Monthly Archives: August 2011

To what we’re listening: Root Glen’s Summer EP

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Sure Labor Day is next week, high school football started last week, and August is over tomorrow, but there’s still plenty of time for summer relaxation, and Root Glen, a New Jersey-based rock outfit, can help with that.

Eric Blank (drums), Andres Gonzales (bass), Ross Griswold (lead guitar, vocals), and David Moroney (lead vocals, guitar) describe their sound as “alternative rock of a funky nature,” and I think that’s accurate. The group isn’t afraid to work out over their riffs and grooves, especially in the live setting and especially if they’ve got a dancing audience (as they always do), but the lyrics are always there too, and they come through by way of strong, musical vocal work. The combination of the bottom end– Blank’s drums always pushing ahead, Gonzales’ bass creating a complex, broad foundation– and a top side with the ability to soar on the wings of Moroney’s distinctive, classical voice and Griswold’s melodic guitar lines give the quartet a full, textured sound without getting heavy so as to bog down band or dancers.

Back in late May, the band released Summer, a five-track EP and the first of its planned seasonal releases. Summer does a nice job of showing off different sides of Root Glen, all while remaining under the broad umbrella of the summertime theme. Stream the album or purchase it by naming your own price at http://rootglen.bandcamp.com.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch Root Glen twice, once in Philly and once in D.C., and I recommend East Coast readers in particular check their fall dates on their website. Everyone else can get a feel for their live performances here.

Aggies up the ante

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The New York Times reports:

Texas A&M’s departure from the Big 12 Conference drew closer to reality on Monday when the university’s president, R. Bowen Loftin, sent a letter to the Big 12 board chairman, the Missouri chancellor Brady Deaton, notifying the league that the Aggies would formally withdraw — very likely on Tuesday — according to two college officials with direct knowledge of the decision.

This latest step in the Aggies’ effort to join the Southeastern Conference appears to have two stumbling blocks. The first is Texas A&M’s exit fee from the Big 12, which it has not negotiated. That amount is expected to be close to $15 million. The other is the approval of the S.E.C. presidents. Nine of the 12 would have to vote in favor for Texas A&M to become a member of the conference. It is unlikely that Texas A&M would be this far along in the process without adequate S.E.C. presidential support.

Texas A&M hopes to play in the S.E.C. during the 2012 football season, which would appear to leave the conference with a mathematically clunky 13 teams for one year.

With this move, Texas A&M’s membership in the SEC is far from secured, and a smooth transition into the SEC is not guaranteed. There has been no public statement from the SEC on conference expansion since mid-August, when the conference “reaffirmed [its] satisfaction with the present 12 institutional alignment.”

Rather than negotiate the particulars– including its Big XII exit fees and whether the SEC would operate with an odd-numbered membership (currently it has east and west divisions of six schools each)– behind closed doors, A&M has stepped out into the open, formally making its intentions known to all.

The move does not place any more pressure on the SEC to act, however. A&M is a school that needs a conference– it can’t and won’t operate as an independent– but the SEC is not in danger of losing it to another conference; this pairing is the only logical option, and the SEC should want a foothold in Texas if it is to expand at all.

Even though this decision doesn’t raise the stakes for anyone but A&M, it may make easier a deal that brings it to the SEC. If the conference was nervous about making the invitation before it was sure A&M would accept it, this formal notification of departure from the Big XII would appear to erase any first-mover qualms the SEC might harbor. The ball may be back in the SEC’s court, but Texas A&M has served up a slow floater, and the SEC can and likely will sit and watch this one for a bit before taking action.

Concert report: Lyle Lovett and his Large Band

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Last week, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a sold-out performance by Lyle Lovett and his Large Band at the same venue where I saw Bruce Hornsby, Béla Fleck, the Noisemakers, and the Flecktones earlier this month.

