CHARLOTTE, N.C. (May 8, 2016) — The life of an elite professional golfer is one of great privilege, born of great skill. This spring, the International Olympic Committee has learned what organizers of PGA Tour events have known for some time: Getting elite players to schedule your event is like trying to lure multi-millionaires to time-share presentations. When it comes to PGA Tour incentives, piles of money aren’t what they used to be.
The news that Adam Scott won’t be competing in Rio broke just as the Tour’s traveling road show stops this week in Charlotte for the Wells Fargo Championship, a top-tier event not just on account of its huge purse and quality golf course (Quail Hollow GC), but for the way it has traditionally pampered competitors. This aspect of tour life is seldom discussed outside the most wonky, Tour-obsessed websites and cable channels. However, the last decade has witnessed a startling arms race of perks and incentives, all bestowed with an eye toward delivering “name” players to individual PGA Tour events.
It’s a hard trick to turn, making elite players show up. As the IOC is now learning, top-shelf professionals have no real incentive to show up anywhere outside the Majors and World Golf Championship events, as they set their own schedules and money no longer motivates them. Olympic glory? Representing your country? Cementing golf as an Olympic sport after a 112-year hiatus? A familiar 72-hole stroke-play format (as opposed to the team formats first advanced by Olympic organizers)? Today, all these prospects, conceived to excite and allure, are likely to be met with indifferent yawns.
And why wouldn’t they yawn? Top players are so well compensated, the incentive to play 25-30 events per year — thus spreading around to many events the Tour’s considerable star power — has largely been removed. The fallback position for event organizers: lavishing\ perks and niceties on players and their families.
At The Players Championship, conducted over Pete Dye’s TPC Sawgrass course each May, a purpose-built 77,000-square-foot clubhouse sports a cavernous locker room, a separate champions locker room, and a full-on spa that, during the tournament, dispenses free services — not just massage but manicures, pedicures and hot shaves — to players and their family members. The gourmet vittles served here are considered the best on Tour.
PGA Tour Incentives: It’s about the Experience
There was a time when tour events burnished reputations by serving really good milk shakes and providing courtesy cars. The latter are today de rigeuer for all players, at every tour stop, but Charlotte takes it up a notch. Each golfer there is provided a silver Mercedes-Benz S-300 or S-500 for the week. They are also entitled to police escorts if they happen to encounter something unseemly, like traffic congestion. Free valet parking at Quail Hollow? Of course — even the caddies get that!
Event organizers here have recognized that cosseting players (and caddies) is good, but indulging their wives and girlfriends is equally vital. During past Wells Fargo events, Tour WAGS have been flown by private jet to visit the Biltmore Estate, the enormous Vanderbilt mansion in Asheville, where the movie Being There was filmed. Players themselves have, in the past, been ferried by helicopter to the Loews Motor Speedway, where they get behind the wheels of NASCAR rigs.
This is just a sampling of what has, in the past, been done for players and their families. I’m not exactly sure what goodies and jet-set diversions were supplied to them in Charlotte this week. The Tour has wisely stopped publicizing this stuff, as it can appear out of touch or unseemly. But there remains the very real expectation that tour-event organizers must continually up the ante in this regard, or else “name” players simply won’t schedule you. The purse — $1,134,000 to the winner in Charlotte this year — is almost an afterthought.
This is what the IOC is up against in Brazil. Forget the romance of lodging alongside triple jumpers in the Olympic village. These guys are used to the availability of private homes. Throw in the Zika virus, plus the sheer distance, and I think we can all see what’s coming. Olympic rosters for the 60-player men’s and women’s fields will be finalized July 11. Between then and now, expect a parade of polite declinations, citing the need to spend more time with family, the safety of those families, and perhaps the quality of milk shakes in Rio.
Having weighed in, soberly and professionally, on the “air rage” phenomenon the Mandarin Media blog, I couldn’t leave the subject without relating the more salacious story of my first trip to the French Alps. It wasn’t exactly an instance of “air rage,” but it well illustrates the peculiar holiday-making mindset among some Brits Abroad. Of course, said mindset can and has led to many an airborne incident. In short (I love quoting myself), “There is something to the idea, born of armchair psychology, that Brits generally and the English specifically cut loose on holiday in reaction to leaving what remains a very buttoned-up, class-restrictive culture.”
It was March 1985. My girlfriend and I were studying abroad, in London, and we’d booked a chartered ski package to La Plagne, in France, for mid-semester break. Our short flight from Gatwick to Geneva, almost entirely peopled by English holiday-makers, quickly degenerated into a sort of raucous booze cruise at 30,000 feet. Everyone, it seemed, had broken open their bottles just procured at duty free.
Normally, such characters scatter to the four winds upon landing, but this was a charter. We had all purchased the same ski package. Accordingly, the same rowdy group piled onto a single coach and set out for La Plagne — in a blizzard.
Brits Abroad: In a Blizzard
By this time, my girlfriend and I had traveled a great deal together. This much was clear: If she wasn’t seated directly behind the bus driver, she was dangerously prone to car sickness. So, from the very front of the coach, we could hear the party raging behind us, as we crept our way along ever more windy, mountainous roads. In a blizzard. This was a non-smoking bus; the Brits defiantly smoked like chimneys and brandished their duty-free liquor bottles like groomsmen at a stag party. Then came the songs.
The unfortunate leader of this charter was a mild-mannered American 22-year-old named Chad. His attempts to tamp things down were met with open ridicule. He was a tad chubby, our Chad. Ultimately, he was regaled with a spirited rendition of “Who ate all the pies?”
From our perch behind the driver, we witnessed the trip’s dramatic inflection point: An oncoming Citroen spun out in the snowy conditions and crossed into our lane. The bus driver tried evasive action but these were shoulder-less roads — and it was snowing like a bastard. The car bounced off the driver’s side of the bus, right below us. After skidding to a stop, we found ourselves literally perched precariously at the edge of a steep and snowy hillside.
