Dear Experts: Quiet Please, I'm Watching the Game

            Nearly a full year has passed since I moved to Southern Indiana. I decided to do so without the benefit of satellite TV or cable in my new place. Originally, this decision was met with skepticism. Most people who knew me said I wouldn’t last a month or two without it. Their lack of confidence usually centered around my inability to exist without my sports channels.

            This was a valid point. I knew that between Hulu.com and Netflix I could see just about everything I wanted to as far as TV series went, but I am (and most likely always will be) a sports nut. So how would I do without the ESPN channels, Comcast Sports Chicago, MLB TV, Versus and the 30 or so other regular stops on my Directv settings? After all, I watched SportsCenter almost daily, TiVo’d “Pardon the Interruption” and spent hours watching whatever they wanted to put on the MLB network.

            Almost a year later, I have to say I am still functioning. I have shown no major withdrawal symptoms and am in fact leading a normal life. In fact, I enjoy sports more now than I did before, and in a quarter of the time. Let me explain.

            Seeing live sports on the internet is fairly easy. ESPN3.com shows live events from the ESPN networks and a lot of events that don’t make TV. The rest I can find other places on the web. I do pay for the MLB and NBA online packages to watch games, but those add up to a grand total of three months or so of Directv, so over the course of a year I come out way ahead. Soccer can be picked up in about a hundred places, as can the NFL. Seeing games and events live is just as easy as it was when I had the satellite.

            So where do I save all this time and still enjoy sports more? By only watching live events, I’ve saved my ears hours of battering from all the chatter.

            It wasn’t until I was away from these channels for a while that I really noticed it. I’d say it was about halfway through the NFL season last year. I remember being in my gym, which has TVs scattered around the walls, with the TV in the free weight area always tuned to ESPN. I looked up and saw one of the many editions of SportsCenter on it. The TV was on mute but as ESPN viewers know you can follow the stories with the crawls and side-of-the-screen graphics ESPN seems to love so much. The big topic today was Player X on Team X had  “called out” his teammates by saying they weren’t playing hard enough. This came from one sentence the player had said during one interview after one game. ESPN decided this Shakespearean moment of betrayal necessitated an entire segment and three “experts” to fully grasp the enormity of the situation. The experts discussed whether player X had “lost his teammates” and whether player X should be traded, and where the team would go from there (and I could tell even on mute since the graphics read, in turn “HAS X LOST HIS TEAMMATES?” “SHOULD PLAYER X BE TRADED?” and “WHERE DOES TEAM X GO FROM HERE?”).

            Why am I calling the player X and referring to the team as Team X? Because I don’t have the slightest hope of remembering which player on which team caused this moment of panic in the ESPN studios. Because, as you may have already guessed, in the grand scheme of the season, absolutely none of this mattered. The team didn’t collapse, the other players on the team didn’t even bother to comment as they knew this was a flippant response right after a frustrating loss, and it didn’t actually mean anything. Another reason is that ESPN does this type of overkill coverage of meaningless stuff all the time, and after a while these alleged “turning point” moments all blend together and proceed to travel in one ear and swiftly out the other.

            Still, SportsCenter has hours of programming time to fill, and as I watched the side scroll (which lists the topics coming up that will be discussed) I realized just how much pure fluff goes into sports coverage on TV. It’s hours and hours of “experts” speculating endlessly and making meaningless predictions. None of these people are held remotely accountable for what they say. They contradict themselves day to day without anyone questioning them about it. Their constant predictions are not accompanied by any data on how their past predictions have fared (and believe me they all could have data a mile long if they wanted it since “who will win the X division in X sport” is one of their go-to time wasters).  In fact, so much chatter goes by so quickly it’s almost impossible for a viewer to keep track of it all, which may in fact be the point. It’s simply distraction from the fact that they don’t have enough real show to last an hour, and if they admitted that, well then you wouldn’t be around to watch the ads.

            I’m dubious about the quality of these predictions and analysis anyway, mostly because it’s given by a parade of suit-clad ex-coaches who were fired for not knowing enough about how to win in their particular sport in the first place, or retiree coaches and players picking up a paycheck for tossing out a couple of clichés a few times a week. Their televised shouting matches that pass for pregame shows or expert commentary mean nothing. It’s all just air. And I find I enjoy sports without these bozos clogging up my ear canals.

            I still catch some of these shows when visiting home or a friend’s place and it’s remarkable how often I’ll see them making dire predictions and speaking of how someone has lost their touch or how one victory or loss by a certain team means an entire division will be in upheaval and say to myself, “they’re calling that a big deal?”

            By only watching the live events and reading the occasional wrap from the Chicago Tribune site, I simply enjoy what’s happening on the field of play. I’m not bogged down with phony outrage or mindless speculation. I just watch what’s happening and if something strikes me, I form my own opinion about it. Sports are supposed to be fun, and the “paralysis by analysis” style of “breaking down” (another irritating sports phrase) the minutiae was taking some of that away from me. I just didn’t realize it until I removed myself from it.  

            It has also added hours to my weeks as I don’t spend time sifting through these shows. I’ve read more books and done more writing (it’s funny to me how often early drafts of blog posts are written in the evening hours when I’d usually be watching SportsCenter and PTI). I’d call that’s a pretty good trade-off.

            So sports fans, give it a try sometime. Skip the pregame and postgame shows and hang out with a friend, read a book or listen to some good music. You’d be surprised how much more enjoyable the actual games can be. 

Summer Reading - When I Can Concentrate Anyway

            Things have been pretty heavy on this blog lately, with posts about my eye and my impending layoff. I thought I’d keep it a little lighter today.

