference champions squared off for the right to get boned, on 36-48 hours’ rest, by a top regional seed. Let’s skip over mere half measures, or further regression, and proceed straight to the ultimate solution: tournament berths for every last Division 1 program, all 351 of them.

Don’t freak out: Here’s how quickly and seamlessly it would work:

1) The regular season ends when February does. All 351 teams in Division I Men’s College Basketball retire briefly to their ever-more plushly appointed training facilities, where they wait on the tabulation of a final computer ranking — 1 through 351. In essence, the period now devoted to “Championship Week” is given over to a 287-game, three-round, six-day tournament that produces the familiar, final bracket of 64.

2) The opening round — comprising 95 games and held the first Tuesday & Wednesday in March — pits the team seeded 351st against the team seeded 161st. In between,  #162 takes on #350, and so on. You like Cinderella? I’ll give you Cinderella: Imagine the crazy shit that will inevitably stem from a 190-team Round I — contested over two nights, at on-campus venues all across these United States. Elegant in its mayhem, Round I rewards the top 160 with a bye (thus lending meaning to the our otherwise meaningless regular season) and quickly reduces the field to 256, a perfect multiplier of 64.

3) Round II takes place Thursday and Friday, whereupon those 256 remaining teams — the bye teams and the Tuesday/Wednesday winners — contest 128 games and symmetrically reduce the field to 128. Traditionally, the Thursday/Friday segment of NCAA Tournament week delivers 32 games and a dependably crazed bacchanal of buzzer-beaters, nail-biters, upsets and blowouts, all in the space of 36 hours. A universal-bid Thursday/Friday takes that spectacle and quadruples it.

4) The 64 games comprising Round lll, on Saturday and Sunday, would approximate a mere doubling of the traditional Thursday/Friday pandemonium, while neatly and cleanly winnowing the field to the recognizable 64. Sunday night the remaining teams — retaining their original seeds — are assigned opponents and regions in the traditional manner we’ve come to expect.

Rounds I, II and III would essentially form a massive, universal play-in bracket unto itself — producing more money in less time, via a more competitively honest framework than the current play-in scheme combined with the odious, so-called Championship Week. All 287 games are necessarily played on campus, at the higher-seeded school. This mechanism is critical because, in rewarding higher seeds, it assigns another, much needed element of meaning to the college basketball regular season. It also guarantees kick-ass atmosphere and avoids potential scheduling conflicts at neutral sites, while reducing site-rental and travel costs. There is no reseeding between rounds. The bracket holds its shape and schedule all week, meaning teams are locked into either a Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday schedule, or a Wednesday/Friday/Sunday schedule.

What’s more, there is no good reason why a 351-team women’s tournament could not, or should not, be administered in exactly the same way, during the exact same time frame.

One of the great attractions of March Madness, perhaps the greatest of all, is the meting out of  champions based purely on game performance. Polls don’t matter. Bowl traditions don’t muck up the works. Ultimately, seeds don’t either. By winning six games in a row, a deserving champion is invariably crowned. The universal-bid system underlines, preserves and enhances this dynamic. As an added bonus, we dispense completely with any and all “bubble” and “snub” talk. Crucially, the regular season is dramatically transformed, for the better, in myriad ways I detail below. The bloated frippery of conference tournaments is eliminated. Bracketology? That irksome construct — and the tiresome, flatulent conjecture that wafts about it — are similarly put out to pasture.

•••

The original play-in scheme, instituted at the turn of the millennium, was shameful enough. The 8-team “First Four” we’ve endured since 2011 has proved that much more arbitrary and capricious. I wish I could tell you these “expansions” of the tournament were first undertaken in the name of inclusiveness and equity. But let’s not kid ourselves: In fact, let’s add a third descriptor, “mendacious,” because this peculiar arrangement was first advanced and expanded entirely in service of annually preserving tourney revenue and exposure for no more than a dozen would-be, at-large, major-conference also-rans — at the expense small-conference champions. Today, the Atlantic Sun Conference title-winner is obliged to play-in against its Summit Conference counterpart because, if they did not, there would be no room in the field of 64 for some seventh- or eighth-place team from the Big Ten — a conference that will soon have 16 basketball members.

