Sports and Culture

Talk radio talks a lot about J.D. Drew, Theo Epstein's bud, who would "Stand in right field, hit 23 home runs, get 87 RBIs and make $15 million per year." Great.

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Not everyone has had the chance to look at lots of material having to do with Mali, the Sudan, and the Sahel in general. It has something to do with that other desert like area, the area between the Gulf of Mexico and Los Angeles, California. Beavis and Butthead, Meat Puppets, Jim Morrison, Butthole Surfers, the movie Dazed and Confused, Burning Man Festival, Queens of the Stone Age out of the Salton Sea area, the Low Desert, the High Desert, all the way to Reno. I think I spent my years from 6th Grade to 8th Grade living here. And then again when I was 28 and 29.

The "Desert Sound" in rap has something to do with it, too. A Tribe Called Quest, Eric B and Rakim, Snoop and Dre, even Sir Mix A Lot, from the neighboring Pacific Northwest, have the feeling. It is an important part of culture and I hear it in the work of the Jazz Rap I like, such as Gang Starr and Pete Rock/CL Smooth.

I'm reading and reading on Stanford's long Mali links page, from the McGill link on your right, stories of libraries out in the desert, the Sahel, equivalent to Low/High Desert for a Los Angeleno, 4,000 y/o libraries of manuscripts out there between Bamako and Timboctou. Is it the Hearst Mansion? Is it the Mr Peppermint Video Collection? One looks at the video work of Sir Mix A Lot and one wonders, how did Sir Mix A Lot get to be the greatest auteur? The desert culture has a way of perpetuating itself. I think back to stories of warehouses (godowns) in India during the development of the corporate era, warehouses full of stock; the very stock certificates of the stock we buy and trade on the internet nowadays. The stock was stored in warehouses, and in non-desert tropical areas it can be quite a storage problem.

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If you're on Netflix and just don't know what to do anymore, take a wild leap at "Pocket Money" starring Paul Newman, a western set in the 1970s in Arizona and Mexico. You watch and wonder, "How can these guys (Lee Marvin and Paul Newman) drive around all day in a Lincoln Continental drinking tequila and working their ass off on their mission to buy rodeo bulls for their financers back in Tuscon?

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Sometimes you have to ask yourself, do you give a care?
Siouxsie Sioux Israel
Siouxsie Sioux Spellbound
Don't get lost! NFL Highlights from this season, with Disturbed::The Sickness If LaDanian was in it I missed it, so here is a picture from 2005.



As the Saints rise, here is a 3 minute, phantasmagorical, cartoonish rap-metal contextualization of the "magic" involved: Sepultura::Ratmanhatta, sung in Portuguese. It's a fast-food hot pepper ragout.

After which one needs something moving in a positive direction for dessert. Delivered Sepultura style: Roots Bloody Roots, with a Chinua Achebe quote to convocate it. Video features lots of sunshine and men on the beach after a day of work, lounging around in silhouette against the sunset. You would have to be a fan of heavy metal to get the positivity. "We don't have to change....our ways to be sane..." Max does some drumming on the beach in this one. I'll have to look up the genre in the pt:Wikipedia.

In two years we play the entire NFC South. That includes New Orleans, Carolina, Tampa and Atlanta. It would behoove one to get in touch with the dynamics involved. I think they're stronger than AFC North and AFC West, and definitely NFC East. In the case of Ratamahatta, it might not be much of a stretch if one has ever spent any time lying in bed at night in a bored uncomfortable manner.

Speaking of Roots, kids today just don't know, here is Cheech and Chong::Sister Mary Elephant from 1978, remember hearing this on the radio every day for two years. Actually, this is a little bluer than the AM radio track.