It took me a little longer than usual to get through “The Economist” this past weekend at the bookstore. Apparently it was “Take Your Screaming Toddler to Barnes & Noble” night. I had no idea. That, combined with a guy in the cafe with an abnormally booming voice made it a little difficult. I don’t want to complain too much as it’s a coffee shop and not a library, so it’s fine to talk, but it was weird. When the guy left the rest of us actually exchanged looks and raised eyebrows. He wasn’t raising his voice or anything, the sucker just carried.

            It’s normally fairly quiet in there. People peck away at research papers and dissertations on laptops, others play chess, groups of teens sit together at a table and…well, they just seem to text more than anything else. Many times the whirring of the cappuccino machine is about the only sound. Oh well, the appearance of a few loud kids wasn’t about to deter me.

            Anyway, I have managed to knock a few things off my reading list lately so I thought I’d share.

        

          “Dethroning the King”: I came across this one in the business section, but it turned out to be a story of a father and son whose dysfunctional relationship and clashing personalities led to the unthinkable – the venerable American icon Anheuser-Busch company being sold to Brazilian brewing giant InBev.

            The father is August Busch III, who pushed is own father out of the top spot and proceeded to make Budwesier not just part of the fabric of St. Louis but also the dominant beer in the country. He also trusted absolutely no one, and created a free-spending and insular culture at Anheuser-Busch that made it vulnerable when the beer business began thinking globally.

            Eventually, August III reluctantly hands the reigns over to his son, August IV (known either affectionately or derisively as The Fourth) and then spends the next year and a half undermining him.  The culture clashes between the tightfisted policies of InBev and the open-checkbook style of operating used by Anheuser-Busch (August III flew his own helicopter to work every day) make for interesting reading. The story of how a hapless August IV tried to keep his father from pulling the rug from under him, but never really mustering up the will to get in the trenches of boardroom warfare show how the apple can sometimes roll very far away from the tree indeed.

            What struck me was how close the company came to heading off InBev at the pass. Anheuser-Busch’s flirtation with Modelo (the makers of both Corona and Modelo beers) would have saved the company, but the castle walls had been built too high to see daylight. Soon after, InBev stormed the gates and one of the great American companies was sold.

            This book isn’t as salacious as James B. Stewart’s “DisneyWar,” but it is an interesting story of how an American icon can fall, and just how fast it can all happen.

“Moneyball”: You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this book, which a movie studio is betting on as they’re doing a film version of it starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. I saw a trailer for the movie and it made me want to go back and read the book again.  Baseball is the setting for this non-fiction book by Michael Lewis, who has written some of the more engaging business books of the past few years. Lewis has a talent for taking the complicated numbers of baseball and the business world and making them more understandable. It’s less about baseball than a story of a maverick thinker who bucks decades of tradition. Moneyball focuses on Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, who built a low-budget major league team that won by turning the conventions of baseball on its ear.

Beane didn’t invent the system, which he readily admits. That evolved from the sabremetrics movement led by Bill James, but Beane was the first to put it into practice in the majors. The force of Beane’s personality is entertaining too, as he comes off as a smart but annoyingly smug guy, always supremely confident that he is the smartest man in the room. Beane even has a fatalistic complex about himself as the poor tortured artist whose work is unappreciated. Still, his theories on why traditional baseball scouting and stats are inherently flawed, and what he did to ignore a century’s worth of conventional wisdom and succeed is an intriguing story.  

           

            “Front Porch Prophet”: This novel by Raymond Atkins tells the story of two friends in a sleepy Georgia town whose lives are altered in quick succession. A.J. finds himself unemployed, while his best friend Eugene finds out he’s dying. While it sounds like the setting of a tragedy, this book is actually very funny. Atkins writes in a breezy style, using narrative flashbacks to flesh out his characters, all of which have more depth than you anticipate at the beginning. These are generally likeable people going through some hard times with a sense of humor and a strong will. It certainly made me laugh more than just about any book I’ve read in the last couple of years, and that humor makes the difficulties the characters experience all the more heartfelt.

            This is a strong first effort at a full-length novel from Atkins, who writes a humor column for a few regional publications in the South. I look forward to reading more of his work.

“Dead or Alive”: This is one of two Tom Clancy novels that have popped out in the last few months. It’s a bit of a surprise as Clancy hadn’t written a fiction book since 2003’s disappointing “Teeth of the Tiger” Both of these new books have co-authors, with “Dead or Alive” listing Grant Blackwood as Clancy’s collaborator. I don’t know how much was actually written by Clancy and how much was Blackwood’s work, but it’s a good story using the same characters that made Clancy a brand name  (he got his start with “Hunt For Red October,” then went on a run with these characters that included “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger,” “Sum of All Fears,” “Debt of Honor,” and “Executive Orders” before the quality began to tail off). This book is better than his last couple of efforts, and follows a former president, his son (now a spy) and a network of top-level operatives as they attempt to thwart a series of simultaneous terrorist attacks.

            Clancy can still plot out a solid political thriller and this one is a worthy successor to his earlier books. I breezed through this one and enjoyed it a lot. It’s good to have Clancy back. 

Moneyball trailer

The Other Shoe Drops

            It really wasn’t a surprise. There had been rumors for a while it was coming. The only thing that moves fast around a government operation is the gossip. Every decision comes wrapped in a bow of thick red tape, so you tend to see the big changes coming. Still, it’s never easy to sit in a room and be told your services are no longer required.

            While the Constitution requires a census every ten years to count heads in the United States, the Census Bureau operates all year every year, doing other surveys that lead to economic indicators and other statistical tasks. The Bureau swells its ranks to do the decennial census, which obviously is an enormous undertaking, but after it wraps up they end up with a surplus of employees. Over the last few months hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand (I don’t know the exact number and the Bureau does not exactly post it on their website) have been given their papers from the Bureau showing them the door.