Lovett and his crew put on an excellent show from start to finish, and despite taking no set break and shifting personnel over the course of the night, Lovett himself was on the stage for the all but one song, during which he let his female backup singer take control of the band. Lovett’s Large Band is comprised of Lovett on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, four backup singers (one female, three male), four other guitar players (one pedal steel, two electrics, and one more acoustic), fiddle, mandolin (who was the second acoustic guitarist), cello, percussion, piano, and a prolific, veteran bass player. (HT: @jwg31 for a long-distance ID of Leyland Sklar. More photos here.)

I’ve seen this group before, in the same spot, a few years ago, and I had an enjoyable time then despite not knowing any of the singer-songwriter’s tunes. In the interim period, I’d picked up only a sparse smattering of his recorded sounds (primarily pilfered from my paternal unit), so I was especially pleased at the number of songs I recognized during this performance.

If Lovett is two things, he is a storyteller and a Texan, and the former in particular was on display this night. He deftly adjusted his personnel throughout the performance, beginning offstage while he let his full band work out for the crowd (an approach well-used by the best, like him and B.B. King), eventually stripping the band down to bass, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and one microphone for Texas-style bluegrass, and slowly building the band back up again, featuring different alignments and arrangements along the way.

Lovett interacted with his bandmates and the crowd with ease and tumbleweed-dry wit. He took care to introduce and shine the spotlight on his cohorts, and he conversed from the stage with a child he recognized in the audience from prior appearances at this venue (they’ve played it three consecutive summers).

I enjoyed this performance even more than the last one. Lovett showed why he is one of the best singer-songwriter-big(large)-bandleaders and, despite being “one ugly dude” (in the words of my father’s friend shortly before the show), a consummate and intimate showman. He also tricked a bunch of upper-Midwesterners into liking country music for a night, and for that alone he and his band earned the audience’s applause, of which there was plenty.

Click here for more photos of the night.

New week: A month in ALDLAND?

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This week will round out the site’s first month online, and I think it’s been a fairly representative sample, although I hope it will continue to expand in scope, style, and authorship. I’m excited that Magalan joined as a co-author a couple weeks ago, and I’m looking forward a couple more writers coming on board before too long. (As always, if you’d like to get in on the action, send an email to ALDLAND[dot]com[at]gmail[dot]com.)

In addition to regularly visiting the site, you can keep up with content through Twitter (@ALDLANDia) and the new Flickr photo page.

This week, look for my review of the Lyle Lovett concert I attended last week, some college football content, and more.

Why Isn’t Mike Vanderjagt Still Kicking In The NFL? (via ThePostGame)

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He wants no attention, even though he’s still as charismatic and eloquent as any football analyst. He wants no sympathy, even though he probably deserves it. He says over and over again that he’s out of the league because he “went from outstanding to mediocre.” He’s got a nice house and a lovely former cheerleader wife and an 11-year-old son named Jay (who, by the way, recently won a Punt, Pass and Kick competition). Vanderjagt readily confesses, “I was an idiot” for saying those things about his team. He has Manning paraphernalia all over his restaurant, and he says the two are long past their dust-up. He has some powerful things to say, that’s for sure, but “Peyton did me wrong” is not one of them.

Vanderjagt has moved on.

Sorta. … Read More

via ThePostGame

Is it really Friday already?

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For a slow week, that went pretty fast. Any week that begins with a Monday night concert probably is going to go pretty well, though, and I’ve already started my report on that night with Lyle Lovett, so watch for that in the next few days.

Onto the good stuff. Like this post, I’m a little late with this selection, helpfully entitled “Friday Night, August 14th,” but it is better late than never. As they say (said), free your mind, and everything else will follow:

“The Ballad of Kerry Collins”

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Ethan Trex wrote that “if Tom Waits ever writes a sad song about an exhausted journeyman quarterback, it will almost certainly be called ‘The Ballad of Kerry Collins.’”
Bubbling up in the bloggochatter since the announcement this week that the former Titans, Raiders, Giants, and Panthers quarterback was going to join the Indianapolis Colts have been comparisons between Collins and former Packers, Jets, and Vikings quarterback Brett Favre, and that’s unfortunate for everyone.

