Review of My Tennis Shoes

They're everyday wear. That means by definition they're grungy.

There's something odd to note about us
21st Century XY chromosome types.
Maybe it's because not so long ago most of our ancestral father figures were still farming the land. We act as if we've got mud on our heels and hereditary manure between our toes.

Just ask one of us guys to bring out our favorite shoes.

Anatomy of a Pair of Shoes
It's very simply accomplished, this transformation of ordinary shoes into exceptional footwear.

Guy in question takes a pair of pristine tennis or running shoes and beats the crap into them through vigorous use and abuse. After that, lace us up! We're ready for the next five years or until the  poor things expire like dead earthworms on the sidewalk.

In the meantime, for as long as possible we'll wear these many-eyeletted, shredded canvas terrors everywhere.

Of course, there are occasional exceptions to the foregoing bold modus operandi which is supposed to result in such desirable shoes. I must humbly report that my own tennie favs didn't reach their current state of near perfect degradation through worthy outdoor, athletic endeavors.

No fast and sweaty pickup games of basketball to break them in. No hikes through the high country where pebbles cut into the tread and glacial silt impregnated the canvas sides as I forded a rushing, ice-cold stream.

This was a kitchen accident.

Seeking the Perfect Shoe
It began with my wanting some walking shoes that were made in Europe. I had a reason. I was traveling to the Continent for the first time in decades and I lived with the unrealistic hope that I might look as little as possible like a tourist.

Here was the goal: To avoid resemblance to a blatant species of American traveler--the one who gives off the vibe of I'm an SUV driving, McDonalds burger eating, American Idol watching citizen of the  Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.

You know, he's all Yankees baseball cap and flapping cargo shorts and Bruce Springsteen "The Boss" T-shirt and the whole of it is shod with a pair of sparkling Tommy Bahamas or ProSpirits (Target brand).

The French invented an interesting shoe in 1936.

Let's say I'd rather blend in.

So I first figured out that black is a popular color in Europe, especially at our initial destination, Paris, where les hommes and femmes serieux se habille comme la nuit and fume beaucoup (apologies for murdering the French language).

"Dress like a Parisian," I told myself, "but defense de fumer!"

So I put together a no-smoking outfit of black jeans, black T-shirt.

Tres simple!

Then I went looking for a comfortable walking option, Euro-insider shoes if possible.

Spring Courts have distinctive "sole holes" to help
ventilate the feet., but we're not advocating you buy some.
Please see our "Endorsement Policy" at the bottom of this post.

There were some English brands (pricey) and then I found them. Spring Courts.

Invented in France in 1936 and manufactured there ever since.

Spring Courts are the world's first  tennis shoe with ventilation holes along the edge of the rubber sole. They are extremely cushy as well.

Spring Courts (in white) are what John Lennon was wearing to complement his white suit as he crossed the street on the famous cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album.

But guess what? For a number of complicated reasons, not worth explaining here, I didn't end up wearing the Spring Courts on the trip. They stayed at home in their tissue-lined box.

The Anointing
So last June the three of us return from Paris and Rome. The trip has gone well, and I find myself ready to wear my new shoes. I hardly have them on my feet for a week when my pedestrian life is altered drastically.

I go to the grocery store. I buy provisions for the pantry and fridge and I'm bringing them into the house in those flimsy plastic bags the store provides.

That's when it happens.

The bottom breaks in one bag like a ruptured spleen and out tumbles something that from the sound of it hitting the hard tile floor I know instantly is a very large glass container.

It's a quart of olive oil.

I look down at my shoes. They now reside in a lake of golden oil. Their spiffy gray canvas sides are splashed with dark swirls of Italy's finest.

In that instant, my tennis shoes enter the mature phase of their lives. From here on out they will be sheer grunge.

Walk Another Mile in Those Shoes
I did try washing them. At first it appeared that the stains were almost gone. True, the heat of the dryer caused some of the rubber trim to start to melt away, but the shoes looked so much better!

I was deceived.

Soon those stains began to come back. The damaged areas of the canvas seemed to magnetically attract dirt. The oil spots darkened, turned brown.

Rating
Do I really love these shoes or am I just hanging on to them because of what they could have been?

Or am I trying to do what my father always called "get my money's worth" which meant he wouldn't toss anything until it had reached the point of decomposition or had converted itself into particles of rust?
Or could it be I'm futilely clinging to the romantic idea of these shoes the same way I cherish the notion I've always had that I will actually master the French language (although, let's face it, after much study I have as much proficiency in le francais as my dog Bullwinkle has in English)?

Or is this just a blatant guy thing?

I say any object that can provoke such existential, probingly deep questions can't be all bad. They may be ugly, but in quite an anatomical stretch they make my feet speak to my head. For that reason I'll rate theses shoes a solid 3 stars ««« - V.W.

Review of My Typewriter (or Keys on Ice)

Today the two-tone blue Smith-Corona portable sits on a high shelf. I've owned it since I left for college, a young man with stories filling his head.

About thirty years ago something came between us and it changed our relationship.

It was like a comet colliding with Planet Earth. Wham! The world shook. A puff of dust obscured reality. Then the dust settled. I'm talking about the arrival of a new technology. We shook our heads in wonder. Then we began using this enticing thing that had come into our midst and offered so many advantages.