This is shameful. If you think about it, the entire bubble/Bracketology thing — as a media construct — is built around whether and which second-tier, major-conference teams make the tournament, at whose mid-major expense. It defies logic that such expansive hoo-hah fixates on a group of teams ranked 55-75 in the country, teams that will not win the title, almost certainly won’t make the Elite 8, and may not even win a tournament game. Accordingly and appallingly, play-in games have eventuated so these demonstrable haves might make more money — at the direct expense of have-nots. 

But here’s the good news: From the moment this play-in component was introduced, we began the inexorable move  toward the final, most competitive, most equitable, most evolutionarily mature, most lucrative solution: a pair of all-in, 351-team NCAA basketball tournaments. This format is nothing less than our national hoop destiny. It will generate way more money and fan interest. There’s no practical reason why all-in men’s and women’s tournaments cannot run concurrently.

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In Iceland, It Truly Is a Matter of Degree

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

While rounding a mountainous spit of land north of Husavik, my traveling companions and I reckoned we’d better stop the car and get a picture. We’re honestly not the selfie-taking types, but 66.201 degrees was as far north as any of us had ever traveled before — or were likely to travel again. So we smiled awkwardly, took the picture and pinned the exact spot via the magic of Google Earth.

Technically, Iceland is one of only seven nations whose respective land masses are crossed by the Arctic Circle, a theoretical line of demarcation whose invisible shadow circles the globe at exactly 66.300 degrees north. Yet only two slivers of this country can claim truly Arctic coordinates: Grimsey Island, dead north of our pin, barely visible across 5.9 miles of open ocean; and small portions of the north-jutting spit immediately to our East, along an uninhabited stretch of Route 870 northeast of Blikalon.

Locals here don’t feel cheated by this near miss. At all. Their most chic sportswear company, 66°North, revels in it. Their cold-weather cred is built right into the country’s name. What’s more, no place on this Big Blue Marble of ours — not the arctic bits of Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Canada or the U.S. — can lay claim to such an astonishing landscape and climate. Because this giant hunk of volcanic lava is continually buffeted by the warm-water Gulf Stream, the weather here is pleasantly temperate marine. We spent eight July days in Iceland, and while the temps never crept into the 70s, the winters aren’t nearly so cold as one imagines. The most frigid month is January, which averages -3 degrees Celsius, or 26.6 Fahrenheit.

What does fluctuate wildly is sunlight. The orange orb simply never goes down in July. Come January and February, it never truly comes up, which, according to my new friend Ole, is why half the country decamps for Tenerife or Sarasota each winter. In the interest of self-care. 

It was our second full day in country when Ole and his wife played golf with me at Keilir GC, a pretty awesome, utterly treeless links half laid out on a pleasingly uneven bed of rock-strewn lava. Icelanders all speak excellent English but Ole’s was best, so I got the inside dope from him — not just where to hit the ball, but all manner of Icelandic information, the kind you won’t find in Lonely Planet.

For example, 58-year-old Ole and his wife Trina spend their winters in Florida. Anyone with the means similarly bugs out for all of January and February, he said, lest they misplace the will to live during another season of perpetual darkness. When flying home, the plane often stops in Bangor, Maine to refuel: If the weather is poor upon approaching Reykjavik, Ole explained, there is no nearby place to divert a large plane; it must have enough juice to reach Glasgow, Scotland.

What about the Faroe Islands? I asked him. “Not practical,” Ole said with a shrug. “Landing even a small plane in the Faroes is a reminder of why we have seatbelts.” At which point he put down his $12 Gull beer and violently jerked his torso forward, as if air brakes had just been applied to his barstool, full bore, halfway down the adorable little runway serving Torshavn.