I first noticed it when a reader pointed me to Jim Wyatt’s post on the Titans Insider blog, and I saw it again in Trex’s post on The Triangle, quoted above. Wyatt hit the theme heavily, opening his post with,

Quarterback Kerry Collins insisted back in July he wouldn’t pull a Brett Favre. “No, no,” he said. “I’m done.”

Yet on Wednesday he pulled a Favre, coming out of retirement and agreeing to terms with the Colts. Collins said in July he was retiring after 16 NFL seasons, including the last five with the Titans. A call from the Colts, who are dealing with lingering injury issues with quarterback Peyton Manning, changed his mind.

Trex started out with a Favre theme as well, although, to his credit, he didn’t attempt to coin a phrase when he lamented:

Great, now we’re going to have to put up with the Great Kerry Collins Un-Retirement Watch every August until the end of time. We finally get Brett Favre’s career put in the ground, and you job us like this, Kerry?

Admittedly, Collins shares some things in common with Favre, like persistent, gray, stubbly facial hair. But we shouldn’t be so quick to apply the “pulling a Favre” label every time a player unretires. What’s important to remember about Favre is how he went about his “retiring” and “unretiring,” if it even can be called that. He never really shut the door at the end of a season. He kept himself in the spotlight through strategic PR moves. In short, he milked it. And he did it multiple times.

If we have to talk about “pulling a Favre” every time a player comes out of retirement, we unfairly cast a negative light on something that need not be negative at all, and we diminish the magnitude of the terribleness that was the actual Favre’s retirement process. To even approach Favre status, Collins is going to have to do this a few more times and make a bigger stink about it. Until then, he’ll just be the next guy to try to “pull a Testaverde.”

Text messaging competitions: Non-sports vs. no sports

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August is known as a slow sports month, which means it probably isn’t the best time to start a new sports website, but here we are. An NFL labor dispute provided a compressed preseason that offered some contrast to that part of the baseball season right before most people wake up and start watching again (which means it’s exactly when the Tigers will go on a tear (and as soon as I write that, for them to blow it in the 10th against the D-Rays)) and that part of the NASCAR season where drivers are still screwing around, oblivious to the fact that the lack of urgency probably will cost them a spot in the playoffs.

Revelations about the Longhorn Network grew into the second annual Texas A&M-SEC flirtation that again has fizzled, and the news of brazen NCAA violations at UMiami are simultaneously so flagrant and unsurprising that there’s not much to add to Charles Robinson’s initial report. And so we cover year-old mascot news.

On the sports blogging front, famous ex-benchwarmer and blogger of the people Mark Titus of Club Trillion apparently now is writing for Grantland, to no tidings whatsoever. I can’t decide what to think about this. Everywhere but on this site, Grantland has been taking it on the chin pretty badly, and even I’m beginning to find The Triangle’s daily sports update by Shane Ryan unreadable. Titus has been the anti-establishment candidate for as long as he’s been a public figure, and probably longer, so it’s tough to see him alongside the purported literary elite that populate Grantland, even if that site’s natural audience surely must be welcoming his voice.

While that relationship, to the extent it is one, remains in its embryonic stages, a new site lurks on the horizon. The Classical, a conceptual rival to (at least the idea of) Grantland, is slated to get rolling possibly by the end of this year.

Sports bloggers probably fall into two camps: the big time, corporate types viewed as influential but out of touch, and the small time, snarky, critical types viewed as operating on the rumor level as much as the cutting edge. Whether internet sports writers are generally clueless reactionaries or hypercritical gossipmongers, they managed to pull it together for uniformly positive and heartfelt responses to the news that Lady Vols’ basketball coach Pat Summitt was diagnosed with early onset dementia. (See here, here, and here, among many other examples.)

All this to say that, today, I traded the slow sports news for the non sports news when I saw a commercial during the TV dead zone that is 6:30-7:30 pm Eastern for a text messaging contest on Wednesday night. I haven’t been able to locate the details on this particular contest online, but apparently these things happen from time to time.