This was in the 1980s. The computer age had arrived. My typewriter, essentially, died right where it stood...

When the Mode Becomes the Muse...
As everyone knows, the computer easily won the allegiance of 99% of writers, including Van Winkle. How could it not? It offers an easy way to correct everything from misspellings to an infelicitous phrasing.

Let me take a second to type out the computer's chief competitive advantage for everyone to see:

A computer = Free do-over

But I think there's a way in which my old hunk-of-steel typewriter remains the forgotten king of the technology heap. It's true. The typewriter is the original all-in-one device.

The typewriter is also the printer.

The practical implication is that a typewriter has always required a high degree of commitment to whatever one is writing. Think a thought and communicate it to your fingertips and it will appear a second later on a piece of paper in black ink.

Think, hit, print.

It's going to require a lot of erasing or some stern swipes of Wite-Out to take the words back.

For this reason, tentativeness and hesitation and endless backspacing, highlighting, deleting, and paragraph moving have no place in the typing-writing process.

Instead, it's like standing in a corner at a party and spotting an attractive person.

Without rehearsing over and over in the mind a pickup line and the proper je ne sais pas quoi inflection, you get your fingers in the right position, walk up to that person, and you smile. And then you lean forward and start "typing" what you have to say and every word had better count...

Hello. You look like someone interesting.

I'd like to get to know you if you'll let me...

Exploding Typewriter
It must be recognized that typewriters are not without their drawbacks. In fact, I know of some writers who have had major problems.

In The Writing Life Annie Dillard tells of the time she was upstairs in her house and she heard a rumbling from below. She found the source of the ruckus downstairs in her study where her typewriter was glowing and smoking. Before her eyes it grew worse:

I saw at once that the typewriter was erupting. The old green Smith-Corona typewriter on the table was exploding with fire and ash. Showers of sparks shot out of its caldera—the dark hollow in in which the keys lie. Smoke and cinders poured out, noises exploded and spattered, black dense smoke rose up and a wild, deep fire lighted the whole thing. It shot sparks.

This all too absurd fantasy ends the next day when Dillard cleans the typewriter and announces, "I have had no trouble since." Then she adds an amusing note of frisson in the final sentence of the chapter:

Of course, now I know it can happen.

Getting Hammered
In 2002 Judy Blunt published a memoir entitled Breaking Free. In it she told of her depressing life as a young wife on a Wyoming ranch, which led to her fleeing said ranch. The book caused some controversy.

The problem was a scene in the first chapter of the book in which Ms. Blunt dramatized how her father-in-law, angry because she was late bringing lunch to the table, came into her room where she had her typewriter. He took the machine outside into the yard and beat on it with a sledgehammer.

Please don't destroy this typewriter from the 1930s.
It's gorgeous and I bought it as a collectible!

When the book appeared, the father-in-law, highly irate and perhaps feeling a bit litigious, said this event never happened.

A red-faced Ms. Blunt had to admit that she had exaggerated the facts to heighten the conflict.

In truth the incident involved the old man pulling the plug on her electric typewriter and shouting at her. No sledgehammers were involved.

I'm glad the author made a public correction in an interview. Because, you see, I was having trouble understanding why anyone out West would try to kill a typewriter with any kind of hammer.

The man was a rancher! He should have run over the typewriter with a tractor or a pickup truck until it resembled shiny roadkill.

Or he should have taken it down to the river and thrown it in into the deepest whirlpool.

Jack Kerouac's typewriter

As I see it, typewriters deserve respect. Even when you're killing them. You're not executing some knave but veritable royalty.
Just think of Jack Kerouac typing On the Road on a 120-foot long "scroll" of paper he continuously fed through his typewriter.

Such a BIG and WORTHY machine should die a notable death.

With a bang, not a clang!

Typing Posture
In the days of yesteryear I drafted all my fiction by hand on either notebook paper or within the pages of ruled notebooks. After that I turned to the two-tone blue Smith-Corona typewriter to produce the final product. I wrote a collection of short stories and a novel with that typewriter, both of which were published, but I didn't connect this success to the typewriter. The computer came along and whisked me away for the remainder of my writing life.

Still, I remember well how those early works required the hard labor of typing multiple drafts until I got the words right. When I add it up, I realize several thousand pages rolled through the typewriter just to produce the sum total of two books. The work was so physical that my back began to hurt.

So I learned to type standing up.

This was about the same time Elton John became famous for kicking over piano benches and acrobatically banging the ivories from an upright position. Crocodile Rock! Bennie and the Jets! The crowd went wild. In my empty apartment the only sound was the keys clacking and my occasional sighing. But my back? It felt a whole lot better.

Rating
The Smith-Corona has remained in my life, albeit at the margins. After I began teaching at a university I placed it on a table in my office on campus. When our son was a toddler I took him to the office and, fascinated by the chrome return bar and those tantalizing keys, he urged me to shove a piece of a paper into the slot, roll the platen, and have me help his little fingers poke at the keys and print a few words.

It is magical.