We sat there for half an hour, crowded onto the left side of the bus — to avoid tipping the bus and our still soused party into oblivion. Finally, a replacement vehicle arrived. When it did, we all exited out the driver-side window.
Any Train-Station Bar in a Storm
This backup bus was not big enough to accommodate all of our luggage, so the entire party was deposited at a nearby train station, which served some small French mountain town whose name I cannot recall. The station had a bar, however. Our new British friends set about drinking again, as if nothing had happened. To be fair, so did we. Having cheated death, we tucked into a couple bottles of wine with two more American friends traveling with us.
Two hours later, we piled onto the second replacement bus, where our moveable booze-fest was now completely out of hand. Chad just hunkered down beside us. This party could not be stopped — or could it…
The up-and-down, side-to-side nature of our alpine journey would result in two initial incidents of vomiting. Each time the bus ascended and descended, the resulting spew sloshed back and forth along the bus floor. The stench had just the wrong sort of effect on others who teetered at the edge of nausea.
Upon arrival in La Plagne, I don’t believe I’ve ever been quite so thankful to disembark from anything. Rule Brittania!
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (23 October 2014) — A week into the Great Scrabble Freeze-Out of 2014, I’m left to contemplate my roots in the game. There has always been Scrabble, of course. But smartphone Scrabble, a newly enabled incarnation of the game has stoked my enthusiasm, even as it’s increased my dependence on dependable wifi.
My smartphone Scrabble journey started in the Dominican Republic back in January 2013. Jeff Wallach turned me on to this version of the game during a media junket to Casa de Campo, in the Dominican Republic. I noticed he was playing on his phone, a Facebook incarnation of Scrabble pimped via some Hasbro app. When I inquired, there was a guarded, secret-society “Can you handle the truth?” aspect to Jeff’s responses. In the end, I was deemed worthy. I’ve played some 350 games vs. Jeff and a dozen different opponents since.
We’ve all played Scrabble through the years, perhaps after an introduction from our parents. That’s my story. But this game never proved a rudimentary Candyland-type diversion, or some lame exercise sexed up by three-dimensional playing surfaces (The Game of Life). It never required physical skill (Jenga) any wellsprings of trivial knowledge.
Scrabble was and remains utterly singular and vital: strategic word-smithing in the language soup we’ve all slurped since birth.
Smartphone Scrabble withdrawal
This essay was long time in coming. I write it now because the mobile app that enables smartphone Scrabble has been unable to connect with Facebook for almost a week. Web alerts tell us developers are on the case. Until they solve the problem, short of going on the laptop and playing there (a place I do NOT wish to go), I’m stymied — and so are my half-dozen current opponents. I texted one yesterday: “Life has so little meaning without Scrabble.”
“I feel rudderless,” he responded. Immediately.
In short, I write this today because without phone Scrabble, I’ve got all sorts of bandwidth (if not exactly more time) on my hands. I might spend 15 total minutes tending to five or six Scrabble games in a typical day. But that quarter hour engenders an entire universe of the mind. Alas, that universe has, for a week, been devoid of matter.
My mom, a reader and lifelong classics freak, inculcated the power of Scrabble into all three of her kids. Parcheesi we played as young’uns; after that, it was Scrabble when proper board-gaming was undertaken. It was a banner day when I finally beat her, because our parents never ceded to their children a game of any kind. It was that kind of household. And I’m glad for that in many respects, this one for sure. She still speaks of that fateful day — as if a spell were broken. We played the other day, on an actual board. My brain is honed these days to an estimable Scrabble sharpness. The poor woman didn’t know what hit her.
Scrabble for Bong Hits
I never played at college. Not sure why not. Thereafter my brother Matthew and I shared an apartment with fellow Swellesleyan David Kett. All of us held down jobs that rendered us semi-nocturnal (we’re still surprised Kettle gave up a lucrative career in college-campus security dispatch, for the law). We’d circle back to 60 Columbia St. at some ridiculous hour and play serious, cut-throat Scrabble for bong hits: losers pack.
We kept a running tally of wins, gaudy game scores and notable bingos — the 7-letter, tray-emptying triumphs that can launch true Scrabble lifers on glorious, 36-hour highs. Bingo was also our pet name for bong hits, so there was symmetry. This key word often morphed into “Bingo Bing!” at particularly high-spirited moments.
Bingo Bing also happened to be the name of my mother’s imaginary friend, when she was a kid — something I’m sure she regretted telling us. The dichotomy of this phrase recalling this fanciful figure from her youth, while signaling both the release of pure Scrabble joy and quite possibly a binger, we found hilarious.
I make it sound like I was playing Scrabble all the time as a young man, or a kid. Not the case. There were periods of mania, like the year on Columbia. But I didn’t play the game hardly at all once I moved to Maine in 1992.
Scrabble Respite in the North Country
We have a board here in Maine — a special anniversary deluxe model, in fact, on a swivel, with ridges to hold the tiles in place. I dutifully introduced the game to my kids, but they were never particularly taken with it. We all moved on.
Now that I look back on it, Wallach’s Great Scrabble Reveal, in the Caribbean, was foreshadowed by a brief and shameful dalliance with a knockoff version of the game. Yes, Words With Friends — an execrably named pursuit, for starters, and just plain weird/wrong in a dozen other competitive respects. The board is different. The letter values are different. Scoring is inflated in ways all out of proportion.
Words With Friends developers had to alter these things, I suppose, in order to not get sued. But on account of these degredations, Scrabble’s inherent, elegant symmetry is lost.
I played WWF a bit. It was okay. The novelty of having on the game my smartphone was inviting. It never occurred to me that proper Scrabble could be played in exactly the same way, on my phone. Of course, it was in fact being played, in that special universe of wordplay, gamesmanship, strategy and trash talk that is smartphone Scrabble. It just took a trip to the DR to discover it.