            Mine came Monday. I was called into a room and told my last day would be July 29^th. I was told it was strictly a numbers game. There was less work coming into the place as a whole, President Obama was cutting the budget, and people had to go.

            I was also told it wasn’t based on merit. That, I had no problem believing. The Census Bureau is a union shop, and like almost all labor unions in this country the AFGE exists almost exclusively to make sure the least productive and least competent held onto their jobs with a vice-like grip. So when cuts happen, they happen based on seniority, not on ability. A useless employee who has been there five years will stay over a tireless worker who has been there for four years and 11 months. That’s the way it goes.

            I only had two years in, so when they took a machete to the payroll lists, mine was one of the names lopped off. So starting after July 29 I will no longer have a job. I’ll be eligible for unemployment, which will help a little bit, but I’ll still be back out there job-searching.

            Those of you who have been in this position know how stressful it can be. The job market in the Louisville area is not heading any lists of America’s best. It’s a seemingly endless cycle of searching through job sites, sending out resumes, customizing cover letters, then hearing the eerie silence of rejection over and over. These websites create convenience, but they also create a disconnect between the companies and the people looking for work. Many don’t even provide a phone number, just an email address or simply a “click here to apply” button. They don’t have to say no, in fact they don’t have to say anything. They can simply ignore you. Many jobs are posted only because company policy tells them they must yet they already have an internal candidate in mind. I wish those came with an asterisk, but that is hardly realistic, so good jobs are dangled in front of you and you apply, unaware you’re doing the job hunt version of running toward a mirage in the desert.

            I really struggle with this process. I try not to take it personally, I really do. Still, it can make me feel unwanted, or even worse, stupid. I over-analyze my resume and poor over my cover letters wondering what I’m doing wrong. Each time I check my phone to see no missed calls and no voicemails I feel a little worse about myself. Each fruitless trip to my email inbox makes my heart sink a bit. Each feeling of hope taken from an interview fades slowly as I wait for news that often never comes.

             I know I don’t want to work in Louisville. That’s why I moved across the river to Indiana in the first place. I don’t want to deal with the bridges and spaghetti junction traffic and everything else, so after a lot of thinking I’ve decided to expand my search far beyond this area. Perhaps I’ve worn out my welcome here. Actually, I may have worn it out quite a long time ago and only now realize it. So I’ll continue to look around southern Indiana, which I like quite a bit, but I feel it’s also time to look elsewhere.

            I have family in Austin, Texas, which is a thriving city with a vibrant culture that seems to be a good fit for me. I’ll look there. I’ll take a look at Indianapolis again, a city I miss far more than I anticipated I would. I’ll look at Orlando, where the market is tougher but a place where some of my oldest and best friends are and where my parents visit often. Both Austin and Indianapolis were on a recent list of cities with good job markets and relatively low costs of living. That was encouraging.

            I’m sure other areas will come up with during my search. It’s a strange thing. The last time I knew I was going to be moving without knowing where was when I was leaving Bloomington preparing to graduate from college. That was a long time ago. Ever since then I’ve had a destination, but this time it’s a blank slate in front of me. Maybe I'll find something down here and I'll stay. More likely, I won't. 

I’ll look around. I’ll take some chances. I’ll listen to suggestions. I'm keeping my mind open to almost anything.

And I will try very hard not to take it personally.  

Late Night Laughs are Serious Business

            As I surfed around some of my favorite movie websites yesterday I quickly found myself up to my cyber-neck in publicity regarding the new Harry Potter movie. That is understandable, of course. The film will undoubtedly be the biggest thing to hit screen this year. In fact, I’ll make a quick and not particularly risky prediction that it will be the biggest opening weekend for a movie in history. I know I’ll be sure to catch it, but that’s not what caught my eye.

            Amidst all this, I saw a review of a movie made about a muggle. It was about one in particular, who about this time last year was one of the biggest names in American pop culture. Just one year since then, this person is still a celebrity, but has faded into the background and now borders on irrelevant. The movie created virtually no stir and considerably less than a stir at the box office. The film is “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop,” and chronicles the live tour on which he embarked after being dropped from The Tonight Show,” which he called “The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.”

            The name of the tour is telling, because O’Brien has been playing the victim in this whole thing ever since the first rumblings of his falling ratings were heard. The press, enamored with O’Brien since the second or third year of his hosting “Late Night,” has been happy to egg him on. They, along with others who had been consistently losing to Leno in the ratings such as David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel, have painted Jay Leno as a conniving villain, twisting his mustache while plotting O’Brien’s demise.

The problem is, it’s not true. Most of the analysis of this whole situation has been completely off-base, and the anger misdirected. It’s one of the most misunderstood series of events in pop culture. Personally, I think Letterman is the funniest when he wants to be, but he’s grown lazy and has been phoning it in for five or six years now. But I respect Leno, who is named by nearly all professional stand-ups as one of the best of all time. Casting him as the bad guy here is both inaccurate and unfair.

The real villain in this story is the NBC network itself and Jeff Zucker, the President of NBC Universal in particular. They made a series of contractual and programming errors that led to it all. Yet people think Leno was the bad guy here, and his reputation has suffered as a result, which is a shame because Leno was much more a victim at the start of this than Conan ever was.

Let’s forget for a moment who you think is the best host, or the funniest guy, or whatever. Let’s try to look at this objectively. Let’s go back five years before Leno left the “Tonight Show” for the first time, and let’s put ourselves in his shoes.

