THE PAGE TURNS

October 17, 2024October 18, 2024

The Revolution Will Be Televised and (Saturday Night) Live

Movie poster from Saturday Night, by Sony pictures.

In October of 1975, most of the popular shows on television looked backward. The country was emerging from the chaos of the Vietnam War, the fall of the Nixon administration, economic misery, and civil rights protests. It should not be a surprise that the most watched shows were things like Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days, and the Waltons — misty-eyed nostalgia for the fun of the malt shop, the slapstick antics of the gals at the bottling plant, and the family bliss of the good ol’ Depression days. There were some controversial shows as well. A few groundbreaking comedies–All in the Family, MASH, Maude, and Mary Tyler Moore–all pushed the envelope in different ways. But more shows yearned for simpler times.

This was the environment in which Lorne Michaels pitched the idea of Saturday Night Live to NBC executives. The movie Saturday Night describes those precarious ninety minutes before the show first went on the air, when maybe it still might not have made it to the air. It’s a suspense-filled narrative, as Michaels (Gabriel Labelle) struggles with technical problems, network pressures, friction among the cast, too much content, and an impending sense of doom. If you’re under forty, you’ll find the behind-the-scenes narrative fascinating and wonder how the chuckleheads ever got this thing in front of the American public. But if you’re old enough to remember the times, you’ll find it holds a mirror up to what those times were really like. Some of the reviews which have criticized the movie as too mild were clearly written by those who don’t remember. I do.

October 10, 2024October 12, 2024

Go to College, If Only Because It Makes Looking at Data More Fun

Higher Education, photo of the Campanile at CAL by kajmeister.

If you had studied Economics, you would know why giving substantial tax breaks beginning in the 1990s for 4-year undergraduate degrees ultimately raised the prices of 4-year undergraduate degrees. If you had studied Communication Studies, you’d be able to spot the rhetorical fallacies of Ivy League graduates who now grouse about the decline of education. You’d know that the Wall Street Journal’s college ranking system based on ROIs uses circular logic. If you’d studied Statistics, you’d wonder why journalists only refer to data showing the last five years, and you’d quickly learn that “public confidence” is not the cause of the decline in enrollment. English major? you’d see how different motivations drive people’s choices. Gender or Multilcultural studies? You’d notice the change in who graces the mastheads of universities today. College is useful for a lot of reasons.

There has been a bunch of — academics might say a “plethora” — of articles recently whining about how people have decided college is a bad idea, how careerism is ruining college, and how it’s just no good (or fun) anymore. I beg to differ.

October 1, 2024October 1, 2024

Elegy for the Oakland A’s

…no one wants to hear from the murderer at the funeral…
Sportswriter Ann Killion, on owner John Fisher’s sham letter of regret.

Some of my lifetime of A’s paraphernalia.

Sports is not really about demigods performing super human feats, even if it sometimes is. It’s not about honoring divine beings, extolling the virtues of gentlemen athletes, or bringing about world peace, even if some claimed that was its purpose. Sports is not even about winning. Sports is about storytelling, stories which become inseparably woven into the fabric of our own lives.

There have been a lot of tears shed this past week at the funeral for the Oakland Athletics, my hometown baseball team. The final games were played last week by Oakland’s quirky, over-achieving players in its aging, industrial monolith of a stadium. Fans and players wept openly, and we’re still crying. I went to a lot of games there, by myself and with friends, wife, kids, in-laws. The A’s Bay Area tenure roughly paralleled mine, and, although I’m not going anywhere, they’re headed off to West Sacramento, to wear jerseys that have no place name on them. The team owners are dreaming of going to Vegas, but all they have so far is an architectural drawing and a hope for public funding.

I was going to write a rant, full of fury at A’s owner John Fisher, who publicly throttled this team as we were all suffered to watch. Like many of the other fans, though, I end up just thinking about my long string of experiences. Forgive me for such a long, maudlin post. Like a good wake, it goes on longer than it should because I just don’t want to tell the deceased goodbye.

The Oakland A’s have always had to play things a little differently, under weird circumstances and not always with poise or polish. They took pride in eccentricity and in showing up to contend with those who had more to begin with.