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Great Moments in Towing: A Brief, Late ’80s Anthology

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in Boston, which is to say it’s been a long time since my car’s been towed. Cars do get towed in Maine, I suppose, but vehicular hazards here are more often centered on large antlered mammals in the roadway, as opposed to somewhat smaller, slightly less hirsute, exclusively bipedal mammals hooking one’s stationary vehicle to a still-larger vehicle, then driving away.

Further, my life here (I moved north in 1992) has been predominately family-oriented, pastoral and deliberate. In Boston, where I lived from 1986-92, I was single, urban and reckless. Nothing more viscerally illustrated this directly post-collegiate existence than lighting out for a party or club, circling a particular destination for a legal parking spot, successfully hunting one down (perhaps on the cusp of legality), leaving one’s largest and most valued possession there, only to return three hours later and find it gone — or, to find it untouched! It was a survivalist game of cat and mouse that I played with some skill for many years opposite traffic authorities representing the cities of Boston, Cambridge, Allston, Brighton and Somerville. I’d like to think that six years of eschewing parking garages saved me more money than I ultimately spent on tickets and towing fees. But that risk/reward ledger has never been reliably reckoned.

What I undoubtedly gained was a slew of great tow stories. I chronicle three selections here. Most tales of tow are tales of woe, where the system clearly got the best of me. That wouldn’t be a full and accurate portrayal, however. I could just as easily detail for you three occasions I parked illegally but successfully in the alleyways that divide city blocks in Back Bay, or parked sans resident sticker (and sans incident) in neighborhoods all over Greater Boston. But I won’t be doing that. As they say in the media business, it ain’t news when the plane lands safely.

September 1986: The Return — If there were an international governing body of traffic incidents, where meticulous logs were kept regarding the speed with which one regains possession of a towed vehicle, I might be world record-holder. On this potentially record-setting occasion, I was fortunate watch the truck slowly pass by the first-floor window of my Beacon Hill apartment. Once I had deduced that my silver 1978 Dodge Omni was literally in tow, there was nothing to do but bolt out the front door and give chase, on foot. I caught the tow truck in Government Center, a third of a mile down Joy Street, and another up Cambridge Street. At first the dude wouldn’t let me ride with him. But ultimately he took pity, acknowledging the effort perhaps, and waved me into his cab.

The impoundment lot this fateful night was located in South Boston, hardly remote. Dude let me out 100 yards before reaching the chain-link gate, so as not to reveal his breach of tow-truck protocol. Often there is a mass of pissed off people milling about the desk of an impoundment lot, but there was just one person there on this providential evening: A woman, in a fur coat, chatting agreeably with the staff. They clearly knew her, so frequently did she flaunt the parking system apparently. Soon she had paid and was gone; 5 minutes later I followed suit and exited through the same door. Same dude was still lowering the Omni back to Earth when I handed him my receipt. Hightailing it back to Beacon Hill couldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes.

I would peg the elapsed time — from the moment my car was placed on the hook, to the time I returned to the Joy Street apartment — at 30-32 minutes. The period stretching from my moment of realization, that my car had been towed, to my reappearance in the flat, could not have exceeded 25-27 minutes. That has got to be some kind of record.

Anyone who knows Beacon Hill — with its high-density residential, its narrow one-way streets, its proximity to three high-volume employment venues (Mass General, the State House and Government Center) — understands that parking thereabouts is about as challenging and high-risk as the Boston street scene gets. In many ways, the stakes are higher today: Computerization connects bad parking behavior with dire consequences almost immediately. Circa 1986, prior to the digital age, it took years for the DMV to run down scofflaws — and so, the anxiety was more textured. Who knew precisely how close to the precipice one stood? A letter might arrive, only go unread for a week or completely ignored. Two weeks later one might be two tickets deeper in the hole, maybe three. Would the next ticket summon the cursed tow truck, or (perish the thought) the dreaded boot?