Texting is not a sport, and neither is gambling, but for someone who likes writing about sports (and, really, writing about writing about sports), gambling on sports has a certain, vague attraction, even if I don’t gamble myself, and so I took in Bill Barnwell’s second dispatch from Vegas for Grantland. Of course, I’d trust Barnwell’s betting advice as much as I’d trust that of former vice presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root or Danny Sheridan. Barnwell does provide some background information on gambling terminology and strategy, though, and that’s nice even if it isn’t always accurate. What I do enjoy from him are the parts of his submissions that talk about the history of Las Vegas, and about trying to find a way to live there and maintain sanity and financial solvency. Having spent just twenty-six (consecutive) hours in Vegas, I have just enough personal experience to enjoy following Barnwell on his desert adventure. We’ll see how long my jealousy lasts.

Finally, Wednesday saw the fruits of a story I’ve been trying to cultivate since the early days of The Triangle and Google+, which is to say, July. It was then that the unappreciated legacy of Kerry Collins, associated more with memories of problems with alcohol and, per the New York Times’ “Black People” section, misplaced racial epithets, than gridiron greatness, came to my attention:

Collins retired this week, which, considering that I happened to graduate from the same college at around the same time, and considering that he once (rightfully) mocked me in a pizza parlor after I got wildly intoxicated on sambuca, seals both of our journeys from misbegotten youth into adulthood. And while we’re here, I would like to note that Collins has more passing yards than Jim Kelly, Donovan McNabb, Phil Simms, Steve Young, Y.A. Tittle, Johnny Unitas, and Troy Aikman. If he had won the 2000 Super Bowl with the Giants, and then made the Super Bowl with the 2008 Titans, he would be a borderline Hall of Famer. As it is, he has to be considered as the most underrated decent-to-very-good quarterback of the past 15 years.

The author makes a fairly remarkable point here, even excusing his sambuca-driven intoxication, and it’s one that Chris Johnson, Collins’ former teammate in Tennessee, mentioned in my fake interview with him the other weekend. Bill Polian, president of the Indianapolis Colts apparently got the memo too, because he pulled Collins out of retirement as insurance for an ailing Peyton Manning. And there’s the ALDLAND news/non-news cycle. Good keeping up, all.

“To Them That’s Gone: A Film for the Fallen” Enters Final Fundraising Push (via QuestionsPresented)

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"To Them That's Gone: A Film for the Fallen" Enters Final Fundraising Push In the summer of 2008, Jon Bellona and a crew of runners set out on a transcontinental run– the Run for the Fallen– from Fort Irwin, CA to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, one mile for each member of the American military killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The group had a powerfully uncomplicated mission statement: Run for the Fallen is a collective of runners whose mission is clear and simple: To run one mile for every American service … Read More

via QuestionsPresented

The final chapter of the Ole Miss mascot search

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The sports media’s football coverage in August has focused almost exclusively on the NFL to the exclusion of the fast-approaching college season. This is a small attempt to balance that coverage by taking a concluding look at a story that started to gain steam during the 2010 college football season.

On Saturday, September 3rd, the Ole Miss football team will take the field in Oxford with something they haven’t had since 2003: a mascot. The school’s teams will continue to be known as the Rebels, but after officially retiring Colonel Reb in ’03, the Rebel Black Bear now will represent Ole Miss squads on the field.

While Mississippi’s black bear population recently has been on the rise, particularly in the Delta region, the selection of the Rebel Black Bear was something of a second-best option, at least for a vocal subset of Ole Miss students and others watching off campus. This pre-selection video highlights the one-time top contender:

As the video suggested, copyright law of some variety formally took Admiral Ackbar out of the running, he surely would have made one of the most interesting and creative mascots in college football. Geekery aside, it also would have been a great marketing opportunity for George Lucas & co.

By dumping Col. Reb, Ole Miss distanced themselves from some of the school’s decidedly Confederate trappings, a motive that also drove revisions related to their fight song, “From Dixie With Love.” Students traditionally had concluded the song by chanting “the South will rise again.” Instead, “the Ole Miss student government passed a resolution suggesting the chant be replaced by the phrase, ‘To hell with LSU.'”