Leno guest-hosted the “Tonight Show” when the king was still on his throne. The last few years before Johnny Carson’s retirement, he got the opportunity to host the show Monday nights while Carson lowered his workload. He realized it really was his dream job, and when the king abdicated the throne after 30 years of unparalleled success and excellence, Leno was an obvious top contender for the full-time job.

The other is David Letterman, of course. Letterman assumed the job would be his when Carson stepped down. Exactly why Letterman assumed he was heir apparent is a mystery. No one told him he was next. NBC had two wildly successful and profitable shows, “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night.” While there are plenty of examples in TV history of a network spinning off a successful show into two successful shows (it’s done fairly frequently), I can’t think of a single time a network went the other way and made two successful shows into one. There’s a reason for that, and that is of course taking two ratings winners and making them one ratings winner is freaking stupid. Still, Letterman thought for reasons known only to him that he was playing AAA baseball waiting for the call-up to the big leagues. It was naïve and foolish, but there it was.

So NBC decided that it would rather have two successful shows rather than one (duh) they gave “The Tonight Show” to Leno. As we all know, this hurt Letterman severely, and when his contract was up he declared free agency and ended up getting “The Late Show” on CBS. At first, it even looked like Letterman had won. In the first couple of years of the shows going head-to-head, Letterman’s new show was outstanding and it won the ratings battle. Writer Bill Carter even wrote a book called “The Late Shift” about the saga that declared Letterman the winner.

The only problem about that was the fight hadn’t gone all 12 rounds yet. Leno slowly and steadily found his audience again, and began to catch up. Finally, he passed Letterman in the ratings and stayed there for years. Only certain episodes would bump Letterman over Leno. Overall, it was Jay winning night after night, week after week, year after year. Combined with Conan O’Brien’s following on “Late Night,” NBC was raking in huge money and solid ratings, validating its decision.

Then they forgot what brought them to the dance. As chronicled in Carter’s second book on this genre, “The War for Late Night”, in an effort to keep O’Brien from leaving the network, NBC made a promise it would come to regret. During negotiations for a new contract with Conan, they told him if he signed he would then be made the new host of “The Tonight Show” down the road. Conan eagerly signed, and NBC broke the news to Leno that they wanted to renew his contract for five years, but that it would be his last. After it was up, the show would go to Conan.

So let’s examine what happened here. Conan, whom Leno introduced on his show and always supported, always mentioning that “The Tonight Show” viewers should stay tuned for Conan, had just put together a deal that shoved Leno out of the chair where he’d been number one for years. And Leno is the bad guy here?

Leno, despite this, went on the air like a good and loyal soldier and announced he was leaving in a five years and he was happy to be handing the baton off to Conan. He then proceeded to spend the last few years of his time on “The Tonight Show” beating Letterman night after night (I’m leaving out Kimmel because he was, is, and remains, a mere blip on the radar). Again, Leno is the bad guy? 

He would have had every right to pitch a fit. He’d done his job. He was number one. He always did whatever NBC asked, he loved doing the show to the point that he actually negotiated for less time off (true story), and they thanked him by giving him the shove-off just to keep Conan happy.

When the time came, Leno graciously had Conan on his show, and then reluctantly walked away from the job he loved and had done successfully for 17 years, all because NBC had gone through a TV programming version of a midlife crisis. They had dumped him for a younger, prettier girlfriend, in this case the young and “hipper” Conan.

It wasn’t long before NBC realized their new girlfriend had some serious issues.  The Conan version of “The Tonight Show” started showing worrisome signs almost from the beginning. I watched the first week of shows and while the debut had moments, I remember being disappointed. The rest of the week, for which Conan and his crew had months to prepare, came off flat and bland. I was a fan of him on “Late Night” but the differences between the looser, more relaxed Conan that came on at 12:35 a.m. and the stiff, watered-down Conan on “The Tonight Show” were obvious. Everything seemed forced.

The ratings of course were monstrous at first, but they trailed off as the week went on and then kept on going down. As the summer of 2009 went by, Conan slipped up and failed in the one task he was hired to do, which was keep NBC on top in that timeslot. Letterman began to win again.

Conan began making excuses, and it is important to note that he began losing to Letterman before Leno’s 10 p.m. show debuted. The first excuse was that NBC was a third or fourth-place network so he was starting at a disadvantage. This holds no water because for years Letterman’s CBS was the highest-rated network on TV, with NBC languishing further back. Despite this, Leno beat Letterman in the ratings for years. Jay wasn’t winning just because more people were watching NBC in the first place. They weren’t. He was winning because people were changing the channel to see him.

Things were bad in NBC prime-time as well, so looking they executives decided to try a new concept, a 10 p.m. talk show on weeknights that would be cheap to produce. Leno, who had done well for them in late night for years, would host it. If it worked it would free NBC from having to pay for expensive 10 p.m. dramas that didn’t get good ratings anyway. It was a bold – and very flawed – idea.

So NBC put the “Jay Leno Show” on the air in the fall of 2009. Again, this is after Conan had lost first place. Affiliates were happy to have Leno back at first, being that he provided solid ratings and thus advertising money for them for years. Trouble is, late night and prime time are two totally different things. Keep in mind even the highest-rated late night show has ratings that are dwarfed by just about any prime time show, just because far more people are watching TV from 8-11 than late at night.  But they decided to try it anyway.

 The format for a late night show is fairly basic. You load the good stuff toward the front so people watch it before they go to sleep. So the monologue goes first, the comedy bit second, the biggest guest on that night’s show right after that. Basic.

Prime time is trickier. You have to put something up first to grab attention, but then you have to maintain it all the way through. The traditional late night format of putting the good stuff on first and then trailing off wouldn’t work in prime time. That would leave the local news (which are cash cows for local stations) with a weak lead-in. Affiliates wanted popular bits like Leno’s “Headlines” and “Jaywalking” segments put on just before the local news. They though it would give them the right bump going into the local news.

That doesn’t work either. People were not going to switch off a narrative show and then decide to skip the ending to see the last segment of Leno. What they found was that a 10 p.m. talk show wasn’t going to fly, and Leno’s ratings were tiny. 

Once again NBC’s poor decision-making came into pay. The network had given itself another complication. In an effort to keep Leno from going to another network, NBC gave him a pay and play contract (ridiculously rare), meaning it not only had to pay Leno, the network had to keep putting his show on the air. NBC couldn’t take him off. The execs looked over their situation, and it was bleak. They had Leno failing at 10 p.m. and Conan failing at 11:35. They had to find a way out.

They found their way out in what wasn’t in Conan’s contract. As it turned out, Conan’s management team had stupidly not received a timeslot guarantee in their contract (this is actually standard for a late-night show), so NBC realized they were allowed to move Conan’s show if they wanted to. In fact they were allowed to push it to 12:05 a.m. if they wanted to (and sometimes did for Olympics coverage, etc). The idea was to put Leno in a half hour show at 11:35 (mostly monologue, comedy bit and a quick guest) then put Conan on. Conan objected to that for obvious reasons, although he should have been more angry at his management for not getting something so basic written into his deal.

He ended up accepting a monster buy-out of $45 million and left rather than see “The Tonight Show” pushed back to 12:05 a.m. That allowed NBC to put Leno back in his old seat.

Then a torrent of criticism flew at Leno. People that didn’t enjoy his show took turns blasting him. Letterman took time out from banging his employees to take shots. Kimmel was particularly shameless, going on “The Jay Leno Show” and insulting Leno, thus generating about as much attention in one day as his mostly-forgotten show has had in years put together (his ratings show his studio audience and a couple of their friends looking to see their buddies on TV during crowd shots may be about the only people watching him).

Again, what was Leno supposed to do? Just quit? Jay Leno is one of the hardest working comedians in history. When he was a stand-up he worked virtually every day. Even as the host of “The Tonight Show” he really did negotiate for less time off. He frequently would tape his Friday show and then hop in a jet to do two stand-up shows on Friday and two more on Saturday, then jet back to Los Angeles and put in an appearance at the “Catch a Rising Star” comedy club on Sunday night. He did that regularly. This was not a man who was going to just sit back and read the paper every day.

Leno defines himself as a talk show host and a comedian. That’s what he does. He never wanted to leave “The Tonight Show.” He never wanted to go to prime time. He would have been perfectly content to stay at 11:35 p.m., but it was taken from him while he was still in first place. Now he was given a chance to go back to the job he never wanted to leave in the first place. Of course he said yes. And he has been crushed for it ever since, mostly by people who don’t like his humor (and seem to be taking it personally, calling him an evil person because they don’t like him) or by people who have footprints from getting their asses kicked by him for years.  Part of the smear campaign has been effective though, as Leno has not been able to get his ratings back up to pre-controversy levels.

Conan, who had gone to Harvard, edited the Harvard Lampoon, written for “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” then gone on to host “Late Night,” was tasting failure for the first time. He did not take it gracefully. He whined on “60 Minutes” and to anyone else who would listen. He blamed Leno, he blamed NBC, he blamed everyone but himself of course.

The bottom line is, had Conan O’Brien simply done a good job as the host of “The Tonight Show,” he’d still be there. But he didn’t. He watered down his show and it tanked. He acted like he was entitled to years and years to get the show right. He wasn’t. No one is entitled to anything when it comes to being on TV, and anyone in the industry should know that. If you put on a show and people don’t watch, you get canceled, fired, or bought out. It’s that simple. That’s how it works. Carson and Leno didn’t keep their jobs for years because they were entitled. They kept their jobs for years because they were good, and they drew ratings. Conan did neither, yet he whined constantly about being a victim.

His new show was going to be his triumphant return, where he and all his devoted fans would show the world he was the next king in waiting, and a late night revolution was at hand once he was freed of the evil shackles of NBC and Leno.

Where did all that hype lead? He’s on TBS, sandwiched between reruns of old sitcoms and a guy whose act consists of 3^rd grade level Mexican jokes, doing a show that draws not much more than half the ratings of Letterman, Leno or Jon Stewart. After all that, it looks like Conan was never really capable of playing in the big leagues after all.  

Meet Music City

I’m really not sure how many times I’ve driven through Nashville, Tennessee. The city has always been a pass-through for me on the way somewhere else. I had obviously heard of all the sights and sounds of Nashville, I just had never taken the time to roll down an exit ramp and see them for myself.

A few months ago I was all set to make my first trip into the city itself. My favorite band, the Old 97's, was going to make a tour stop at the Mercy Lounge. I was all set to go, alas when I got online to buy my ticket the show was already sold out. My plan was scuttled. I put it out of my mind for a couple of months until I read the good news on the band’s website that more tour dates had been added and they were coming right back again July 8 and 9.

After consulting my calendar I knew I’d be going on the 9^th. Friday the 8^th I had a wedding reception to go to. This time I made sure to get my ticket early to avoid any “sold out” issues. With that, I decided to head down a few hours early and take a look around downtown.

I even had a tour guide lined up, a friend from high school who knew Nashville well and would make sure I would catch the highlights. We were going to meet up outside of town and roll in together to save on parking. Everything sounded good. I woke up Saturday after the reception, had a big breakfast and a few Excedrin to knock out my hangover (it was a really good reception) and headed south.

I should have checked my email first. Why? Well, then I would have seen that my tour guide had been stricken by illness and was out of commission. I learned this from an apologetic text message I received while roughly in the vicinity of Bowling Green. So now I had directions to a meeting place where there would be no meeting, a ticket to a concert but no idea where the venue was and no clue at all where to go for anything in Nashville. Other than that, I was all set.

Thankfully, I still hadn’t reached Tennessee, so when I crossed the border I quickly hopped off to the rest stop/welcome center. I had enough time on interstates to know you can usually stock up on brochures there, and maybe some of them would have maps showing me where the hell I was going. I could also use my phone to google the concert venue and find directions to it.

I walked into the welcome center to find the usual gaggle of people milling around, using the restroom, dropping change into vending machines and popping their joints and backs after hours of road time. Sure enough, I found a rack of brochures about tourist attractions in Nashville and started flipping through them. A map on the brochure for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum looked promising as I took one and spread it out on the large information desk in the middle of the building. I had taken out my phone and googled the Mercy Lounge when I heard a SMACK followed by a woman’s voice saying, “Got you that time.”  I looked up to see a woman in her 20s pop up from behind the desk wielding a fly swatter, her face a mask of intense insect-homicidal concentration.

Her face softened when she saw me. “Can I help you with something?”

I told her of my predicament. She reached under the desk and pulled out a detailed bus route map of downtown Nashville, along with a yellow highlighter. While she didn’t know where the Mercy Lounge was, my googling had produced an intersection, which she was familiar with. She highlighted a recommended route, wrote directions in the margins, circled a few good sights to see and even told me where the cheap parking was. She only stopped momentarily when she honed in with laser-like focus on another fly and whacked it.

I thanked her and was on my way out as she resumed target practice. As it tuned out, she knew her stuff. Her directions and information were right on. I found a good parking lot, grabbed my camera and started off toward the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The Hall was bustling, with tour groups and others buzzing all over it. I decided not to fight the crowd and save that attraction for another day, so I snapped a couple of pictures.

Like this one, for instance

I hiked a few blocks to the legendary Ryman Auditorium. Now this was pretty cool. The Ryman was the home of the Grand Ole Opry for over 30 years and still hosts the occasional concert. It was also the home of Johnny Cash’s variety show as well as who knows how many classic live recordings. It was a bit strange to see in person as it is crammed into a downtown block. The front entrance is right up against a two-lane street and the building across from it is right up against the sidewalk as well, so no matter what you do, you can’t stand across the street and get far enough away to take a picture that actually gets the whole damn building in frame. You have to walk down the street to find a little nook or cranny and then try to stand tilted halfway sideways to get an angle since the street is slanted so steep the picture looks like you were drunk when you took it. The sidewalk was lined with people holding cameras in one hand and confused looks on their faces trying to find a decent angle. 

Taking a pic of the Ryman is a lot trickier than it should be

After that, it was off to Broadway, where in a span of two or three blocks you can find around 20 live music bars, many of which are open to all ages during the daytime. No DJs here, bring a band or don’t come at all. It was pretty impressive to pass door after door with live music blaring from inside. It certainly brought a feeling of energy to the hot and sunny street. I poked my head in several including the Stage, Cadillac Ranch and Whiskey Bent. There was real variety in those places. A traditional country singer would be playing next door to a more rock-country act, next to a place featuring bluegrass. Being in Music City, competition was strong and the talent level was impressive even in the smaller venues during the daytime.

Another highlight was a record store that sold almost exclusively vinyl albums. There was a small CD rack but 95% of the place was devoted to vinyl, from albums to 45s. Very cool.

Spinning the platters that matter in Music City

The bars on Broadway are busy all day long, and really pick up at night. I couldn’t stay, though. I had tickets for the show. The Mercy Lounge is on the second floor of a brick building in the industrial district. The acoustics there were excellent, and the show started right on time, which may be some sort of first. Robert Ellis led off with his backing band, playing straight country and doing a pretty good job of it. He even threw in a George Jones cover.

Those Darlins came up next. I saw them open for the Old 97’s a few months ago in Louisville and I was greatly impressed. This band of three women and one guy have a punkabilly, garage rock sound that I liked immediately. Since I saw them in Louisville their album “Screws Get Loose” has received good reviews and the band has been singled out numerous times as up and comers. I say seriously this band may be really big someday. I might be bragging about seeing them before they were huge.

The Old 97’s were the headliners and as always, they did not disappoint. This is an outstanding live band, full of energy and charisma. Front man Rhett Miller is dynamic on vocals while Ken Bethea and Murry Hammond tear it up on guitar and bass, respectively. Philip Peeples keeps the beat wonderfully on drums. The band released two albums in the last year, The Grand Theatre Vol. 1 and 2. They played a set heavy on new songs while still keeping audience favorites. The crowd was loud and enthusiastic all night, and the band responded to the energy.

By the time it was all over, the show ran four hours of great country, garage rock and alt-country. I was wiped out by the time I made my way back to my car, but as I drove through the night back to New Albany, I felt satisfied I had done it up right for my first day-trip to Nashville.

One of My Worst Fears Dodged...For Now

            For the past six months, I have been walking around with a large, heavy object figuratively hanging over my head. Sometimes I picture it as a ton of bricks in a net, or a cartoon-like heavy combination safe, or an anvil. The imagery change, but there it is. July 6 was the day I found out if it – whatever it was - will crash down on me or not.

            Six months ago I went to my optometrist for my annual eye exam. My vision began faltering when I was in middle school. By high school I had to get glasses, which didn’t bother me as it helped my headaches immediately and improved my appearance anyway. On the other hand, the downward slide of my vision was troubling. Each year my eye doctor would tweak my prescription accordingly as my eyes deteriorated. I am nearsighted, with my left eye adding in a bonus case of astigmatism. Eleven months or so after each adjustment I’d start noticing I was having problems reading smaller signs on the road and I’d start getting those blasted headaches again. Another change in my prescription, another temporary relief.

            Finally, around my thirtieth birthday, my eye doctor informed me my vision was still good when wearing my glasses. I didn’t need an adjustment. I was elated, and since then my vision has leveled off. I haven’t needed a new prescription in years. When I went to my appointment this past January, I felt confident I’d get the once-over, tell the eye doctor the usual, such as “choice one looks better than choice two, the lines are parallel…now, I see two dots….now, yes I can see your hand to the left, right, top and bottom,” and be on my way.   

            This visit involved one additional test. It was an in-depth photo of my retina. I put my face up to a camera, putting my chin in a chinrest like that “puff of air” test, only this time a bright light flashed and a picture was taken of the back of my eye.

            That’s how he found the dark spot.

            He showed me the picture. The right eye looked just right. The round spot where the optic nerve meets the eye looked great, the blood vessels in the eye looked strong and healthy. But in the picture of my left eye, a dark spot on the macula was obvious. It was different shades, and irregularly-shaped, like how mountain ranges are depicted on maps. He said this spot was troubling.

            He called it an epiretinal membrane. There is thin bit of tissue on the retina, about the same thickness as a piece of cellophane. This area needs to be smooth to facilitate proper vision. An epiretinal membrane is like crumpling up a piece of paper.  You can straighten out a piece of paper after it’s been crumpled, but it will never go back to being perfectly smooth again. That membrane is a crumpled up spot on my eye.

            So what did that mean? Was this serious? Well, it could go either way. It all depended on whether the spot was stable or growing. It may have been in my eye for decades, all the way back to childhood at that same size. Since I had never had that test done before January there was no way to tell. I would have to come back July 6 to find out if it was expanding.

If the spot showed growth, I faced macular degeneration. That means slowly, over the course of the next ten to fifteen years, the central vision in my eye would get darker and darker until finally I would no longer be able to read or recognize faces, I would only have peripheral vision at best. It’s rare for that to happen at my age (I’m 36), but it happens. This version of macular degeneration has no treatment or cure at this point.

My vision would go from this...

...to this, with that spot gradually expanding

The doctor gave me a piece of paper with a grid on it. Once I month, I was to cover my right eye and look at the center of this grid. If I noticed any of the lines appeared wavy, or if there were blank spots on the grid, or if I noticed I was having difficulty seeing the sides or corners of it in my peripheral vision, I was supposed to let him know. Since there’s no treatment or cure, I’m not sure what good telling him was going to do, but I over the next few months I looked at my grid faithfully. The problem is, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing and what I wasn’t.

Your mind plays tricks on you, we all know that, and mine was feeling particularly mischievous. Every little “floater” that drifted by registered in my mind as a sign the dark spots were coming. Anytime I woke up and rubbed my eyes and things seemed a little extra blurry in the morning made me wonder if it was starting. Was it coming on so slowly I’d never noticed it before? Or was I just being flat-out paranoid now? It seemed like I could see okay, but was that spot to my left blurrier than usual? When it got to dusk did it seem darker to my left than on my right? It sure seemed that way sometimes.

I said very little about this to anyone. There’s nothing anyone could do about it anyway, and why worry people? But I could feel the shadow of that weight hanging above my head as the months went by.

I began to think about what would happen if it were all true. If I went blind. Since I was a very young child reading has been one of the most important things in my life. I’ve always proudly proclaimed I have been in the middle of reading at least one book - and almost always more than one – continually since I was in grade school. I devour magazines such as Sports Illustrated, The Economist and The New Yorker, and others on my weekly trips to the bookstore. Reading is a large part of who I am.

Writing is too, of course. It’s more than just this blog, it’s the emails I write to friends and the novel I’m perpetually hammering away at. Dictating into a recorder as a writer just doesn’t work for me. I need to see it on the page. It’s the act of typing that allows for a bit of reflection as my fingers tap out the words. Plus I need the visual of the sentence on the screen, the ability to see the story there. A recording of my voice would make editing, changing and rearranging far more difficult, perhaps even too maddening to bother with.

Then there was the part about not being able to recognize faces. The idea of my friends and family’s faces fading into nothing but memories tied knots in my stomach. My nephew would be 12-17. I’d miss seeing him grow into a man. I’d miss my friend’s smiles when I crack them up with a joke. I’d miss the looks of happiness on my family’s faces when I arrived home after a long drive for the holidays.

Long drives? There would be no more drives. I’d spend the rest of my life confined to the passenger seat, rolling past a countryside I’d never get to enjoy.

            Losing those things would completely change who I am as a person. It would have to completely re-define myself. What would I find to do? I could listen to sports on the radio and still follow it, yes. I suppose that would be tolerable. But I’d lose movies, another thing I love.

            It would happen gradually over ten to fifteen years, putting me at 46-51 and blind. I’d have decades to go statistically, with everything with which I define myself taken away. Not to mention, just on the level of someone who doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life alone, who would ever want to be with a blind guy? These are the thoughts that flew through my head daily. I began wondering if I even wanted to live a life like that. I’d try to shake it off, but those thoughts would make me feel so utterly sad.

            On July 6 they took another picture. After ten very long minutes the optometrist told me the spot on my eye was the same size it was in January. It wasn’t growing. He said I would come back for my regular eye exam in January and we’d check the spot again. It may decide to start growing at any time. Hopefully it will just sit there forever, a wrinkle in my eye that doesn’t bother to leak any fluid or expand. So far, it’s decided to let me keep my vision.

            I exhaled a deep breath, and we were both grinning as I shook his hand to leave. The feeling of relief was palpable in the air.

            So while I still worry, the weight above my head feels a little further up above now. The words that appear on my Nook seem a little brighter, and when I go to Barnes & Noble this weekend I’ll savor my copy of The Economist and The New Yorker with a little extra enthusiasm. I also have a party to attend with some friends Friday. I’ll be even happier than usual to recognize their faces.

            NOTE: By the way, if I had found out the spot was growing I was going to put this link toward the top of the page. It’s a column by one of the all-time great newspaper columnists, Jim Murray. I thought of it immediately after receiving the news about the dark spot, and one of the first things I did after my January appointment was to read it again. Murray a better writer than I’ll ever be, and this piece is one of his best and would have been right on-topic. I’ll put in the link anyway, so do yourself a favor and read a master at work:

Jim Murray's Column From the L.A. Times

Looking Back at the 4th

            It’s a cloudy 4^th of July morning as I write this. It should be a fairly quiet 4^th for me this year, which is fine. I’ve had some great ones as an adult. A night spent setting off fireworks on the beach in Myrtle Beach and looking down the waterline each direction and seeing literally hundreds of others doing the same thing for miles comes to mind as a good one. A few years in Indianapolis I’d catch the AAA Indianapolis Indians game downtown and watch the city’s fireworks display from the ballpark. Those were good days too. Still, none of these can really compete with the childhood 4^th of Julys.            

            Like Memorial Day, Independence Day was another excuse to throw a neighborhood party. I’ve mentioned before how I grew up in a great subdivision for a kid, and we took full advantage. If you saw our typical 4^th of July in a movie today you’d almost think it was idyllic, maybe even cliché, but it was all true, and it’s why I wouldn’t trade my old neighborhood from the late seventies and early eighties for anything.

            It actually started weeks in advance. There was a temporary fireworks stand that would pop up in a parking lot on Edison Street in South Bend, or maybe it was in Mishawaka. Either way, this stand would appear each summer peddling fireworks right on our route home from the day camp at which my sister and I spent our weekdays. Mom would stop and buy the family fireworks there every year. Actually, we begged to stop a lot more often, and mom soon outsmarted us by spreading the shopping out over several trips instead of just one. The stand was always run by the same woman, and each year she’d comment on how much Corrie and I had grown in the last year and give us free fountains, which were probably part of her “buy one, get two free” deals anyway but made us feel special.

            I don’t know if my memory is just rosy for this time or what, but I simply don’t remember very many rainy days. It seems to me the 4^th was almost always warm and sunny, which is remarkable in South Bend.

That’s good, because the day of the 4^th itself was as busy as the nighttime. The kids often decorated their bikes with red, white and blue ribbons and crepe paper. We spent an hour or two riding around the neighborhood with our new patriotic wheels. The adults meanwhile would be preparing for the nighttime. I believe bourbon slushes were frequently involved.  

            Some years we even managed to put together a 4^th of July picnic and bar-be-que on one of the cul-de-sacs in the subdivision. It would be full of grills, coolers and folding chairs as dozens munched on bugers, hot dogs and potato salad. I believe some canned adult beverages were frequently involved there too, but as a kid you didn’t really think of that too much. Nor do you think about the neighborhood gossip that went on. I didn’t find out about any of that until years later while reminiscing. Turns out there was the usual neighborhood drama, marriages on the rocks and rumors of affairs and drinking problems, but I was young enough back then to be happily oblivious to all that.

            There were often other things happening too. One year I walked down the street to the Lowe’s house (our best friends on the street were the Lowes and the Markiewicz family) and saw Mike Lowe out on his porch working with some contraption. I investigated and found Mike had gotten himself an old-school ice cream churn and was going to make homemade desserts for that night. He was out there for hours cranking away at this handle with the ingredients inside, the churn surrounded by ice. Homemade ice cream? What could be better than that?

            Sundown couldn’t come fast enough though, that’s when the big fun started. The Lowe’s driveway was usually home base for the fireworks. The Markiewicz family would be there, as would several other families from the street, making for a pretty busy front yard.

As the light melted away, the parents would break out the sparklers. While the girls would twirl them around (they made really cool trails in the darkness if you whipped them around fast enough) I made up a challenge for myself. I decided I’d be close to being a grown-up if I could light my sparkler and run all the way around the Lowe’s house and back to the driveway again before it burned out. If I were able to go around and get a foot back on the concrete with a little bit of spark left, I was a winner. It took me a couple of years but when I was seven or eight I did it. I knew I was on my way.

            Bottle rockets were of questionably legality, so of course we stocked up on those. The Sherriff would roll through the neighborhood on patrol once a night on the 4^th. We could see him coming though, and the dads had a system though and the metal pipe we used as a launching pad (and the wooden ladder on which the pipe leaned) disappeared into the bushes quickly when he rolled past.

            I loved the fireworks. I enjoyed every bang, spark, burst and screech they made. The dads who fired them off were the coolest guys in the world to me. I was particularly proud when I was deemed old enough to light a few myself.

            After a vigorous day of bike riding, picnicking and fireworks (and the bourbon slushes for the grownups) we were all pretty worn out. The homemade ice cream? Well, that didn’t quite work out (I think there ended up being chunks of butter in it or something. That stuff’s trickier than you’d think to make by hand). Sleep came very easy for us.

            So while I’ve had some terrific Independence Days over the years, I still feel nostalgic for the childhood ones, where I was surrounded by family that loved me and friends that cared about me. I felt safe (despite the presence of explosives and lawn darts we never had an injury) and happy in our neighborhood. Some kids I knew talked about taking vacation over the 4^th of July holiday. I always felt sorry for them. Why would anyone want to be anywhere but the Greenview North subdivision on a day like that during that era? I’m still wondering.