June « 2011 « Black Marks on Wood Pulp / by Corey Vilhauer

Let me just say something about the lockout before it gets bogged down in awfulness

June 30th, 2011

We’re only a few hours from lock-out, and something’s already bothering me about the owners’ position on the NBA collective bargaining agreement. Thankfully, the Salt Lake Tribune went ahead and said it out loud. From “Shutdown: NBA Owners Lock Out Players.”

“Parity and improved competition are also at the heart of the league’s desire for change. Superstars such as LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony controlled the 2010-11 fates of their former clubs, dictating where they wanted to play – Miami, New York – and damaging the futures of franchises in Cleveland and Denver. In addition, most small-market teams lack a realistic chance to win the NBA championship before the season even starts, while several clubs have either been sold or put on the market during the past year.”

There’s a lot wrong with that paragraph. But let’s look at two reasons.

Reason One: If small markets are hurt by their team, they sure aren’t showing it.

I don’t have any sympathy for small market teams, especially not in a league where profit-sharing allows small market teams to ride piggyback on merchandise sales of its larger market brethren, and ESPECIALLY not in a league where a salary cap dictates how much you can spend on your team.

To say most small-market teams lack a realistic chance to win the NBA championship – and to assume that large markets are given some kind of free “get to the second round for free” pass – is pretty short-sighted.

Just a reminder: the smallest markets in basketball last year were:
1. Memphis – Bad for some years, fantastic last year, filled with young talent and ready to make a leap.
2. New Orleans – Injury riddled and still reeling from some hurricane.
3. San Antonio – Four championships in the past twenty years.
4. Salt Lake City – A power through the 90s, a upper-tier team until recently
5. Milwaukee – Pretty awful.

And the five biggest non-NBA markets:
1. Tampa/St. Petersburg
2. St. Louis
3. Pittsburgh
4. San Diego
5. Hartford

So, the “small market” argument says that, if the five smallest markets were replaced by the five biggest non-markets, those teams would suddenly gain some kind of advantage? Would the San Diego Spurs or St. Louis Bucks suddenly be better?

While we’re at it, let’s look at the five biggest market teams:
1. New York – One playoff team in the past decade
2. Los Angeles – One team with tons of titles: the other with tons of lawsuits
3. Chicago – The best team in the world in the 90s, woefully underperforming through the 00s and until recently.
4. Washington – Snicker.
5. Boston – They’re good now. But remember the Antoine Walker years?

Reason Two: The league didn’t force someone like Dan Gilbert to purchase or create a basketball team in a place like Cleveland.

Last I checked, there was no dictate that allowed the NBA to force an owner to buy a team in a small market for more than it is worth. On the contrary – owning a basketball gives some people SUCH a hard-on that they’re willing to overspend.

If I buy a Mini Cooper, and I live in the mountains, I don’t have the right to complain about how my small engine makes it too difficult to travel over a mountain pass. And I certainly don’t have the right to expect the state to tear down the mountain to make a more level road.

You can’t blame your 400 million dollar purchase of a sports team – and the subsequent inability to sell said 400 million dollar sports team – on the players.

One More Thing

LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony controlled the 2010-2011 fates of their former clubs by dictating where they wanted to play, eh?

Well. Kind of.

Carmelo Anthony improved the future of the Nuggets. By requesting a trade, Carmelo guaranteed that the Nuggets would receive SOMETHING for their superstar, as we now see he had no desire to stick around in Denver. And LeBron, sure. He’s a dick. That’s easy. But he also worked the free agent market the way he could. The way any of us are allowed to when we want a new job.

So did Kobe Bryant, back in 2006. Remember that? When he flirted with signing with the Clippers until Lakers management traded Shaquille O’Neal for next to nothing and – coincidentally – signed with the Lakers the next day? Now THAT was a jerk move. But, that being said, the question is still worth asking: why are we blaming players for the desire to switch jobs?

Parity is a fallacy. Parity is designed to allow bad general managers the chance to make bigger mistakes with smaller consequences. Parity hurts America, and it promotes communism and clubs seals and forces babies to become prostitutes. It gives Clippers fans hope that, despite a history of horribly managed basketball decisions (very very LARGE MARKET decisions, by the way) that they have a chance.

Argue about player salaries and cash and lockouts all you want. Just don’t position things like the players have some kind of upper hand. It takes two people to sign a contract, after all.

On collaboration

June 24th, 2011

There are two distinct ways of dealing with cross-company industry collaboration – specifically, the collaboration of ideas. You either accept it with open arms, gleefully sharing insights and blog posts and other industry-furthering information, or you hold it to your chest, using it as intellectual leverage.

When I worked in the traditional advertising agency world, we held everything to our chest. We couldn’t post extensive portfolios because we didn’t want our competitors to discover the companies we worked with. We were vague in our methodologies because we didn’t want to give up our tricks. We treated industry colleagues with a measure of wariness.

That’s the old way.

The new way is one of collaboration, understanding that as others make breakthroughs and discover new tricks, we are allowed to follow those breakthroughs and discover our own.

I recently threw an email out to content strategists around the nation. Some of them are big-time. Some of them have written books. And I asked for an important chunk of their time in the form of a deep question about one of the discipline’s core tasks.

I asked for a lot and expected a few terse one-line responses.

On the contrary. Nearly everyone responded within hours, each with an intense, thoughtful and impassioned response. Lots of words. Lots of wonderful nuggets of information. Lots of awesome.

There was no shielding of competitive knowledge, no insistence upon vetting the question, no ego, no NOTHING; just great information from great people who want to further the field.

It’s not just in content strategy, either. You see it in small design shops. You see it at un-conferences. Web is an industry fueled by constant change, which makes the ability to share ideas and use those ideas to make cool things one of the most important skills a professional can have.

I’m still amazed at how open things are. The egos are smaller. The ideas are fresher. The cross-pollination is natural and welcome.

We all stand on the backs of those who came before us. The real difference is whether we use this height to pull others up, or if we’re content with kicking them back down.

Editing, right before your eyes

June 17th, 2011

So I read this six paragraph review from Kill Screen on Infinity Blade, and it was good, and I liked it, and I thought “what an interesting way to position an iOS game,” and then I clicked the button: Begin Bloodline 2.

And then, I gasped.

Because here it is. The power and the potential of online content, pulling you in, tweaking your imagination. Changing. Right there. Changing as you watch.

Even more than the tech mumbo jumbo, though: this is the first time I’ve seen an article tackle the most important part of the writing process: the process ITSELF. Much as the game provides an opportunity to grow and learn from your mistakes, the article slowly grows through revisions, insight and experience, becoming more refined RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU AS YOU WATCH.

That’s pretty great, you guys. Pretty f’n great.

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Web, Writing

Fear of death

June 13th, 2011

Fourteen days ago, I began preparing for a vacation to Idaho, where my grandmother lives and where, for two weeks every year, I wish I lived.

Thirteen days ago, my mother told me that my grandmother wasn’t doing very well. She was very sick. She sounded awful.

Twelve days ago, I concluded that I was no longer going on vacation. I was travelling to say goodbye to my grandmother.

I was wrong. Thankfully, blessedly wrong.

1.

In January 2006, my family – mother, brother, Kerrie and me – flew to Idaho to spend a surprise post-Christmas week with my grandfather. We knew why we were really going, though: my grandfather had lung cancer, which had spread into his brain. We were travelling to spend time with him before he was gone.

This came just five months after Kerrie and I had made the same trip – a vacation this time. At that time, the cancer was still in its infancy, and my grandfather was actively going through treatment, his nurses confident in his recovery, my family positive that we’d make it through the ordeal.

The shift from summer to winter saw my grandfather grow worse. Where he was once full of life – sick, pained, but still in good spirits – he was now tired and weak. We celebrated the holiday. We hung tight as he became sicker, his lucidness beginning to wane from day to day, and we hoped for a miracle.

A week later, he was gone.

2.

I have never been one to dwell on death. I know that my time will come when my time comes, that there is little I can do to stop the inevitability of death, and all I can do is hope that it comes much later than sooner. That doesn’t change one simple fact, though: I’m scared of it.

So when my grandmother went in for testing, I wasn’t ready to admit it. When that lump appeared, I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it. When that diagnosis came back – that it had been removed, and we’re all just waiting to make sure it worked, and that she should be alright but we really don’t know – I wasn’t comfortable.

The uncertainty was awful.

And then, she got sick. Wouldn’t leave her chair. Ran out of energy after just a few hours.

Suddenly, everything became so urgent. Suddenly, I found myself dwelling on death.

3.

Turns out, my grandmother is going to be okay. As far as we know, right now.

Over this last week, we saw my grandmother’s color return. She didn’t leave the house except to get tests and results, but those results were positive. She still sat in her bedroom, but so did we. And at times, we didn’t. At times, we convened around the dining room table. Like we always have. Like we always will.

She was still tired, but she was there. THERE. That’s all she needed, too: to be there, with us, cracking the same jokes, living the same life, bringing us together as a family as she’s always done, even when the family didn’t want to be brought together at all.

I pulled out of the driveway without tears. Not because I fought them back, but because I knew everything was going to be okay.

As far as we know. Right now.

4.

My grandfather never really left us, it seems. His ashes, encased in a beautiful wooden urn with a burned-in image of the Tetons, still sit on my grandmother’s china cabinet next to the ashes of his dog, Darby. She’s been unable to bury either box. They simply mean too much.

He never really left us in the spiritual sense, as well. His stories still live on and his presence still surrounds the valley. The small engine shop he owned in Jackson – now known simply as the last location of a failed art gallery – still features the same antique gas pump as a decade ago. The two houses he built for himself and my grandmother – one on each side of the Teton pass – still stand as reminders of his skill.

And his memory lives on, expanding as we drive through the valley, suffocating my fear of death, helping me understand that, as hippie-dippy as it sounds, we all live on in those we’ve influenced, and that there’s no point in focusing on death.

Death is simply the point where life ends. And up until that point, life is life. Life is only life.

After that point, life is the only thing we remember.

5.

We don’t go to those who are dying to say goodbye, because goodbye doesn’t need to be said face-to-face. Instead, we go to celebrate life. We go to spend time with those we love, regardless of the outcome.

This past week, it turns out, I didn’t say goodbye to my grandmother. Quite the opposite, actually. I spent a week wondering how I had jumped the gun, how I had assumed the end was near when the end most certainly isn’t near and I was a damned fool to believe that the end even mattered.

My grandmother may have twenty more years in her. Or not. We don’t know.

No one knows.

We do know that she’s getting better. That she has a very curable form of cancer, and that she could be healthy in no time.

That, as long as she’s living in the valley that raised her – a valley that she, in turn, has helped shape – she’s alive, and we can’t focus on anything but being alive, because there simply isn’t anything else.

Fear of death be damned.

Comments: 4

Issues Considered: Family, Grandpa Boyer, On..., Travel

My favorite music year: 1997

June 8th, 2011

There’s no originality in calling 1997 my favorite year in music. Not since the A.V. Club’s Josh Modell did so back in February with a top-5 list that will look eerily familiar to mine, and not since a few weeks back, when Questionable Content pushed out a comic arguing for the cause, citing many of the same albums.

There’s a reason for that, of course: 1997 was a fertile time for independent records, standing in the middle of music’s last pre-Napster generation, when being independent meant being under the radar and, by association, free from pop-chart co-opting. This was Modest Mouse before “Float On”; post-punk/emo before the skinny jeans; Radiohead before their guitars were stolen on their 1998 World Tour.

(That’s what happened, right?)

For me, 1997 was life changing on an entirely different level. I graduated from high school and went to college. I lived on my own and began to break away. Post-punk wasn’t a secret, by any means, but it was what I used to separate myself from the rest of Marshall’s resident collegians, their country-tinged pick-ups reminding me more of high school than of the rich and storied halls of academia.

