Month: October 2003

Yesterday was the anniversary of the shooting death of Jam Master Jay. And there I was, wondering why I heard My Adidas on three different stations during the day.

I’m back from Utah. I called Ian and Jess out in San Diego, and they’re not in any danger from the fires. And the NBA season has started, so my life can now stop for a few months.

One thing, though: For some reason, many (but not all) home teams are now wearing their dark uniforms, rather than their whites. Most of you readers likely aren’t big sports fans, but this is a subtly disturbing phenomenon. See, normally, you know which team is playing at home when you glance at the screen and see the white uniforms. So it’s kinda odd when the team in dark unis hits a basket, and the crowd cheers.

It’s nothing I’d lodge a protest over (as opposed to the truly freakish, Hefty-bag-esque uniforms the Dallas Mavericks unveiled for their first game).

Went out last night to a hospitality event thrown by one of our advertisers. We went to the Olympic Oval, a training facility for the 2002 skaters. We went curling and shooting hockey pucks. Pictures to come, unfortunately.

Many thanks to Ian for turning me on to Gorillaz and Thievery Corporation! I have discovered many new beats during this trip! Let’s all hope that Ian and his True Love, who live in San Diego, remain safe from the fires.

The iPod holds up! A rambling hike yields some great photos! Salt Lake City on a Sunday is like 28 Days Later, but without the zombies!

The Gil Roth “King of the Road” Tour continues, as I head out to Salt Lake City for the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) annual meeting. Last week was Phoenix and San Diego, combining business & pleasure. After Utah, I’m back for 10 days before heading off to Atlanta for 3 days for the Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) annual meeting. Then I’m back for another 10 days before taking The Big Vacation. All told, 2003 will involve 25 takeoffs & landings. As long as none of them match my Takeoff of Horror last Wednesday from Newark, I’ll be a happy man.

Which is to say, as long as I have the iPod, I should be okay.

According to my webstats, at 4:45am this morning, someone came to this blog by Googling the following:

Red Sox fan commits suicide

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer and Mickey Kaus both have pretty good takes on the debacle of Easterbrook’s strange Kill Bill blog. Kaus also links to about 10 million other blogs that discuss (or mindlessly rant about) Easterbrook’s entry and subsequent apology.

Funnily enough, Shafer actually had the exact same reaction I did when he read the column last Monday. He writes:

The moral posturing and witless embrace of loathsome cultural stereotypes found in these 84 words seemed so un-Easterbrook that I hoped that someone would e-mail me the news that somebody had hacked Gregg’s blog and inserted this bogus copy.

I’m glad that people who are close to Easterbrook have defended him as a person, even as they’ve criticized his work in this instance. It’s much better than reading, “Y’know, he told me he was collecting that Nazi memorabilia for a special project, but I never thought…”

Anyway, it seems that this rant of his got out of hand, such was his indignation at Tarantino’s film (which I’m now dying to see, admittedly). It’s not like he’d be the first blogger to misstep; it’s more a sign of his gravitas that such comments were taken so seriously (though I still contend they’re more muddled than anti-semitic). Anyone who’s read this blog in the past 8 months knows that essay-like entries can really go off the rails sometimes.

One other disturbing thing: It completely slipped my mind when I was writing the first entry, but ESPN (where TMQ was published each week) is actually owned by Disney. See, I thought TMQ’s quick hook was a post-Limbaugh response by ESPN. But now, it raises a more sinister question: Did a high-up at Disney (Eisner or Weinstein, perhaps) call for Easterbrook’s firing? Media consolidation sucks.

I hope that Tuesday Morning Quarterback resurfaces somewhere like Slate (where the column originated).

Or at Virtual Memories! Why, I’m pretty unconsolidated, by Big Media terms (well, I do run a publishing company by night, edit a pharmaceutical magazine by day, and watch NFL Direct Ticket on Sundays)!

So let it be known that I am now offering Gregg Easterbrook a place to post his Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns. I can’t promise that my server won’t collapse under the weight of the new traffic, but I can offer an absoluete minimum of editorial interference (after all, I am used to running a trade magazine)!

Ouch. Gregg Easterbrook — whose essays I enjoy and whose Tuesday Morning Quarterback columns on ESPN Page 2 are always a hoot — just got canned from the latter gig. I meant to write about his blog on The New Republic’s site last week, because he wrote an entry that I found pretty incomprehensible. Since the blog doesn’t use internal bookmark hyperlinks, you’ll have to go to here or over the Easterbrook link on the left side of this page, and scroll down to the 10.13.03 entry about Kill Bill and Quentin Tarantino’s fatuousness.