Most of the time when I stop using things, I get rid of them. They get traded in like my cars or they go to a garage sale or Goodwill or end up in the trash can. Not my typewriter.

Both the typewriter and I know. My computers are convenient, lightweight, and quick, but I'll never save a computer and enshrine it on a shelf. The computers are casual, colorful affairs, the typewriter is someone I've loved. Its key pressure and clacking sounds and dinging return bell and its twenty-pound weight are aspects I know intimately.

Just look at you, Smith-Corona. You traveled from Anchorage, Alaska to go to college with me in New Haven, Connecticut. You got me through a nearly 100-page senior economics paper. Whew! In your greatest feat, you churned out pages that were mailed to New York City and eventually they came back to me in published form. And those are just the highlights. That's reason enough to rate you four stars **** - V.W.



Clifford Brown, A Life in Jazz (Black History Month - Part 2)

Life is odd. Horrible things can happen (like my ancestors owning human beings as slaves, see previous VWP post), but from such horrible things sometimes quite different states of being emerge. Unambiguously good things.

Like jazz.

If African-Americans had never been loaded aboard slave ships and brought to a distant land, if they had remained just what they were, Africans, who would have invented this most American of music?

And without jazz I wouldn't be telling the story of quite likely the greatest and least known trumpeter of all time.

Clifford Brown.

MY MUSICAL MELANGE
Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky. This was the music I grew up with. My father wanted his sons to be exposed to the best of culture, and in the Western world, European classical music was considered to be at the pinnacle of the human effort to turn instruments and notes into compelling sounds.

My first musical love...classical music.

Our father purchased stacks of RCA and Columbia Masterwork records at what happened to be a propititious moment. He could still get his boys' attention by dropping the needle on, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto.

A few years later, though, the British Invasion of rock 'n' roll roared ashore in America. Our ears tuned into a new sound. Goodbye, Ludwig. Roll over, Beethoven!

Oh, I still liked, even loved, classical music, but it took a backseat in my musical interests. Rock music was so much more dashboard and steering wheel direct. For starters it was louder and the singers sang words about what was on their minds.

Classical music, on the other hand, was more of an extended impression of a feeling, that gradually unfolded and shaped the listener's soul over time. Why a symphony might require an entire forty minutes of listening! Rock music tended to serve up three-minutes doses of sound that gouged, carved, and stomped the psyche in satisfying ways.

If classical music was courtship and seduction and love letters written back and forth, rock music was a vivid one-night stand, a sudden jolt of a drug to the head...

But where was jazz in those days? Actually, we were living in the golden age of it, the late 1950s and early 1960s, but I had no idea. I heard jazz, in a degraded or altered form, and no one told me that was what it was.

Call it jazz...because it sorta is.

Jazz was in Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther Theme". It was in every other note of the elevator music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. It was even in the only instrumental The Beatles ever wrote, the blues inflected "Flying" on their Magical Mystery Tour album, and in the lonely saxophone wail of "Us and Them" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

And why was it I loved the massed brass, and most of all the horn solos, when I sat down and listened to the Blood, Sweat and Tears album or one of those classic numbered double albums by Chicago--I, II and III?

I was starting to hear the music I was destined to fall in love with.

JAZZ TRUMPET'S MISSING LINK
Decades later I probably listen to more jazz on a daily basis than any other kind of music. I'm no jazz expert, but I like how jazz shares with classical music the idea of being a musical impression of an emotion. I like too how, unlike classical, the musicians have the freedom to solo and display their technical virtuosity as well as express how they're feeling while the tune progresses.

I'm still making discoveries in jazz. Like the trumpeter Clifford Brown aka "Brownie."

For me it's like finding out that between Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms there was another equally great composer, but somehow I never heard of him until now.

Of course, anyone who is very conversant in jazz will have heard of Brownie, but the casual jazz listener not so much. In fact, no one even assayed a book-length biography of the man until 2001.

It's not that Clifford Brown didn't have the chops to match Miles Davis. He did and then some. It's not that he didn't play with the greats of his time like Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins, He did. It's that he died young. Way too young.

Brownie was just getting started.

ON THE CUSP (OF GREATNESS)

It is the summer of '56 and it is Clifford Brown's wedding anniversary. Normally he and his wife LaRue travel from gig to gig together. They have a baby this year and they would even bring the baby along.

In those days the jazz musician typically traveled by car. It's a hard way to make a living even if you're 25-year-old Clifford Brown who is seen by critics as the next great jazz star. He already has an album whose title sum up the possibilities:

New Star on the Horizon.

Brownie doesn't take wife LaRue and baby Clifford, Jr. on the trip on June 25, 1956. LaRue goes to her mother's house because she had never met her grandson. And it is her birthday. Yes, she and Clifford had married on her birthday two years earlier.

The birthday party is being held at the home of saxophonist Harold Land and his wife. Land isn't in the current incarnation of the Clifford Brown quartet, but he remains a close friend. Someone comes over and says there's a call for LaRue at her mother's house down the street.

THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED
Brownie has been playing at Music City, a jazz club in Philadelphia. After the show the band packs up, drummer Max Roach and Sonny "Newk" Rollins, the saxophonist in one car. Brownie travels with his pianist Richie Powell (younger brother of the great pianist Bud Powell) and Richie's wife in the other car. They hit the road, caravan style, Roach and Rollins in the lead car.