So while Puff Daddy made millions on Notorious B.I.G.’s death, I rocked out as some of emo’s most important albums were released: Promise Ring’s Nothing Feels Good, the first Get Up Kids EP Woodson and follow up full-length Four Minute Mile, Cursive’s Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes (a raw and brilliant introduction to Omaha’s finest, I might add). And while Elton John made millions on Princess Diana’s death, I grasped the sudden resurgence of hardcore with 1997’s Further (Guilt), Progression Through Unlearning (Snapcase) and Eightpennygalvinized from Sioux Falls’ own Floodplain.

This was all fine and good. These were the bands I already listened to, the music I brought with me from high school. This was fantastic music, but it was also typical. For me, at least.

See, at some point in high school (as many of us did) I had jettisoned the idea of listening – or liking – anything resembling mainstream.

“NOT cool,” I said.

“NO WAY,” I screamed.

Not a CHANCE you’d walk in and see some point of weakness, as if my chain necklace and Less Than Jake t-shirt refused to hold court next to ANYTHING released on a major label.

And then: OK Computer.

Because, I mean, it was good. It was GOOD.

I heard “Paranoid Android” and fell in love. I couldn’t get enough. The video – THE VIDEO! – was SO good, and I ran to Sam Goody and I bought the SHIT out of that CD and I listened to it and it was all so fantastic and, seriously, I just forgot it all: the chain necklace, the Less Than Jake t-shirt, the reasons behind forging such a singular view of music.

I embraced the mainstream. Kind of. Almost.

1997 was the year that what was once called “alternative” had become too big to contain, its form lurching along as it pulled in sub-genre after sub-genre, like a net overfilled with bottom-feeders. Weighed down by itself, it split. Ben Folds Five released Whatever and Ever Amen and no one knew where it was supposed to go. The Foo Fighters brought us their best in The Colour and the Shape, and we couldn’t figure out if it was rock or alternative or something different.

Mainstream had developed a sub-mainstream – a super-independent track, if you will – that brought to mind the early 80s, with its popular-but-still-quirky new wave and its garage-y Athens bands and its punk flag-wavers, but with an understanding that making it to MTV no longer meant what it used to mean.

It became okay to be independent. It became a goal, not a consequence – enough that even major label bands like Radiohead brought success down to the indie-rock masses.

From this split came music that I didn’t even know about. I was a young pseudo-punker from the Midwest – I had no idea that in the future I’d fall in love with some of the year’s best indie records; that, 14 years in the future, I’d place 1997’s Perfect From Now On and The Lonesome Crowded West in high esteem, or that I’d somehow become some weird Ween fanatic and argue that their 1997 release, The Mollusk, shows the band at the peak of their musical ability.

Some of my favorites were just a year away. Braid had begun recording Frame and Canvas. Jets to Brazil had formed. Sunny Day Real Estate re-formed. The blank recordable compact disc was introduced. Other favorites – Texas is the Reason the most notable – broke up.

The nation’s musical taste even died a little, as we managed to put Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Hanson’s “Mmmbop” atop the charts.

In the end, though, it was my musical awakening that contributes to 1997’s importance. It was a fantastic year for releases, but it was also the right time for me to make changes in the way I listened to music.

I was on my own. I was making my own decisions (though I was barely making my 8 am class) I was struggling to find my balance. It was all fueled by music. Music kept me tied to my friends, and my home. It kept me entertained. It kept me on the road, from Mankato to Minneapolis to Omaha, my schedule cleared for nothing but shows and new CDs and a completely open mind.

It’s cheesy to say that music provided the soundtrack to my senior year of high school, or that it helped shape my first year in college.

Still though. That happened. Soundtrack, life shaping, all of it.

And it was all great. All of it.

Comments: 3

Issues Considered: Music, The Top...

This is Spinal Tap: IMDB’s special treatment

June 7th, 2011

If there’s any doubt as to IMDB.com’s dedication to it’s users, it should be erased by this entry for This is Spinal Tap.

Because those stars? They go to ELEVEN.

This is Spinal Tap on IMDB

Certain films foster a certain level of fanaticism: Monty Python, Star Wars, Spinal Tap, among hundreds. IMDB not only acknowledges this fanaticism, but also takes part in it, and that is beyond awesome.

Via @gadgetopia.