The ultimate penalty was not meted out this record-setting evening, but there was a karmic breach. A group of us were headed out that particular night. Everyone else, three or four others, were clustered in the living room, positioned at the rear of our Joy Street apartment. Standing in the front bedroom, alone, I saw whirling red lights refracting through the windows on the walls. For an instant, I mused to myself, “Some moron got himself towed.” The regret was equally instantaneous. I was the moron.

No one had even noticed when, without word or warning, I raced out the door and down Joy Street. Twenty-five minutes later I returned and they were like, “Where have you been?” I got towed.

“Oh no. We’re going to be really late now.” No, I already got it back. Let’s go.

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Ascendant Sand & Scrub Movement Meets Curious Headwinds in Asia

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments
The Yangtze Dunes Course at Lanhai CC in Shanghai, PRC

There are two kinds of people in this world: those whose tastes in golf courses hew to The St. Andrews Ideal, and those whose preferences gravitate toward The Augusta National Ideal. 

Courses built and maintained according to the St. Andrews paragon we identify generically as “links”: natural and treeless, firm and fast, lightly kempt and several shades of brown. The Augusta model has come to represent an opposing pole, and these so-called “parkland” designs do exude a different vibe altogether: lush and soft, multiple shades of green, landscaped and manicured to a fare thee well. 

History, culture and geography have traditionally funneled Asian golfers into the parkland camp, a classification that may strike one as trivial, or arbitrary. But Asian predispositions in this regard are robust and stand to shape global golf trends for decades to come — even as contemporary tastemakers exalt the links model (and sneer at the parkland genre) as never before.  

For centuries, even this binary choice did not exist. Links courses — named for the sandy terrain that connects beach to more arable land — were the only game in town, and that town was St. Andrews. The Home of Golf will never change, but after several hundred years as a purely Scottish pursuit, golf began to migrate. First the game moved south, to England. During the mid-19th century it moved inland, where the parkland style was devised. 

Late in the 19th century, golf and its attendant tastes traveled West, across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, where the parkland style took firm hold and thrived as never before — fueled by American cultural influence, its economic sway, the opening of Augusta National Golf Club in 1934, and the advent of course irrigation. This shift toward the parkland ideal and away from the British links ideal happened far more quickly and comprehensively than anyone could have imagined. In 1880, for example, it would have seemed laughable to Brits that their game would, in just 50 years, be so dominated by America, Americans and their tastes in course design. But that’s exactly what happened. What’s more, during the ensuing century, the game arrived in Asia where the parkland style also came to predominate. 

In the mid-1990s, the stylistic pendulum swung back. The American course zeitgeist underwent a major shift, whereby The St. Andrews Ideal gained extraordinary new steam, while The Augusta National Model declined. Why? Resorts like Bandon, developed on a remote stretch of Oregon coast, proved links golf was popular enough with Americans to be profitable. Projects like Sand Hills — located in even more remote western Nebraska — showed that oceans and shorelines were incidental to the genre’s appeal. Anywhere there was sand, developers learned, compelling links golf could be devised. The more isolated the links course, the more golfers seemed determined to travel there. 

Today, where sand does not dominate the existing soil profile, developers import it and “cap” the entire 18-hole footprint, ensuring both efficacious drainage and links-enabling bounce & roll. At venerable Pinehurst No. 2, turf once dominated the landscape wall to wall. In 2011, prior to a U.S. Open held there, architects peeled back all but the fairway turf to reveal a sea of native, sandy scrub. Acolytes of the St. Andrews model swooned. 

Golf in the 21st century remains markedly U.S.-centric, but the game’s momentum continues to move West. Today, Asia-Pacific is the region where course development, player development, tournament interest and prize money/corporate support are growing most rapidly. True to golf’s migration patterns, the resurgent St. Andrews Model has been newly deployed all over Asia — along the coast of Vietnam, on islands in the Yangtze River, atop dead-flat properties in Greater Bangkok. 

There’s just one problem: Asians don’t much like links golf. 

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