The book review below, written in 1994, first appeared in The Harold Herald, the blog I created in 1992. The original print issue sought to mimic the look of the NYT Book Review. That effort has been abandoned here, in the name of SEO. Some have argued I invented the blog, pre-Internet. Read more about that claim here.
THE HAROLD HERALD BOOK REVIEW
Vidal’s Historical Fiction Pegs Ambition as Historical Catalyst
Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington D.C. byGore Vidal. Ballantine Press, $5.95 ea.
By all rights, Aaron Burr should have been the third president of the United States. If not the third, then certainly the fourth. When he and Thomas Jefferson secured the identical number of electoral votes following the election of 1800, Burr stood aside. He accepted the vice presidency and bided his time. The presidency would fall to him eventually. Hadn’t John Adams set the executive precedent by accepting the second spot, then ascending in due course? Hadn’t Jefferson promised his support when the time came?
But Jefferson would prove unfailingly vague when it came to political commitments. He was wary of Burr and isolated the vice president within his Cabinet. Jefferson wouldn’t allow Burr to resign with honor — until, that is, Burr hadn’t the time to organize a credible campaign for 1804. Jefferson then framed Burr for treason and the government tried him. The trumped-up charges failed to convince a jury, but Burr’s political viability had been effectively obliterated. Thus Jefferson securing his own and, by naming James Madison vice president, a Virginian ascension.
At least, that’s Burr’s version of events.
Or rather, that’s the version laid out by Gore Vidal’s title character in “Burr,” the first of six historical novels comprising the author’s so-called American Chronicle. I started this jourjney in August and have finally finished.
By tracking Aaron Burr and his descendants through the nation’s first 150 years, Vidal illustrates how ambition shaped and sustained the world’s first modern democracy. Ambition and naked political scheming. At the same time Vidal weaves an enormously intricate, believable tapestry where historic figures full of life mingle with equally engaging but fictional offspring.
Vidal’s Historical Fiction is Heroically Researched
Vidal has clearly done a vast amount of homework. His is an authority born of journals, letters and historical canon. Yet Vidal’s real characters — like Jefferson and William Seward, Lincoln’s ambitious secretary of state — prove unfailingly funny, sullen, outrageous, randy, paranoid and sometimes insane. In a word, human. Indeed, they take on the qualities of fictional characters because Vidal depicts them with such depth, wit and humanity. On scholarly grounds, historians wouldn’t dare recreate dialogue as Vidal has done. Besides, most historians couldn’t do it; they haven’t his skills as a novelist. Vidal can convincingly mimic Henry Adams and Mrs. John Jacob Astor, with equal parts style and integrity. Because he’s a writer of fiction with supreme command of the subject matter.
When Vidal intersperses these historical figures with fictional characters (believably placed in the maelstrom of actual events), it’s hard to remember who’s real and who’s not. The author does his level best to remove any distinction. The reader cannot put it down.
Young Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a fictional law clerk and budding journalist, tells the story of “Burr”. Schuyler works for the title character and convinces the old man to dictate his fascinating memoir. This Burr does, in part. The bits and pieces of his amazing life — the raid on Quebec with Benedict Arnold, candid Burr-centric portrayals of all the founding fathers, his aborted conquest of Mexico, his many wives, his mysterious relationship with Martin van Buren, rumored to be Burr’s bastard son — are never published as memoir, per se. They appear only as flashbacks set against Burr and Schuyler’s “contemporary” story, set in the 1830s. The young protégé provds mesmerized by this window on the nation’s founding moments and men. He is fairly well knocked to the floor when, upon the old man’s death, Schuyler learns that he, too, is Burr’s illegitimate son.
The Interwining of Real & Imaginary Figures
In “Lincoln,” volume II in the series, Schuyler disappears and Vidal centers the novel around two historical figures: the president and his young secretary, John Hay, who narrates. Schuyler reappears very late in “Lincoln” before resuming his own narrative in the third volume, “1876.” Here Schuyler and his daughter hitch their political wagons to the shoo-in presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, and their social fortunes to New York’s budding Astor-based society.
At the beginning of “Empire,” Hay, now President McKinley’s secretary of state, returns as one of Vidal’s central/narrative characters. He does so alongside the fictional Schuyler’s two equally fictional but compelling grandchildren, Caroline and Blaise Sanford. Secretary Hay becomes Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president upon McKinley’s assassination. Blaise becomes William Randolph Hearst’s dilettante protégé. Sister Caroline — a former schoolmate of Eleanor Roosevelt in England — buys the fictional Washington Tribune, where she out-tabloids both Hearst and her jealous brother.
“Hollywood” follows Caroline to California, where she helps pioneer the movie industry (with Hearst). Blaise buys the Tribune and remains in D.C. to savage President Wilson — and back the serenely dim, Republican hopeful, Warren Harding. In the closing novel, “Washington, D.C.,” Blaise presents as an aging, would-be kingmaker frustrated by FDR’s stranglehold on the body politic. The nation’s capital — a malaria-ravaged swampland in “Burr”; a provincial seat of government in “1876”; now, in 1945, nerve center of the world’s first superpower — has changed. But it remains a fascinating backdrop for Vidal’s horde of schemers and climbers. In other words, all the folks who’ve made this country what it is today.
Imbued, as I am, with the arrogant notion that scholarly history is interesting enough (blame the Wesleyan history department), I’ve never been a fan of historical novels. Though I’ve always liked Mary Renault (“The Persian Boy”, “Mask of Apollo”), the genre allows too many liberties. Basically, it’s cheating.
Vidal changed my mind. Well, he didn’t change it… Vidal proves it can be done well, even raised to high art. But good luck finding another author so capable.
Author’s Note: On Other Capables
Ed. September 2014 — So, I found this piece in an online issue of the HaroldHerald, the proto-blog I published via Pagemaker, a Xerox MFM and the U.S. Postal Service in 1994. Disappointed I can’t find the ancient “print” version, as I recall spending a lot of time laying it out to make it look exactly like a NYTimes Book Review page. In any case, it remains an odd mix of fascination and dread to read oneself from 20 years ago, especially as I happen to be rereading “1876” right now.