I don’t agree with his stance on the complete uselessness of Tarantino’s work, and I think Ron Rosenbaum makes a very neat case for Oliver Stone and Tarantino serving as stand-ins for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but it was the closing paragraph that I found troubling and incomprehensible. And it’s why he’s been fired from his ESPN gig (and, in Soviet fashion, throw in the memory hole of the Page 2 site).

If you’re too lazy to go to the page itself, shame on you. But here’s the paragraph in question:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can’t possibly miss the message–now Disney’s message–that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.

I’ve read a bunch of Easterbrook’s work. I know that he’s a devout Christian, but not, as near as I could tell, an anti-semite. So the notion that Eisner and Weinstein, as Jews, “worship money above all else,” was disturbing. There’s been an uproar (I hate when people use the term ‘furor’ for this sorta thing, for obvious reasons) about the blog, and Easterbrook’s editor, a Jew, spoke out to defend him and criticize blogs (somewhat predictably).

Anyway, one of the reasons I didn’t write about this entry at the time was because I simply didn’t understand where he was coming from. The criticism of Jews came so out of left field that I actually thought the blog had been hacked that morning. It hadn’t. On Thursday, Easterbrook wrote an apology. Unfortunately, it didn’t make his argument that much clearer, and it seemed to imply that all Jews, as Jews, should think in certain ways. If you read it differently, please drop me an e-mail so we can discuss it.

PS: I won’t buy a Volkswagen. My father drives a Mercedes-Benz. We differ on a lot of subjects, and we’re just two Jews.

I’m on the road at present, touring pharma and genomics facilities in Phoenix (Wed.-Fri.) and visiting my best friend and his True Love in San Diego (Fri.-Sun.). It’s a little tiring, not least because I’ll be flying off to Salt Lake City next week for the AAPS conference, and off to Atlanta 10 days after that for the PDA annual meeting. But, as John Mellencamp once sang, “This is my life; it’s what I’ve chosen to do.”

The genomics initiative was pretty interesting, and I met up with some editors from other magazines, who sorta boggled over the amount of hats I wear in my role as editor of Contract Pharma. But when you’re a micro-managing control freak, you do what you have to.

During the flight Wednesday, the pilot gave us updates on the score of the Red Sox-Yankees game 6 and the Marlins-Cubs game 7. Chicago, demoralized by its epically fucked-up loss on Tuesday, were beaten by Florida. The Yankees also lost, unable to hold a 7th inning lead, leading to a deciding game 7 on Thursday.

Now, I warned the PR firm that was organizing the trip. I said to the liaison, “You have to understand: if the Yanks are playing the Sox in a game 7, I may disappear in the middle of the big dinner on Thursday night. I wouldn’t do this on just any night, but this would be the final game of a Yankees-Red Sox series. It could be epic.”

The liaison laughed, nervously.

Game 7 impended. Roger Clemens, whom I’ve never truly adopted as a Yankee, was throwing against Pedro Martinez, formerly the best pitcher in baseball, now a really good pitcher who has a tendency to throw at players when he struggles.

We listened to the first three innings on the radio in the van that took us from ASU’s new BioDesign Institute to the Westin, which was hosting a biotech venture capital event. I said to myself, “If Clemens wins this one like he did game 3, and I’ll accept that he really is a Yankee.”

(This could be the subject of a pretty rambling entry, the question of who’s a Real Yankee, and who just wore the uniform for a few years and rode the coattails of the Real players. It isn’t a question of which players were “home grown” and which were traded in or signed as free agents. The greatest Yankee of the last 10 years, in my opinion, is Paul O’Neill, who was traded over from the Cincinnati Reds. O’Neill, introduced for his at-bats with Springsteen’s “10th Avenue Freeze-Out,” was a Yankee through and through, despite having won a World Series title with another squad. Paulie burned to win, and it inspired the rest of the team. Chuck Knoblauch, who came over in a trade and won a few championships, was never a Real Yankee. He contributed pretty well, until he had a mental breakdown and couldn’t complete a throw from second to first, but he was never One Of Us. Anyway, I’ll provide a breakdown of Real Yankees and Fake Yankees some other time.)

Clemens was gone by the beginning of the 4th inning, down 3-0. He is Dead To Me, Dead! now. Despite all the career achievements, he failed to show up in his biggest (and possibly final) game.

(One of the fun things about game 7s — and there are a bunch — is that managers are willing to go “all hands on board” for the win, since there’s no tomorrow. Thus, Joe Torre ended up having three of his starters throw in this game, along with a few relievers. The only pitcher he held out was Andy “Ring of Jesus Fire” Pettitte, who had gone the night before and would’ve been ineffective.)