The band is headed to Chicago for more music making. Brownie and the Powells are riding in Brownie's 1955 Buick.

It is raining as June 25 heads toward June 26, 1956.

After midnight, Brownie's car stops off on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Bedford, PA to buy gas. It's the last time Brownie and the Powells are seen alive.

Nancy Powell, who is now driving, misses a curve, smashes through a guardrail, and the car falls down a 75-foot embankment.

The rain continues to fall.

"...BROWN IS BEAUTIFUL." - Kalamu ya Saaam, poet/author
If Clifford Brown had lived, then what? For one thing, I wouldn't be writing a blog post about him in 2011 anymore than there's a need for someone to post about Miles Davis and what a great jazz musician he was. Everyone with even passing familiarity with jazz would know the name.

Brownie's solo for "Daahoud"

Brownie only had five years in which he recorded and played and positioned himself in the forefront of the future of jazz. It is an amazing accomplishment that is validated by the recordings. Sometimes Brownie's playing is, no other way to put it, jaw dropping the way you listen to a Charlie Parker sax solo and wonder how any human can have the breath and finger speed to produce such sounds. Other times, with the riotous bebop pushed to the background and replaced by a ballad, Brownie is simply moving and soulful.

He could do it all. Always his horn playing is impeccable and intelligent and commands my attention.

But there's one more thing that's always mentioned about Brownie. In an age when many jazz musicians followed the Charlie Parker model of dissipation--burn bright and burn out young--Brownie was a clean living family man. He didn't touch drugs. He was gentle and kindly. This is not myth making. It's what all those who knew him said upon learning of his death. The world had lost a great jazz musician and a great human being.

CODA? NOT QUITE
There were tapes in the trunk of the 1955 Buick that took Brownie to his death. He liked to record his rehearsals and gigs on his own reel to reel machine. Only one of the tapes was labeled, which means that as the tapes have finally come out on CDs in recent years people are left to guess where and when Brownie is playing. But what really matters is that he is playing. He will keep on playing. That's my definition of classical. - V.W.

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The Best Super Bowl Halftime Show (That Never Was)

It's not fair to be too hard on the halftime entertainment at the Super Bowl. You must consider how far this activity had to come in forty-five years to arrive at the present moment.

In 1967 at Super Bowl I the crowd and TV viewers "thrilled" to the trumpet sounds of Al Hirt and the marching bands of two colleges.

Al Hirt was so "big" they brought him back (with Carol Channing)
for SB VI in '72. Love that Goodyear blimp about to bomb his head...

This pattern of featuring marching bands along with an artist whose LPs resided beside your aged aunt's and uncle's record player next to key albums by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Nelson Riddle persisted for years.

This was the other, older side of America. As far as it was concerned rock 'n' roll had never been invented.

The Super Bowl show was stuck back in the Big Band Era (Woody Herman, Ella Fitzgerald) or Broadway or tourist schmaltz (Pete Fountain, Carol Channing).

We can only be thankful we were somehow spared Andy Williams and Pat Boone.

When in 1988 at Super Bowl XXII rock 'n' roll finally arrived it came in the form of (hold your breath) Chubby Checkers. The Super Bowl's entertainment was literally almost 30 years behind the times.

The Up With People Era
When the Super Bowl folks finally realized, "You know we need to have something to pull in the younger generation," they just didn't get it. They brought out Up With People. They thought "Well, this group of clean-cut kids with major orthodontic smiles are young and they'll appeal to Grandma and Grandpa, too."

That was the problem.

Up With People (whom I'm sure are lovely and very "up" people) had its genesis as a singing group that recruited youth from around the country and then the globe. They sang in, no surprise, an upbeat fashion.about those great themes of the sixties: love, peace, and togetherness, but they did it minus the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The very name of the group was a reaction to the sixties' youth movement that chanted "Down with the establishment!" "Down with whitey!"

These kids asked us to think UP!

They would first appear at the 1976 Super Bowl X and make three more appearances.

I'm sorry to say, UWP was the musical offspring of Al Hirt and Carol Channing. If any person under 30 was watching the Super Bowl by 1980 the song that came to mind as halftime approached again was "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who. This song was already a rock 'n' roll relic, but it startlingly conveyed what was wrong with the Super Bowl musical fare.

Halftime show? Are you kidding? It's always the same drivel!

A Change is Gonna Come
In 1990 it seemed the NFL finally awoke from their cultural coma. They must have said, "The masses are restless. They're fixing snacks during halftime and not watching the show and the commercials. We need an injection of youth and acts that are actually still on the charts, not on the easy listening radio station."

You want youth, the NFL was going to give you youth: The New Kids on the Block. Now that's young!

Yeh. So was the Partridge Family.

But the next year it was Gloria Estefan. Hey, Gloria is on the charts! And she's from Miami and the Super Bowl that year was in...the Minneapolis Metrodome. Well, I never said it made complete sense.

Then came Super Bowl XXVII in the Rose Bowl. Michael Jackson. True it was 1993 and Thriller and Bad were distant memories, but MJ always was tabloid fresh as befits a global celebrity. And since at the Super Bowl the quality of the actual music at halftime show will always be handicapped by the need to set up quickly in the middle of a stadium, it helped that Michael could dance. Like no one else. May he rest in peace. There will never be another one like him.

The one and only.

Evolution Super Bowl Style
By now the Super Bowl powers that be had the memo in hand. They had to feature either current charting popular acts or classic rockers. The music should be loud, energetic and gaudily presented.

So they brought on country music stars. Then they visited the other side of the pop charts and gave us Aeorosmith, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Boyz II Men, various Motown stars, and Phil Collins.

In 2002 they brought on the rock band best suited for a 9/11 tribute: U2.

Bono, the Irishman who is an American patriot.
You've gotta love it...especially at such a preeminently American event.

Can you say HUGE? This is the kind of thing people would tune in to see.

In 2004 the halftime show discovered one other thing. The performance should not be sexy. Justin Timberlake gave the tug that was watched and talked about around the world. That oh so convenient "wardrobe malfunction."

At the moment the nethermost point of Janet Jackson's 38-year-old, pierced mammary gland touched the humid Houston night air some portion of America was scandalized. The rest was "tit-i-lated" but to no avail. An FCC fine followed. Everyone except nursing babies would forthwith be protected from visual collisions with female breasts. So this sort of thing wasn't going to happen again.

Like a bandage dressing the flesh wound, Paul McCartney arrived the next year. Legend! Former Beatle! Superstar solo artist! It was milk and cookies pop (during the most glib moments) and, come to think of it, closer to Up With People than some of us Beatle worshippers might feel comfortable admitting.

There's a shadow hanging over Sir Paul...
but he still believes in yesterday.

But Paul made it safe to watch the Super Bowl halftime show again. Bring on the Stones, Prince, Bruce, Tom Petty and...

Who Are They?
Last year I decided to watch the halftime show out of a sort grim respect for a rock band that once was the most iconoclastic and innovative that ever burned up a stage or smashed a drum kit. The Who.

Before: The greatest rock performers of all time...

Of course, when only two of the four original members are left, I think truth in advertising means they ought to add another character to their name...The Who?

After (40 years): 1/2 a Who and Who Cares?

The constantly changing lights on stage were the best part IMHO. The music was loud, but the band, like all others before it, opted for a medley of hits.

In the interest of total candor I must say that I strongly dislike medleys of hits. I've heard the song being played multiple times, perhaps hundreds (that's why it's a "hit"), and now the band deigns to play a short snippet and then segue into the snippet of another hit and another.

Medleys? Ugh. I feel like I'm listening to a machine that's slicing and dicing music. It's just an exercise.

Sure, within its medley The Who(?) played about two minutes and 15 seconds of "Won't Get Fooled Again," my favorite song back in my bell bottom jeans day. But that means 5 minutes of the greatest rock 'n' sturm and drang ever penned was lopped off. Won't get fooled again,  indeed. Which leads me to propose a constructive alternative.

Four Halftime Shows We'd Like to See

1. A man or a woman on a stage with just an acoustic guitar. Twenty minutes, 3 soul-stirring songs. Your nominations for this person are now being accepted.
2.  A band that plays an extended version of a familiar hit song for 10 minutes, then has the nerve to send the lead singer to mic to announce, "This is a new one we just wrote. We want to play it for the first time." 
3. Ice skaters. Why not? If we can send men to the moon and back, we can create a large rink quickly mid-field (and do a better job than the Teflon one they set up in front of Gloria Estefan in '92). And ice skating always looks good on TV.
4.  Up With People. Did I just say that? Yes! Why not bring back the original performers, now graying boomers in the their golden years. Because, you know what, after all we've been through with this show, maybe they won't seem that bad. And I just bet some of them can make some fancy moves with their aluminum walkers and canes.



The Up With People Super Bowl Challenge:
"Let's get UP! tonight!"



- V.W.

The Worst Super Bowl Ever

This is how the world looks outside my front door today.
The temperature is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind is blowing, creating an effective "wind chill" temperature of -10 F.

Closures for all schools and universities have been announced for the second day in a row. This is unprecedented in these Sun Belt parts.

None of this has anything to do with the Super Bowl V, the 1971 contest between the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Cowboys, my nominee for "worst Super Bowl game ever played."

Please, Don't Call It "Super"
The funny thing that occurs to me about Super Bowl V is how little I remember of the details surrounding the game and yet how sure I am of my distaste for it.  I felt halfway in that this was the most boring "big game" I'd ever tried to sit through.



Mercifully, the winning kick by the Colts in the final seconds
ends this numb-fest.

Super Bowl V  was a threshhold experience for me. Football would start to change on that day. For example, the Dallas coach Tom Landry preferred to play at quarterback a fellow named Craig Morton over young former Navy, Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. Though Staubach was destined to be a future Hall of Famer, at that point Morton would obediently call the plays that the coach sent in and Staubach sometimes didn't.

Coach Landry, like all future NFL coaches, wanted to call all the plays.

Can't play football without the ear goggles...

Yes, we were moving toward the era of the Motorola headset, the technicalization of the game of professional football. As coachng staff and trainers proliferated, it felt like the players had walked onto a cruise ship with an enormous uniformed staff who watched over them and scheduled their every movement.


It would become unimaginable that on the NFL game-day cruise that a player might try to think for himself. Instead, he had become like a piece on a chess board. It was all so complicated that you now had separate coaches for the offense and the defense who called the plays when each unit was on the field. You still had the head coach, but I'm not sure what he did...

The wonders of technology. You could now buy a football field
and have it delivered...just like a rug.

Super Bowl V was also the first Super Bowl played on plastic grass, euphemistically called "artifical turf." Another switch in atmosphere and ethos: "This game is made possible by the 3M Corporation."

The game was becoming less a contest than an entertainment in which the goal was to eliminate risk and tweak every imaginable movement in a massive choreography that might even include injecting drugs into players to enhance what they did on the field. It didn't matter that this meant adopting what could seem at times an arrid, technical style of play. You did what you had to do because the money invested in this production had become enormous and you had better win so you could keep on selling tickets to the show.

Sure I would find future football highlights, some of them occurring in Super Bowls even, but overall nothing would match the days of fiery, principaled coaches like Vince Lombardi and the players making about the same annual salary as a lawyer instead of the gross national product of some small republic.

Stinking Up the Orange Bowl
Super Bowl V, variously called "The Blunder Bowl," "The Stupor Bowl" or the "The Blooper Bowl," stands out as an example of how even with the best laid plans and high expectations by players and coaches you can still flop.

I only vaguely (and uncertainly) remember that I watched the game at a high school friend's house in Anchorage Alaska. It was in the basement where they had a color TV.

Color didn't improve what was taking place on the field in Miami. The Colts and Cowboys would combine to lose the ball to the other side 11 times, 7 of these turnovers by the Colts, an appalling record. The Cowboys' own ugliness came in the form of 10 penalities, another record.

Chuck Howley, the MVP who didn't wanna be...

What this meant practically speaking was that it was like watching two people take turns trying to drive a car with a manual and neither of them could manage the shifting. They'd lurch forward, then go backwards. Then they'd stall the engine all together. Then the other one would try.

It was the only time the Most Valuable Player award was a matter of massive head scratching. Everyone who took part in the game, as we'd bluntly put it today, sucked. So the award was given to a player on the losing team, the Cowboys' Chuck Howley who intercepted two of the opposition's passes.

Howley, God bless him, refused the award.

I Bench Myself
That Super Bowl was a game changer (pun intended) for me vis a vis my football watching habits. Thereafter, I would enjoy the NFL regular season and perhaps some of the playoffs, but the Super Bowl seemed to me less than worthy of my attention.

This placed me outside the mainstream culture which responded to the increasing hype surrounding each Super Bowl as if it had to be the best and most compelling football played. The viewership in America and around the world, with a few annual blips, kept going up.

In the meantime, I'd circle that Sunday on the calendar, then to go to the grocery store while everyone was inside their houses having their cocktail meatballs, beer, popcorn and watching the game. The grocery store was empty. The checkout clerks looked like the last people left on board the Titanic. Working on Super Bowl Sunday was the last thing they wanted to do.

A Crack in My Super Bowl Boycott
In the early eighties I married my wife who was an executive in advertising. Of course, she was into ads. We began taping the Super Bowl and fast forwarding it later to get to the TV spots. Here was a whole new way to appreciate the event!

Also, our son came along and I thought I ought to give him a chance at seeing what the Super Bowl was about. He could then make up his own mind.

The year I decided to initiate him (2003) happened to feature the Oakland Raiders playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Pirate Bowl. How cool is that, son?

You like the logo, you'll love the team!
So the theory goes...

I decided to root for the Raiders. I've always liked their black and silver uniforms and that football pirate on their helmet.

So we went shopping for Raiders' wear the day before the game. Problem. Nobody in this part of the country cares about either coast. There was nothing for sale except for Dallas Cowboy regalia. Talk about irrelevant.

No problem. We'll make some snacks and wear non-logoed black T-shirts and sit down and watch the game, father and son.

Within minutes of  the kickoff there was a problem. The Raiders put on their own Blooper Bowl. The awesome passing game we expected from Raider QB Rick Gannon never materialized. Every time the ball was snapped to him, it seemed like Tampa Bay poured through and sacked him or harassed him into throwing interceptions (5 in all).

The Raiders had no chance. Final score: Tampa Bay 48, Oakland 21. Son now hates football.

Conclusion: A Bowl of My Own
The fact that I'm Van Winkled and this means I can't watch Super Bowl XLV this year isn't exactly breaking my heart.

But I'll wish for the commercials, which are often clever and lavish.

And I will regret not seeing moments like some offered us in recent years: the Titans' last play lurch that fell one yard short of winning the game in 2000, David Tyree's "helmet catch" that put the Giants in a position to upset the Patriots at the very end of Super Bowl XLIV, the "Aint's" showing last year that they had what it took to keep coming back until they had the Vince Lombardi Trophy in hand.

Still, looking a few days down the road, I'm totally all right with not seeing the game. I'm planning to sit down and spend a couple of hours with the Tax Bowl. Yes, I'm going to use the Super Bowl time slot to perform the annual ritual of striding onto the gridded lines and boxes of Form 1040A. It's a challenge. As everyone knows, Uncle Sam has a tough defense and he doesn't like for you to score. - V.W.

Review of My Dictionary

Is there an iPad or one of these in everyone's future?

I have a friend who is what used to be called a "booster." Boosters once were commonly found lurking among Rotarians and other such groups of business people. They were quite often loudly heard boosting the latest greatest thing that was, incidentally, likely to make some people in suits a lot of money. A power plant, a factory, a new subdivision.

When it comes to digital technology, especially the use of portable versions of the computer (e.g., iPhone, iPad, e-readers), my friend sees almost limitless possibilities for their use in education. He emphasizes how through these devices a cornucopia of knowledge on the Internet can be delivered to students at anytime. Simultaneously students can use the devices to easily connect with peers and discuss what they're learning.

 booster: 1 a person who  boosts; an enthusiastic supporter     

In his enthusiasm my friend goes around the country, and sometimes overseas, and delivers speeches about what is unfolding. He says the change we're looking at is a on par with  the one wrought by Gutenberg's printing press when, for the first time, books potentially could be made available to the masses, not just to the wealthy or a cloistered religious elite.

He forecasts the new prevalence of the digital version of ink (especially once all the old books are scanned into the new system) will soon allow each of us to hold in his or her hand all the world's writings from all eras, past and present. There will be no barriers to information in terms of time to acquire it or having to relocate ourselves to access it. It will all come to us instantaneously.

This means books, as we've known them for centuries--physical volumes housed in libraries and bookstores--are essentially dead.

He may be right. 
Or it could be that he's only partially right. Or it could be he's completely wrong.

Our son, who at age 12 is savvy beyond his years, reminded me when we were out walking last night how the Victorians thought steam was final word in technological marvels. Once they had steam in their factories and driving their ships, they thought it was only a matter of time before everything would be powered by steam. Horseless carriages. Crafts for flying through the air. But the Victorians were wrong about steam. It's heyday was something less than a hundred years.

About the only steam-anything you'll buy today is a steam iron.

The Good, The Bad, the Jury's Still Out: Even if my friend is correct that books and book stores and libraries as we have known them are bound to go away, I'm not prepared to concede that every aspect of "new" is "better." In fact, if I consult my dictionary, nowhere in the definition of "new" am I told that "new" always equals "better."

Of course, sometimes the new thing brought to the market is indeed better (caller ID and men's briefs are two of my favorites), but sometimes it's eventually recognized as bad (DDT and Yugos). Most often what is new is a confusing mix of costs and benefits (women's high heels and Dipping Dots).

Digitizing Our Books: It's easy to see a benefit to having books available through electronic devices. When I travel I don't have to pack up the heavy things and squeeze them into the overhead bin on the airplane or pay to check a bag containing them. I can even foresee the day when I will rejoice that our son's textbooks are offered to him digitally and he can put away the crippling 30 lb. backpack he lugs to school each day. The portability of e-books is a decided advantage.

But there may be costs the boosters have not recognized yet.

Start with the promise of access. Is it always really good that I stay deep in the couch cushions at home and pull up book after book with a tap of my finger? Frankly, I enjoy driving to my downtown library and following the numbers on the shelves until I find the book I seek out. Of course, the entire process is far from instant, taking me about 45-minutes round-trip and, yes, I will burn fossil fuel when I drive my car.

  enjoy: 1 to take pleasure or satisfaction in 2 to have for one's use, benefit

But on the other side of the balance sheet, in the library I will meet adults and bump up against excited children. I will smell the books. I'll smile at the woman who checks out the books. I'll even do enough walking that a few calories will be burned as opposed to staying at home on the couch. So there's an entire social, physical, and mental health benefit to the process.

And still another benefit awaits me when I get home with my analogue version of the book. As I sit down and open up a physical book, I am able to experience the sensation that knowledge and words have weight and texture.

She's So Heavy:

Meet my dictionary. If it were human, it would now be old
enough to have graduated from college. But could it find
a job in this down economy?

The mention of weight brings me to just about my favorite book. It also happens to be the largest.

As I pick up my Webster's Third College Dictionary and thumb through it, what I balance in my lap amounts to a heavy portion of the best of what our language has to offer. How heavy? I decided to take the dictionary to the bathroom scales.

Four and a half pounds! But actually that is nothing.

If I want the complete riches of the English language, then it comes in a Vatican-size residence for the text: the Oxford English Dictionary in twenty volumes.

A few years ago a man in England named Ammon Shea read the entire OED which amounted to 21,731 pages. He read some days for 10 hours straight and it still took him a year to get through the entire work. It was hard going, but he reported in the book he wrote about his experience that it was also rewarding. Obviously he learned some new words. A lot of them. But he also thought the panoply of vocabulary had aspects of reading a great novel.


                    

                              Ammon Shea at work reading...the dictionary.

Word Fights: The dictionary figures in one of my favorite classroom stories from college. 

John Hersey 1914-1993

When I was at Yale I was fortunate to be able to take a creative writing class from the writer John Hersey. Hersey was a tall, patrician man and the author of many books and novels, including the bestsellers A Bell For Adano, A Single Pebble, and Hiroshima, the latter being the definitive on-the-ground account of what it was like when the first atomic bomb was dropped. Everyone was in the class because Hersey represented a rare chance to study writing at the feet of (intake of breath) a Famous Writer.

Hersey was kind to me. Believing I had notable talent, he personally submitted a story of mine to The Atlantic Monthly. He was also fairly acerbic as he upheld the highest standards in writing. One day he began bashing the dictionary. The dictionary? Yes indeed.

"In Webster's Third, damn them, they've made 'nauseated' and 'nauseous' synonyms. They've destroyed a perfectly good word," he lectured. "Soon we'll all be reduced to just making grunts!"

Hmm. This sounded serious. My profs, especially civilized ones like Mr. Hersey, didn't usually cuss. But perhaps it was called for. People grunting throughout the day did seem an unpleasant prospect. As Mr. Hersey backed up and gave us some definitions, I understood why he thought the new version of the dictionary was doing us all a disfavor.

That day I learned from the writer (and never forgot) that "nauseated," means "I feel like I'm going to vomit." "Nauseous" (pre-Webster's Third) can only mean "capable of inducing a nauseated feeling in someone" as in "They encountered a nauseous odor." So if someone pre-Webster's Third said, "I feel nauseous," they were actually (stupidly) saying, "I feel like I can make other people throw up!"

But Webster's Third, in a language liberalizing move, had added a second definition to describe how some people misused "nauseous" when they really ought to say "nauseated." For an old-school fellow like Mr. Hersey this was a red flag in front of the bull. A dictionary ought to prescribe, not describe; otherwise, the misuage was legitimized.

All right, good and well. Still, I also could see how people confused the two words and meanings. Doesn't saying "I feel nauseous" just sound, well, more sickly, more nauseated?

The larger lesson stayed with me in any case. Words are important. This is a creedal statement for anyone who even dreams of being a writer.

  creed: 1 a brief authoritative formula of religous belief 2 a set of fundamental beliefs

Consider just one page of the dictionary...

Dictionary Adventures:
A number of years ago I wrote a novel that I never could get published. The heroine is a famous but disenchanted Hollywood movie star who slips away to a small seaside town in Oregon. There she meets a man nicknamed Shep. Shep is a fisherman whom everyone regards as a sort of holy fool. Shep is always talking extravagantly about the nature of reality, the sheer miracle of it all. One day he pulls out a staggeringly massive unabridged Webster's, turns to one of the "C" pages, and starts lecturing the actress on the definitions . As he nears the end of his two-page soliloquy he's  really getting worked up.

            "And we must not overlook coriums, attached to every bug! Here we find the long middle part of the beetle’s wing. What can that wing do? It traverses great distances and, just as easily, folds up and disappears beneath the streamlined armor in order to join a body waddling across the hard ground.

            "Oh! The coquilla nut! You’ll find it in the top of the piassava palm that grows in Brazil. Break open the nut and smash and knead its meat and you obtain rich oil. However, do not discard the hard brown shell. Touched by human hands and tools a different result is derived. It can be carved and polished like the finest ivory.

            "Please don’t forget the short tale of cordierite. Formed in the fiery belly of the earth it is coughed to the surface. The colors dazzle the eyes of those who pick it up and hold the bluish crystal in their palms. And it finds its way into necklaces and jewelry and where it has often brought delight to kings and queens.

            "And I still have not told you of the coquito, that palm of Chili whose sap is sweet and becomes a tongue tingling wine, or the impossibly beautiful Ionian isle of Corfu, or the amazing coreopsis, those plants with dazzling yellow, crimson or maroon flowers, or the cordgrass that grows ten feet high in the middle of forbidding tidal mud flats, or the delicately drooping pink and white flowers of the coral bells blooming nearly half the year on our own continent, or the deeply hued Cordovan leather, made from fine goat skins obtainable in Spain, and the men and women who walk the dusty roads in shoes made of it.”

            Shep stopped speaking.  He reached a hand to his forehead.  The fingers stayed there as if feeling the after-vibrations of his own thought...         

Rating Time: My character's point is that the dictionary is not just information. It's a collection of names for wonders that humans have encountered. Every entry there contains a story. The words have dimension because they are attached to human actions and thoughts. Holding the book in our hands, running our fingers over the paper as we turn pages, picking up a pencil or highlighter and rubbing our own response into the page encourages us to realize this dimensionality.



I treasure the dents on the cover as well as the barely visible
Simon & Schuster logo in bas relief.

But what happens if we flatten all that out digitally? I would have no Webster's 3rd with beat-up indents in the cover and creases in the pages. Using a computer as the sole source of my information I would acquire words the way someone who is fed through a tube gains calories. The tube does its job, efficiently and quickly, yet the flavor and the pleasure of chewing have been removed.

I've had my trusty Webster's Third for 22 years. It serves me well. Since I'm enough of a language liberal to overlook the "nauseated" and "nauseous" scandal, I can give it without qualms four stars **** - V.W.

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