I back most everything I wrote here, save the last bit. I have, in the ensuing decades, found several historical novelists the equal of Vidal, but only in certain respects. Bernard Cornwell — he of the Sharpe’s Rifles series, set in Napoleonic times; his Arthurian trilogy; and several more multiple-volume depictions (of England in the of time Alfred, France in the middle ages, and even America during the Civil War) — is a thoroughly trustworthy historian and expert yarn-spinner. But he cannot write like Vidal. Few can.
Renault is fabulous but Vidal’s “Julian”, which I read after tapping out the above review, beats Mary in her own classical backyard. Hilary Mantel’s 21st Century series starring Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII (“Wolf Hall” and “Bring up the Bodies” are to be capped by a soon-to-be-released third book) is superb. But she needs a few more under her belt, ideally something from a completely different era, to hang with Vidal. Her very first historical novel, A Place of Greater Safety, tracks the men behind the French Revolution. From birth. It’s very good good but not on the level of Wolf Hall.
The best moments in any good historical novel are when the author introduces and puts to lengthy narrative use juicy historical characters. By that I mean rendering them and their interactions with fictional characters. When done well, this exercise can be thrilling. This might happen a half dozen times in any Cornwell novel. In “1876”, it happens every 15 pages: Grant, Mark Twain, Maine’s own James Blaine, James Garfield, an array of New York newspaper editors and publishers, The Astors, Samuel Tilden, even Chester A. Arthur for chrissakes.
The density of Vidal‘s non-fictional characters is dizzying. He delights in painting familiar icons in ways that deconstruct our modern preconceptions while remaining entirely plausible, not to mention historically accurate. This is some of what makes Mantel such a formidable player in the genre. She similarly packs her novels with historical figures, fascinatingly rendered. It’s something her relatively modern subject matter (and our familiarity with many of her non-fiction characters) allows.
The piece de resistance of any historical novel, I’ve learned, is the author’s note at book’s close. Not all of these are handled the same way, but typically the author details all the research they’ve done beside the liberties he/she may or may not have taken with historical events and personages. Invariably, they are minimal; it’s in the author’s interest to give that impression. Oftentimes they’ll get into their sourcing, their bibliography, for the same reasons. Either way, these notes make clear that extraordinary research required, alongside their abilities as storytellers to integrate that data. In the author’s note for Burr, Vidal dazzles in the service of simplicity:“Everything depicted here is historically accurate; everything the non-fictional characters are quoted to have said was taken directly from primary sources, i.e. their letters, correspondence and memoirs.”
I just skipped ahead last night to the Author’s Note for “1876”. It’s similarly brief. History obliged Vidal to move publication of “Huckleberry Finn,” apparently. He wanted this new classic of American literaturediscussed during Twain’s dinner at Delmonico’s with Schuyler in June 1876. Similarly, the massacre at Little Bighorn happened in July, but word of it didn’t reach back East for several weeks. Vidal wanted it in the air at the Republican convention in July, so he took that liberty. But that’s it. Everything else fits together like a sprawling Roman floor mosaic, the sweep of history accented here and there by bits of zhiny, fictional color.
What I didn’t know in 1994 was that Vidal wrote these books out of order, as it were. “Washington D.C” came first (published in 1967), followed by “Burr”, “1876”, “Lincoln”, “Empire” and “Hollywood”. What I could not have known back then was that he would add a seventh volume, “The Golden Age”, that chronicles America during the Cold War. In this coda, Vidal takes us right up to the year 2000 (the year it was published).
Come the millennium, the original thesis laid out in the very first book and supported throughout the series — that America’s republic, always built on the not particularly reliable or durable foundations of corruption, ambition, scheming and privilege, would with the close of WWII, finally give way to outright empire — had indeed come to pass. “The Golden Age” features the broad cast of historical characters any reader of the Chronicle might expect, plus one that comes as a mind-bending but pleasant surprise: Gore Vidal himself.
Vidal never cottoned to calling this series his American Chronicle. That came from the publisher apparently. He preferred Narratives of Empire. Today, one understands why.
My dad on the 8th green at Nehoiden, right across the street from the house where grew up. It's late November; the greens have been staked for fencing at the first snow. We sprinkled his ashes here, and there's a memorial bench for him just right of this frame, on the 9th tee. There is no headstone in any cemetery for him. This is his spot, for all eternity.
My dad with his dad, the original Harold Gardner Phillips.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (11 August 2014) — I try to write each August about my dad, Harold Gardner Phillips, Jr., as he passed away (all too soon) at the end of this month back in 2011. This exercise is equal parts homage and memory aid, as I suppose one fears these recollections we share as Fathers & Sons, now perfectly strong, will somehow fade with time. This year the jog happened naturally, as today I stand poised at the fulcrum of a generational see-saw: My son Silas goes off to college tomorrow. In turn, the memories rush back re. the day my dad saw me off, out of the nest and into the world.
As is the case with so many stories I’ve shared about my dad, golf plays an intersectional role. This one’s even more fitting because it centers on Ponkapoag Golf Course in Canton, Mass., a municipal track we played dozens of times growing up.
One used to be able to see Ponky from Route 128, the thronging, inner ring road that circles Greater Boston, though methinks ever-maturing trees now obscure that view. Today there are only 27 holes at “Ponky,” but once there were 36 and the course visible from the highway was nothing special. It has been reduce to 9.
The other 18, however, was a Donald Ross design from the 1930s that, despite the rigors of time, high traffic and miniscule maintenance budgeting remained damned sublime.
Fathers & Sons, Drop-offs & Tournaments
My dad and I played Ponky together on a several occasions, but this was mainly a place where he, my mom and other parental figures dropped my friends and me for entire days of golfing adventure. It also served as perennial host to a pair of junior tournaments: The CYO Championship (that’s “Catholic Youth Organization” for those who may not have grown up in Boston, where the Church held such wide-ranging cultural sway) and the New England Junior Championship.
That day I left for college, a cloudy late August morning in 1982, I was scheduled to play a quarterfinal match at the New England Juniors, as I had qualified earlier that week for what stood to be a potentially anti-climactic match-play portion. I had packed our ’78 Dodge Omni that morning with all my stuff. Win or lose, I would decamp for Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., some 100 miles to the southwest, directly from the golf course.
As it happened, I won the match, bettering a kid from Rhode Island named Fred, 3 & 1. I signed my card, informed a quite delighted Fred that I would be withdrawing, told the officials, and walked off to the parking lot. There to my surprise I found my dad, who had just rolled up.
As a kid, my competitive golfing career would never prove particularly extensive. Indeed, this tournament and the CYO the year before were the only two official events I had ever played to that point. Golf was a fall sport at my high school, as was soccer, which took clear precedence. In other words, while my dad had played hundreds of rounds of golf with me through the years, and we maintained a spirited, running match for decades, he had never seen me play a proper tournament match against anyone else.
Pleasant Valley Cameo
One time, in college, he showed up at Pleasant Valley Country Club near Worcester to see me play a collegiate tri-match featuring Wesleyan, Springfield College (I think) and Assumption. I know the latter to be true, for certain, because I ended up facing a guy from Assumption that day named Frank Vana, who would go on to win multiple Massachusetts Amateur crowns. My dad worked near PVCC and he showed up on the 9th or 10th hole, at which point my game imploded. He scurried off after we finished 13, not wanting to karmically cause/witness any further carnage.
For many years, I was never sure what exactly my dad meant to “do” that day in the parking lot at Ponky. We had said our goodbyes that morning, and it wasn’t as though I was going off to war. But today, I can see he probably wanted one last moment with his boy, who would soon leave and return in some way, shape or form, more a man.
I’ve been trying to remember what exactly my dad and I talked about during that moment in the parking lot. I surely went over the match with him, and the curious aspect of my winning but withdrawing. If we got into anything particularly deep, I don’t recall it. Clearly I remember being touched that he had shown up, but there were no tears. I’m pretty sure we shook hands.
See here a relevant excerpt from the eulogy I delivered for him in 2011:
Showing, not Telling
My dad was not a particularly emotive man, not for most of the 40 odd years I had a clear picture of him. Ine time I arrived home from college determined, in the sure and committed way of college students, to simply start hugging him and telling him that I loved him. I had seen other dads do this and been impressed — that a father and son could be so open and physical in their affection for one another. I wanted that for my dad and me, to be honest. So I started out with hugs and, well… the man never really got comfortable with it. It just wasn’t his way. I remember telling him during this same period that I loved him. To some extend, I explained, one is obliged to let people know this is so. We need to verbalize it, to say it plain. He said that wasn’t his way either, that he instead showed people he loved them. I remember thinking, at the time, that this was something of a cop-out.
But the man knew himself. As I grew older, I better recognized the ways he expressed intimacy and let you know how he felt. There are no rules or universalities for these things, I’ve learned, as I myself have grown as old and, in some ways, as wise as he. The more I observed this, over time, I can report that my dad did practice this sort of behavior consistently, with all sorts of people.
The Side-by-Side Experience
I think one of the keys to understanding and appreciating my dad is this: If he enjoyed something, his greatest joy was to share that enjoyment with you. If there was a piece of music that he found thrilling — and the man enjoyed a notably wide musical taste — he wanted you to listen to it and, ideally, derive the same thrill, too. Had he seen something compelling on PBS or C-span, he wanted you to see it, too. If there was food item he had acquired or my mom had made, he wanted you to consume it. Right then. His enthusiasm for this sharing was really quite intimate, almost childlike in its enthusiasm. I might walk into my parents’ home, having not seen him for weeks, and his most deeply held desire was to have you sit down and watch an interview with the historian Gordon Wood, right then, so soon as you put your bag down.
And there was another aspect to this: He wanted you to listen or watch or taste or, to the extent possible, read this stuff WITH you. He wanted to sit right next to you while we watched the Gordon Wood interview, together — so he could pause the recording and discuss it. My dad wanted you to put the earphones on while he would stand right there beside you, grinning giddily, as you listened to some choral piece by Arvo Part. The man would call just to see how far I’d read in a book he had recommended…
I loved my dad but I, like many sons, have fashioned a great deal of my life in response to his. When Silas heads off tomorrow morning, there will be hugs. There will be tears. That said, I expect that whatever I’m feeling at that moment, resembles what my dad felt that day, some 32 years ago, in the parking lot at Ponkapoag.
Silas is flying to Montana tomorrow morning, with his mom. I suppose that if I could practically meet them in Chicago for one last goodbye, I’d do it.
BRUNSWICK, Maine (3 August 2014) — Bald Hill played the Peace Fair here on Brunswick Green Saturday. Our mando player, Ben, arranged the gig. His mother is a German war bride and longtime social justice activist. She administers this event, which annually draws a healthy cross-section of southern Maine’s aged hippie population. In other words, not the place the where one might expect to solve a jazz mystery involving Horace Silver.
This year, to entertain these unreconstructed lefties, we performed a Pete Seeger tribute/sing-along. The crowd was big (for a Maine peace fair, in August) and the weather held off. But the noteworthy development arrived before I had played a note.
Ben’s brother Matt, a gifted pianist, was visiting and sat in. He brought with him a fellow Nutmegger native on sax. They started our set (we followed a five-piece that featured two steel drums) with a four-piece tribute to the recently departed Horace Silver, a jazz name I sorta knew but not really. Altogether appropriately, the song they chose was Silver’s most famous composition, “Peace,” and it quickly transported me.
Horace Silver, in the Evening
During the early 1990s, I worked as the news editor at a couple of daily newspapers in Massachusetts. That life was somewhat nocturnal: I’d arrive at 5 p.m., put the paper on the press at 2 a.m., and go home — unless the newsroom crowd had gathered for very late-night revelry. We were somewhat obliged to socialize together because who else was awake?
Yet even a ridiculous schedule like this one can engender routine. I’d arrive in the newsroom and flip on NPR via WGBH in Boston. The first two hours of the work “day” were a mix of gay banter, serious story planning, photo assessment (from what had been shot that day) and assignment (to be shot that night). As news editor, from this activity, I would formulate and layout the front page/section of two dailies. All this took place with All Things Considered airing in the background, as soundtrack.
At 7 p.m., the banter lessened and things got more down to business. Reporters headed off to meetings or returned from accidents/crime scenes/sporting events to begin filing stories. I would read and edit that content before sending the final layout to the paste-up/press operation a few towns over.
But nothing seriously got done, not at my desk anyway, until 7:04. WGBH aired a jazz program starting each night at 19:00 called “Eric in the Evening”. The show theme was this beautiful piece of jazz that dripped from the transistor radio each night, all on its own, starting at exactly 7 p.m. The routine of its play provided the perfect respite, a quigte zen-influenced moment of regathering before the radio got turned off and we all settleed into the mania of another evening on deadline.
Dripping from the Transistor
I wasn’t always a huge jazz guy. I enjoy a pretty massive cross-section of the genre, though I can see how the influence of Charlie Brown and Vince Guaraldi shaped this particular aspect of my musical taste. Dave Brubeck. Bill Evans. That’s the stuff I’m drawn to apparently: white guys from the late ‘50s and early 60s. Very uncool, I’m afraid. Just the way it is.
I left the Marlboro Enterprise and Hudson Daily Sun in 1992. I never did get the name of that theme music to “Eric in the Evening”. Every couple years it would jump into my brain — not because I’d heard it, but because I’d remember just how resonant and important it was to me, at one time, in my working life. I googled “Eric in the Evening theme” one time, with no luck. For a long time, apparently, Eric Jackson still hosted a jazz show on WGBH radio, but at some point he’d eschewed the regular-theme music thing, opting instead for excerpted bits from that night’s guest or spotlight artist.
Well, I can report without question that “Peace”, was t Eric’s old show theme. I knew it from the moment I heard the opening two measures at the 2014 Peace Fair. Only took me 23 years… And now Eric Jackson has passed away, at 72.
Here is Silver’s original version, from 1959. Here is the Tommy Flanagan version that specifically served as the “Eric in the Evening” theme. Peace out, Mr. Jackson.
It doesn’t matter where MadMen auteur Matthew Weiner picked up the narrative thread when beginning the seventh and final season. Some might have insisted on 1969, to keep the specific-decade ethos in tact — though the award-winning series actually started in the late ‘50s. Others may have argued for 1974, thereby neatly bookending the Dick Nixon Era. I don’t care how the final season might have started, but I have strong feelings how it should have closed.
Fans and critics of MadMen have debated the show’s narrative choices since its debut in 2007. The actual series finale — whereby Don Draper passes over into a 1970s American Milieu by joining an EST retreat in Big Sur — has garnered all sorts of feedback. But still, halfway through Thursday’s 2-hour finale, the show should have leapt forward to a recognizably modern day. Maybe the suit jackets might have seemed a bit oversized, especially through the shoulders. Hairstyles would shift. In keeping with the way other MM seasons have begun, however, it’s not exactly clear what year it is.
What is clear, in this alternate finale of mine, is this:
Sterling Cooper & Partners has survived and thrived, perhaps added a name or two. The agency has taken up residence in chic modern offices high in a glittering Manhattan tower of glass and steel. For 50 minutes of this final hour, in the course of a normal business day, we learn what’s happened to most all the characters who matter, i.e. who remains at the firm, how the hierarchical machinations have shaken out, who’s moved over to or formed competitors, who has leftthis mortal coil, who has divorced and remarried whom, who’s aged well and who hasn’t.
The pacing is pointedly brisk, recalling the Season 3 episode “Shut the Door. Have a Seat,” when our gang reboots the firm. This pacing is important because frankly there’s a lot of ground to cover — for the viewer, absent all these years — and to make clear the agency’s ongoing vitality.
MadMen Finale: Chronological Clues
Indications of the time period dribble out via scene details and workaday conversations at SC&P. The Justice Dept. will no longer seek to break-up Microsoft. The codgers at Sterling Cooper aren’t at all sure, charmingly, what a search engine is. But they do care. They’re courting Netscape, which is jittery because a company called Google has just been awarded US Patent 6,259,999 for the PageRank algorithm used in its search engine.
Bobby Draper has grown up to be a political operative. We see him on TV as chief of staff to Congressman Gary Condit, steadfastly defending a man who would appear to be dying a slow political death while denying an affair with 24-year-old Chandra Levy, now missing for 133 days.
All this catch-up takes place on a single day, a Monday.
The next morning, standing in his Upper East Side apartment, an appropriately aged Don Draper reads the paper. In his stylish breakfast nook, a radio plays in the background: Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, has been assassinated in Takhar Province. Draper’s young wife frankly doesn’t know who that is. She’s the spitting image of Betty Draper. Or, maybe it’s another brunette…
What we all accept without debate: It’s a late-summer day of rare clarity, made real under a bright, blue, cloudless sky. Don emerges from a cab and bumps into a colleague (Peggy? Roger? Dawn?) outside their NYC office tower. They’re all running late for a conference call at 9 a.m. As they hustle inside, the camera pans back from the monolithic revolving door. It reveals, for the first time, that the Sterling Cooper offices are housed inside the World Trade Center.
Sterling Cooper in Flames
Cut immediately to the Sterling Cooper offices burning out of control. Don is knocked out but slowly coming to beside his own desk. He lies amid charred debris that includes a bottle of bourbon, a tumbler and a slide carousel. Low-licking flames and the eerie, reedy hum of steady wind provide the only soundtrack, as several ceiling-to-floor windowpanes have been shattered/knocked out by the impact and subsequent blasts of jet fuel. Scene staging and blocking actively recall MadMen’s seminal Korean War flashbacks.
Don ultimately does regain consciousness. Things are suddenly moving fast again. MM characters dart in and out, to see if Don’s alive, to express ignorance or disagreement as to what has actually happened. They tell him so-and-so is dead, inform him they can no longer stay put. As per usual, they exude a massive, sincere reverence for this man in particular, whom they’re now looking to for decision-making, beside whom they might well die. A group has decided to ignore the “stay put” advice of emergency personnel on the ground — they’re leaving, and they’re taking the stairs. Draper says he’ll be right there.
Alone now, he grabs the bourbon, pours himself a drink and downs it. As he takes one last look around the wreckage that was his office/firm/life, the episode-ending music begins (“Be My Baby,” by Ronnie Spector and the Ronnettes). Don walks past the camera toward what we assume is the door. Instead, he walks to the open window and calmly steps out.
No need to show the trag-iconic footage of that businessman falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11. It is immediately recalled. It provides new meaning to the animated version of that footage we’ve seen at the start of this and every other MadMen episode, including the final one.
Here’s all I have to say about the advent of FootGolf: “It’s about freakin’ time.” Anything that essentially combines my two favorite participatory sports — and knee-high argyle socks — has my full attention and support.
I knew there was something out there like this, but until I read this piece, I had no idea it was so well developed, and so intrinsically awesome. As a devotee of disc golf, I embrace the game in all its alternative forms. But this one takes it to a new level. There’s even a rule book, to be consulted in the event one’s approach hits the pin and ricochets backward into a lake. (Of course, if that should happen, the ball would be floating on the surface and could presumably be retrieved, prior to a legal drop).
Soccer and golf have a long and distinguished history together. There’s the dreaded foot wedge, of course. And there was that time Alan Shearer played through our group at Gleneagles. I’d love to see him hole out with a proper foot wedge and run the length of the hole with his signature hand held high.
Check out more information here. There’s apparently a FootGolf facility in Las Vegas, but that’s awfully far away. If anyone out there knows where this activity can be pursued here in New England, I’m all ears. After all, there was a FootGolf World Cup held in Hungary in 2012. I now have my sights set on 2016.
Raised to be aggressively “skeptical of consumerism in general and advertising in particular,” I have, throughout my adult years, embraced this credo and further developed it. I dutifully change channels during commercial breaks and flip right past magazine ads, for example. I diligently disable any and all online pop-ups. I watch on television virtually nothing that hasn’t already been DVR’d, allowing me to buzz right through any and all consumer appeals. When I am obliged to confront an advertisement, I delight in letting loose upon it all my powers of sarcasm and mockery. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a single instance where I was moved to purchase anything on the basis of its formal advertisement.
Anything, that is, except special edition burgers mongered by fast food giants.
Much as I’m loath to admit it, I am quite helpless in the face of fast-food burger innovators and their army of propagandists.
I recognize this is for the major character flaw it is. Perhaps by writing about this phenomenon, this innermost shame, I hope to overcome it. Until that time, I am putty in the hands of Burger King each and every time it trots out a special-edition Whopper.
The King and his competitors are a sophisticated bunch and it’s not merely the power of their marketing. They spend years in secret labs researching and building into their products the neuroscientific triggers designed to elicit in unsuspecting consumers, like me, the desired Pavlovian response. When it comes to new burgers, I am essentially their Munchurian Candidate.
Ads for existing burger products don’t have the same effect. You could pimp Big Macs to me all day long and I wouldn’t be moved. I know from Big Macs, and I’m over them.
However, when the burger establishment pitches me a new, highly accoutered beefy morsel, I MUST TRY IT.
Intimates of mine may well read this and say, “Well, Hal is famously enthusiastic about all things edible.” And this is true. The same parents who so well prepped me to resist consumerism also imparted to me, by nature and nurture, an overdeveloped appreciation of worthy foodstuffs. But while I’m saddled with an unnatural love of pizza, for example, I don’t see an ad for some new Domino’s product and feel I must rush out to buy it. I don’t notice a fancy new offering at my local pizzeria and feel any immediate urge to sample it. Introduction of a new chicken-based sandwich anywhere leaves me essentially unmoved.
The burger situation, however, is anomalous and insidious. Something about cow flesh reaches my involuntary subconscious on a primal, unsettling level.
I recently ran across the above ad — for something Jack in the Box is calling the Hot Mess. Am I the only one intrigued by the mere name of this thing? We don’t even have Jack in the Box in Maine, or anywhere in New England, so far as I know. Still, I am plotting my next trip to the West Coast where I can cram a Hot Mess down my pie-hole forthwith.
Methinks it’s the special edition aspect that truly breaks down my fragile defenses. Homer Simpson proved famously spellbound by the Ribwich, a McRib-like concoction whose periodic availability (“for a limited time only!”) he met with unbridled enthusiasm. Indeed, Homer ultimately followed the Ribwich around the country, from city to city, like a Grateful Dead fan.
Thankfully, I don’t have the need to eat these things over and over, but I must try them. When Dairy Queen unleashed its Flamethrower burger — hot sauce, jalapenos, pepper jack and bacon — I naturally went out and sampled one straightaway. Okay, several.
I get over such things in due course, but it’s the initial curiosity that gets to me. If they’re equipped with bacon and/or jalapenos? Well, it’s “Katy bar the door…”
I’m a Burger King guy, because I like underdogs and their fries have always been superior, but mainly because their menus have routinely featured more bacon-bedecked items than McDonalds’, or any other competitor’s. Naturally, it didn’t take me long to sample their new “Angry” Whopper, so called because of the jalapenos, complemented by bacon and onion rings. Formidable!
Wendy’s Baconator combined the same time-honored lure of cured meats with another clever name. Of course I’m gonna try me one of those. If they ever figure out a way to work a fried egg in there, I’ll be among the first in line.
The value proposition is another trigger. Much has been written about the obesity of underprivileged Americans due to the remarkable affordability of fast food. A clear connection there, in my view. For the pure delivery of calories (worthless calories, but calories nonetheless), $7 goes a very long way. No, I don’t need a second Whopper — but if you’re offering me one for a dollar? I’m likely to be persuaded by that, even if I’m not hungry. Two Egg McMuffins for $3? Only a fool would pass that up.
I’m already over the recently unveiled Angry Whopper. Been there, done that. But this Hot Mess thing… It’s in my head. I’m headed to California in April. I’m intrigued enough that I may well bypass the SoCal delights of In ‘n Out Burger.
The regional nature of some chains does figure prominently in this equation, so far as I’m concerned anyway. I’m participate in an NBA fantasy league, so I watch a lot of NBA TV, where they merely co-opt regional cable feeds from, say, Sacramento, and share it with the nation. The commercials there naturally feature West Coast brands like Carl’s Jr. or Jack in the Box — that’s how I discovered the Hot Mess. When I first started traveling in Florida, I had an uncontrollable urge to investigate what Checkers had to offer. In North Carolina, how can one travel around the state and not drive-thru at Biscuitville?
In Kalamazoo, Mich., from whence my wife hails, I was, for a time, fascinated by something called Hot ‘n Now, a local chain that serves only drive-thru patrons from small, purple, A-framed establishments in mall parking lots. “Oooh… What’s that?” I cooed to her the first time we passed one.
“Ugh. They’re disgusting,” she reported.
“Well, yeah. Naturally. But we’re going to need to turn around.”
Built to Spill, rockin' The State Theater in Portland, Maine on Aug. 30, 2012
Built to Spill, rockin’ The State Theater in Portland, Maine on Aug. 30, 2012
The path I followed from first discovering Built to Spill, back in 2002, to my place front and center at Portland’s State Theater last Thursday night is nothing if not post modern. The way we find and consume musical media today seems hilariously random to this late 40something, raised and educated in such matters on 45s and LPs, college radio, live shows, mixed tapes and the ever-vital personal loaning of vinyl.
Here’s how I went from Built to Spill ignoramus to devoted fan: Early in the millennium I dabbled in Limewire, a web-based, Napster-like file-sharing community where one could search band and song names for download. The first thing I did, upon appreciating the enormity of what Limewire enabled, was reacquire most every 45 I had possessed in the 1970s (this effort yielded some real gems: It never rains in California, by Albert Hammond; Brand New Key, by Melanie; Rubber Band Man, by the Spinners).
The next phase moved me to sift through contemporary artists I knew way too little about, folks like Ben Folds, Weakerthans, Fountains of Wayne and Dressy Bessy. Soon it became clear that individual treasure troves from all manner of music fans — meaning those thousands who had digitized their vinyl, all their live bootlegged tapes, and transferred all their CDs and random mp3s to the computer — were available, too, via Limewire file-sharing.
This meant older bands and tracks were fair game.
Now, I came of age musically in the 1980s, or, I should say I came into my own at that time. College, an all-vinyl and mixed-tape experience, ended for me in the spring of 1986, when I moved to Boston and there luxuriated in the Hub’s potent alt/indie scene. There were several bands we followed in earnest, taking in live shows at TT the Bears, The Rat, Club III, The Channel and Nightstage, among others. One band, Big Dipper, came and went all too quickly, and so, 15 years later, I was eager to see what live performances and otherwise obscure files I might procure via Limewire, to augment or otherwise fill out my own digital library.
Yet every time I searched Big Dipper, I got nothing. Nothing, that is, but a song entitled Big Dipper, by this band called Built to Spill, about which I knew nothing. This happened a couple separate times — because it was worth Limewiring intermittently on the same subject; one never knew who might be online to share files at any particular time — before curiosity finally overcame me. I downloaded the BTS version of this song Big Dipper. Listen to that fateful tune here.
Well. These guys were awesome. More specific searches and downloads revealed just the sort of alternative rock I like best, a mix of Dinosaur Jr.’s driving garage sound, Pavement’s unpredictable song structures, the Pixies’ rumbling melodies, and Neil Young’s wistful lyric style and guitar godliness (a goodly portion of all that thanks to BTS front man supreme Doug Martsch, who gives an interesting interview here). I reveled in this totally new band and the dozens of songs I had come into, each one as interesting as the last.
The weird thing was, this band had pretty much come and gone by 2004! Or so I thought. They’d enjoyed their heyday in the ‘90s and appeared broken up, diverted into side projects or put on permanent hold due to solo efforts from Martsch. Or so I learned by reading up on them online.
Built to Spill remained a self-contained obsession. My son Silas adopted them whole-heartedly but hardly anyone else I knew had heard of them or cared much to get on board. I desperately wanted to see them live but figured I was 5 years late to the party.
But then, as happens almost continuously nowadays, the band reformed and started touring again. I saw them at Citi on Landsdowne Street in Boston circa 2006, then again in 2010 at the Paradise. When they scheduled Portland earlier this year, I snapped up two tickets for Silas and myself. Last April, in Seattle, we visited the Experience Music Project museum at the base of the Space Needle. Great freakin’ museum. Spent three hours in there and greatly enjoyed the super-expansive, highly-interactive exhibit on grunge, which included a particular exhibit on the regional scenes across the Northwest — including Boise, from whence BTS hails. Did you know Martsch was also in Treepeople? Probably not.
The Aug. 30 show at The State was predictably thrilling and the less-than-full-capacity crowd, while it might preclude a return engagement, enabled great viewing from a small riser, center stage, just 25 feet from Doug. We stood next to a guy who could not have been 30 years of age, so I asked him how he got into this band from the ‘90s. He was a metal guy. Someone had recommended Built to Spill, and he YouTubed them. The rest was history.
YouTube didn’t exist in 2002, of course. Had it, I might have come by Big Dipper and ultimately BTS with more alacrity. But as they say, better late than never.