It sounded as if Pedro was throwing a heck of a game, so I grew despondent. During the cocktail hour at the Westin, I sneaked out to the Starbucks and checked out the game on the internet. I instructed my dad to call if there were any changes in score. The Yankees fell behind 4-0, before Jason Giambi (whose status as a Real Yankee I’ve yet to determine) belted a couple of solo home runs to get the score to 4-2. I had hope: one base-runner, a homer off of Pedro, and we’d be all tied up.

That hope dissipated when I saw that David Wells had given up a solo homer in the top of the 8th, leaving the Yankees down 5-2. With six outs remaining to them, I was sure that they’d lose the game and series, and that my work-trips to Boston would become a major trial, for the rest of my days. It’s bad enough to be heckled by anyone, but it’s really tough when the heckler has an accent that makes him or her sound like a borderline retard. I began to drink a little more heavily at the dinner.

Eventually, William Haseltine was introduced, and he proceeded to deliver his lengthy and rambling self-hagiography, occasionally tying back to genomics and the Translational Genomics initiative that’s taking place in the greater Phoenix area. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I took a look and saw that it was my father calling. I figured he was telling me that the game was over, and the Yankees lost. I hit “ignore.”

Then the phone vibrated again, moments later. A friend of mine was calling. I answered it, sneaking out of the dining area. She said, “I can’t believe it!”

“What happened?” I asked.

“They came back! Bernie knocked in Jeter, and Posada just drove in Bernie and Matsui! It’s tied up, and Jorge’s on second base with 1 out!”

“Holy shit!” I hung up, and raced down to the sports bar. “Gimme a G&T!” I said to the bartender-ess, adding, “Come on Ruben! Get me a hit to right field and drive this bitch home!”

(One thing you have to understand is, I sound like a Tourette’s patient when I watch a sporting event. I have a near-constant line of banter going on with the TV, which can be entertaining if you don’t take me too seriously. I mean, it’s not like I REALLY wanted Clemens to throw at Nomar’s head in game 3. I did want him to drill Manny Ramirez in the wrist, but that’s completely justifiable.)

Pedro had been pulled from the game after the Posada hit, having run out of gas several batters earlier. The Yankees couldn’t get another run across in the 8th, so they went into the 9th inning tied up. They brought in their super-heroic closer, Mariano Rivera, to preserve the tie. He was virtually unhittable, and I knew it was only a matter of time till the Yankees finished Boston off. With every Yankee at-bat, I rapped the brass surface of the bar (bruising several of my knuckles pretty badly in the process).

In the top of the 10th, two of the other editors came down to the bar. One said, “You are SO busted.”

“Dude, I SO don’t give a shit. The Yankees came back. They’re going to win the fucking series and destroy the hearts of Boston fans for another generation! Now siddown and have a drink!”

By the top of the 11th, the rest of my group had come down to harass us at the bar. I said, “If we were out east, and it was midnight already, I’d be back at the hotel already. But it’s only 9pm, fer chrissakes! Cut me some slack!” Traveling west rocks, mainly because of the early starting time for sports. If I ever move out west, that’ll be the main reason.

Eventually, I relented and we sent for the van. One of the valets listened to the game on our radio for a few moments. I said, “There’s nothing to listen to. The Yanks are gonna win this one. Boone’s going to belt one out in the 11th, and we’re going to the World Series, baby!”

And he did. First at-bat in the 11th, Aaron Boone — largely unproductive since his mid-season trade to NY, not even starting in this game — had the biggest hit of his career, pasting a left-field home run to end the game and drive a 32-oz. stake into the hearts of Red Sox fans everywhere (particularly Boston).

I unleashed a Ric Flair “Woooo!” in the van, scaring the other editors, who thought they’d seen the limits of my demented behavior. Some of them seemed to think my drunkenness promoted this exuberance, not realizing that, if anything, alcohol actually tones me down during sporting events. I get much more worked up when I watch a big game sober.

One of the editors, a Torontoan, said, “The worst thing is, you fucking called the home run.” Yes, I did.

I was actually kinda thankful not to have watched the home run on TV back in the bar, because I would likely have:

a) embarrassed everyone by doing the “riding a pony” dance across the room, and

b) bought a round for the place in celebration, stipulating that the drinks could only go to those who pledged eternal fealty to the Yankees.

So, all things considered, I feel pretty good that I got through the evening with only a few bruised knuckles.

National Book Award nominees for 2003 were just announced. As is my too-busy wont, I haven’t read any of the books. I HAVE, however, been present when one of the authors read from his book. I wrote up that experience in February (go here to understand just how bullshit a writer I think Boyle is, and why nominations like this exist seemingly to reinforce my hatred of art that makes middlebrows feel like they’re smart. Grr.)

Nominees:
T.C. Boyle, Drop City
Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire
Edward P. Jones, The Known World
Scott Spencer, A Ship Made of Paper
Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen