Those Goddamn Yankees

Alright, let's get something straight here, and Kyle, please back me up on this: the way that the Yankees conduct business in Major League Baseball has become completely unacceptable. Cashman and Steinbrenner, they're like insolent children who got into their dad's closet and are screwing up his broadcloth button-downs, except that instead of dress shirts, we're talking about the fabric of the way in which American sports and the economy are interconnected. The contracts the Yanks have processed this offseason remind me of the way that Oprah gives away Toyota Carollas and Disneyland season passes. For those of you who hide under a sports rock--a considerably insulting and somewhat unthinkable offense to my and my ilk considering that midnight baseball and streaming podcasts are as much a part of my life as showering and dairy--here is a brief but poignant list of the temerity of the Evil Empire:

1. Tex for 180 over 8.
2. CC for 161 over 7.
3. Burnie for 82.5 over 5.
4. Leaked conversations that revolve around signing Manny.
5. 423.5 in contracts since November. By far the largest payroll in baseball. $27 million in 2008 luxury tax ALONE.
6. Jason Giambi's 2009 buyout--5 million United States dollars--is more than 75% of the players who are actually playing for the Giants on the everyday roster.

Even though Pavano, Giambi, and Mo are all off the books, if the Yanks keep Matsui and Nady, they'll break their own atmospheric record set last year at $207.1 million, at reset it $222 million; the second place team, the Metropolitans, paid their players $137.4 million, which is just a touch under two-thirds of the Yankees' salary. By contrast, the median mark is in the low 70s and the lowest is 27 (owned by the Florida Marlins, who came in third place in their division, just like the Yankees did, and who finished only 4.5 games behind the team that spent nearly 8 times as much money on its players). And it's not just a recent phenomenon: the four highest contracts in history were for players inked by the Yankees, and Manny would be the fifth. All this in an economic environment which, according to baseball insders and specific GMs, is making people around the league "raise eyebrows".

Major League Baseball, it has been demonstrated, is very much an old boys club type of organization. You do things wrong, and it gets handled in-house, if it gets handled at all. Public admonition of the Yankees' spending habits highlights the amount of discomfort and disapproval that the baseball community at large has with their flamboyance, and suggests an enduring meta-problem with their philosophy: no one else matters, and it doesn't matter. I can't conceive of a team or a city being satisfied with itself if its owner and general manager tosses around this sort of disgusting unitarianism. Can't you feel it, New York? You are despised by fans from all over the nation, but at least a little bit of that is jealousy. You are disowned by high administration in the league of which you are a part, but a little bit of that is likely displaced frustration. But you are objectively wrong, here, and that is a condition from which there is no reproach.

Oh, and all you Boston area sports fans? Here's a bit of scalding rebuke for you, too. Hating New York philosophically does not preclude me from hating Boston pragmatically: how about this. The next time I hear you honking down the street or wearing your stupid cursed faux-fade Sox cap, I get to remind you, way out loud, that the only reason you can see the sun today is that you live in California. Oh, the Celtics are great? The Pats are your team? Go freeze, then: take your T, and your 8 degree weather, and go fight with New York for who can buy the best team. Also, that accent makes my ears want to jump off a goddamn roof. You're lucky you had the Kennedys. Otherwise, everyone would be okay with hating you more openly.

Winter Festival Photos

Old Town Salzburg, seen from the Festung


Sweet mountain house in Bischofshofen. Two gnarly german retrievers out front.


Our horses. Sleigh ride through Filzmoos to Restaurant Oberhofalm.


Ian Brown, me, and Daniel Sip. St. Bartholomew, across the lake from Konigssee, in Bavaria.


Gothic steeple and town below, Bischofshofen.


Super long exposure, evening mass. Chapel, Schloss Leopoldskron. Christmas eve, 2008.


Ski jumps, Bischofshofen. Scary steep.


Nifty streetlamps in the alley towards the lake in Konigssee.

Ascending

The attic air hung thick and crisp with winter's influence, so that each breath had to be carved out of the stillness, and each was beat away again by deep, excited huffs. We should not have come. But then, what is adventure if the admonition of authority is excised from the idea? Surely, some of the greatest chances and highest pleasures are the result of an unwillingness to accept a 'should', and a vivified will to pursue a 'must', nonetheless.

A narrow glint of early morning light hung thirty feet away, on the other side of ceiling beams and a pair of lonely wine glasses, which must have been abandoned by an earlier party. One of the glasses, thin and delicate through the stem, was tilted up against a slight metal ladder anchored at the top by the frame of the skylight. How graceful it looked in the blueness--! And how brittle and lonely, a quiet casualty to the intrigue of romance.

Cautiously now, we tip-toed over the beams and lurched at the ladder, tripping in our haste and our ignorance; and in due honesty, we had taken in enough wine to make us warm for the journey. Ah, but no excuse is necessary for wine. Up the ladder we crept, trying to stifle bursts of laugher, and slipping on the rusted bars, guessing where to find the next rung. The roof was ridged and freezing. The slats dug into our calves like tangs on a giant cheese grater, and the flat partitions were spotted with tiny patches of ice: to the chimney, then. Out across the glass-top lake, reflections of the moon and the walkway lights peppered the area between the island and the foremost castle grounds. A few stars ripped through the still fog that otherwise masked the giant mountain peaks in the distance. A fleet of geese interrupted the serenity of the lake, arrowing towards the townhouses to create rolling-pin mounds on the surface. The wind, whipping over the alps and past us, accounted for the only noise in the crisp night. And eventually, as the frost broke and the dark lost its fight, we began to whisper.

Shouting (or, Advice)

It was about an hour after the evening fireside cocktail party had wound down. Some stragglers still remained, waxing about the past year and nursing a bottle of warming wine. The fire had stopped cracking now, and the candles which beset ubiquitous wreaths ran low, so the two-story Christmas that towered near the bay windows provided most of the light in the Great Hall. Two girls whose parents are yearly participants at the winter festival seem to be the only other attendees who are in their early twenties, and we gravitated towards each other in the name of comfort. I am jarred by the reality that it is so fundamentally different to talk to them.

It seems that a lot of the conversations I have participated in during my adult life--or, more to the point, more of the things that have been said while I was standing in front of the speaker--have been directed at me, as opposed to held with me. I find that I am told what to do a great deal of time, but not from a position of authority; instead--and this is uncomfortably often--people seem to speak as if they have some guidance for me, and yet I have not requested any. Moreover, we are often not speaking about anything the context of which would necessitate guidance in *any* instance..things such as standing in a line for a meal, looking at the food. Make yourself a sandwich, they'd say. Save it for later, because you'll surely get hungry. Try this wine, it's a first fruit. Your new favorite, no question. Oh, this part of the city is certainly the better, in fact that other place you're thinking of isn't worth it. Go this way. Do this thing. Trust us. These are not tips, from someone who has been there before me. Instead they are each a credo: do this, because I know better than you. It is insufferable. Because they do not.

And more than that, they cannot. Many people pretend to know what it is that I prefer, how my mind is designed, or what it is that will make me as happy as possible in the the future. I pity them that they don't realize how foolish it is to assume that I am like they are, or if I conceive of them more gently, that they don't realize that I don't care much for their opinion, regardless of how closely it aligns with my own. And it is not as if they think poorly; in fact, this is far from the case, as the collective degrees, grants, and awards bestowed upon the people who gather in any given year at this Seminar alone is unspeakably humbling. I quite often receive this sort of treatment from professors, or employers, or just from adults in general. Perhaps that is the tragedy of my relationship with some of them: I am young, they are in so many ways experts. But the failure of their pride is that because they are good thinkers, they presume that by extension they are better than I am, or that at the very least, they are more capable than I am at determining something that they simply cannot know better than I do. In some cases, they will be able to outthink me, but it will only be because the data is available for them to do it: in terms of my habits and feelings, I rightly I trust myself more than I will ever listen to an overbearing professor or a stressful boss, or than I would take the advice of even a knowledgeable stranger. 

It is not that I do not recognize their right to express themselves: surely, they have that. But do it in some other way, won't you? If you feel supervisory, then why not pay mind to your own screaming children, or admonish at all the ones who are unspeakably rude so often in your presence, or buy a hamster and tend to that. If you are feeling aggressive, then play tetherball, squeeze a bag of sand, write a haiku. If you feel as if you are better than I am, then kindly silence your impulse to demonstrate that triviality; or, remove yourself, and do it quickly.

Photographs (or, Snapshots)

Photography is becoming and increasingly present element of my life in Austria. Sometimes I shift through an album or a few pages on the facebook, or I'll browse a week of college on my macbook. Then again, there are ever more photos to be added to my computer, as a rare opportunity would be missed if I were to neglect my camera for these next four months. Photos, then, are a product and also a constant task, and moreover one on which I should begin to focus a bit more ardently. A more professional manifestation of this theme is the work with which my colleague Daniel and I are presently preoccupied: the Winter Festival photo board, which displays small headshots and dense biographies of all of the participants for our weeklong program. Daniel has worked exquisitely hard on the festival as a whole, and has been a brilliant role model in terms of work ethic and drive in order to complete the tasks which are assigned to the office. 

This photo board, it seems to me, is a bit of a microcosm of my struggle between my present opportunity and desire to travel versus my desire to have a swarm of kids and a goodly wife. The people on this board are all past attendants of some session that has been hosted by SGS: this is a prerequisite for invitation. And most of them are families. The union of these two qualities is something that I hope to foster in my own future, also in general I perceive that constant travel and a maintenance of a cogent family life is a stellar challenge. So I shall learn from the masters, then. Let us see if I can sit here in front of the photo board and discern that which is common, and then I will decide to what extent these incarnations are tolerable.

Actually, a lot of the guys seem to share something in common. I have never met any of them, and I have only read a very few things about them, so my conception cannot be totally correct: this is more playful than anything. But, into the fray. First, in every one of their pictures, they wear a variation of virtually the same exact thing: collared shirt, layering piece, chinos, and a belt. Everyone combs his hair to the side, categorically shaped in that sort of smooth, airy, Yale debate team-style flop-over. But there must be a couple other mitigating factors that have nothing to do with clothing, because otherwise every person who attends a Thanksgiving dinner would be a Salzburg Fellow. And it seems as if a very large percentage of the people who send in group pictures have a field by their house, or at the very least have densely-leaved trees in their yards; every picture with a group, save one, shows the family crouching in a veritable thicket with a novelty-size leaf pile. Alternatively, they all read the same photography tips magazine, and not one of them has a lick of sovereign creativity. Each of them perhaps comes from money, or at least garners a great deal of it now.  But after simply reading their biographies, which are scribed by the individuals themselves originally, it is plain to notice a sort of affect that indicates propriety: it is refined in a way that is not express education, and it is sometimes haughty in a way that shows unnoticed and enduring pride. And finally, yet most adversely, no one mentions affection for any sports teams. Where is the appreciation for things that they cannot control? Where is the devotion to something that break your heart, mends it together again? Where is the adherence to a code that unites people of like mind all over the nation and world, and which governs a relationship that fosters pride, and joy, and misery, and heights-then-depths that are lasting and wonderful and bitter and new every brilliant season?

Well then, no, I should not like a life like this. Give me the shirts and the leaves, in the end, and keep the rest. And so onwards, men of like mind: to change the world again, the way we would have it.

Winter Market

I introduce you to gluhwine (gloo-vine), the nectar of the gods. Red wine, warmed (or scalding, depending how eagerly you drank it), and spiced with cinnamon, orange, and schnapps or rum. The drink is served at the very popular winter market in old town Salzburg, the set-up of which is quite lovely: there are booths everywhere, sort of like at art and wine festivals, and there are large barrels set up as de facto tables for cups of liquor and ashtrays. Lampposts distribute enough light for the frequenters to mingle, which they do at a humming pitch. The whole scene is quite Romantic. I am heading to town in a few minutes with Daniel, who refers to items for which he does not know the English term as a "bucket". We are celebrating Adam's last couple of days at the Seminar, and we're going out with a few girls from the Seminar and their friends. Then back to the bierstube in the castle for some pints, I would imagine, unless the snow directs us otherwise. This is one of the troubles with snow, I have found: when the nearest thing that you walk to is on the long side of twenty minutes away, the snow really inhibits graceful walking. Perhaps the last thing that it is wise to add is a potent mix of alcohol, but such is the price we pay for celebration. Thinking back on it, adding hard alcohol to wine seems like one of those things that you see bartenders do for those girls who come in celebrating some shrieking about a bachelorette party, but gluhwine is maybe the exception to the overkill rule. Instead, it is the domain of something closer to the caveman paradigm, which holds that one good thing plus any other one good thing becomes an equally good or better new thing. Men like twins for this exact reason.

With the snow falling intermittently and the constant traffic around the courtyard, the grounds that lead to my apartment look like the pavement in line to a children's amusement park ride, which demonstrates your intended path by showing with cartoon feet where to put your own. The soles of my penny loafers are slick by now, and it is a tenuous fifteen steps to my porch stairs, to say nothing of the staircase itself. I think the SGS might want to look into a great glass elevator (or a similar device) in order to avoid this opportunity for catastrophe, and related lawsuits.

We have begun work on our UST: a shift in physical states from mortal to "decaying otherness", irrationality, and cannibalism. More updates on this matter to follow as our zombie phenomenology warrants.

Snow is Falling

We were graced today with the lightest dusting of snow, about two hours after the sun slunk behind the alps. The ground looks like a weather-affected version of toast, when the butter melts and sinks into the bread, and the stairs to my penthouse have become slick enough to think twice about skipping the even ones. Two movie nights in a row have accented very long work days. Another two assignments today, to go along with an extremely long list of biographies for visiting schools, professors, and academics who will arrive in early January for ISP 29. I am also in charge of organizing some documents, reading through reviews of past sessions, assimilating the common data that the schools have reported on, and sifting it into an accessible document in order to improve the effective and efficiency of an upcoming ISP session. One of my on-going, probably interminable projects is to research past session lecturers and attendees, discern missing information in their biographies, verify and update contact information, professional progress, and publications made in the interim. The void in our record goes back about 40 years, so this project will be my Everest.

As a de facto timeline for my two-ish readers, I will be preparing for and facilitating the winter festival until the end of December, two International Student Panels in January, the Institute for Historic Justice and Reconciliation in February, and one final session in early March, just before I leave for Dublin.

One other bit of news that is worth noting: today at lunch, the topic of zombies came up. Apparently, there are no less than four people here, all male, who are pretty into zombies, both in pop-culture references and in classical mythology. We tossed around a few thoughts on the matter, and I mentioned to my colleague Daniel--a man who, by the way, had recently ordered ten books on zombies from Amazon, arrival pending shortly--that we might want to come up with some common identity traits that all zombies seem to share. I have assigned this set a preliminary name: the Unified Selenti Theory (thesis concerning all of the dead). He and I discussed many, many different variables, parameters, and pitfalls to this potential theory, including the ways in which it accesses present and past iterations of the zombie, verses other undead and otherwise horror field archetypes. It occurs to me that philosophy must somehow be connected to this subject, as it generally is to all things both critical and trivial, and for my part, I will do some work playing around with this connection. A website on the subject will be launched soon, as a way to pass our time creatively, and surprisingly, several various publication mediums, even this early in our thought process, are currently being pursued. This is a fantastic success for day two, and one certainly befitting the stirring minds that occupy the intern office at the SGS.

The Welcome Party

The pioneer post in this new catalog is fittingly dedicated to my arrival in Austria. The length of my stay, which will last until the middle of March, will be occupied by work as an intern for the Salzburg Global Seminar. I have only been here for a day, but the whirlwind has begun: there are a tremendous amount of people working for the Seminar, including my two officemates, Daniel and Adam. Daniel is a 27-year old masters student from Hamburg, who is working on a degree in political science; Adam is a 24-year old Missouri boy going after an MBA, and he is on the cusp of redheadedness, seen only in his traffic lane dash of facial hair. Both men are extremely pleasant and great to work with, have been quite helpful and thoroughly accomodating, and will unfortunately be in company for only a short while.

Today, I got the grand brushstrokes of my training session. As far as ISPs go, there is a fantastic amount of preparation that takes place revolving around each student who visits the Seminar. Most of my day was consumed by learning about the servers and databases that the Seminar features, and further, about how it is that I extract information from those manifests, crunch it down, and produce other documents (biographies and summaries, etc.) that will be used for the duration of the ISP sessions. I can see that there will be a fair amount of office work that will be requisite for all of the interesting matters to take place, so I've sort of resigned myself to getting as much done as quickly as possible so that I might enjoy the lectures and the like when they begin--this should be the first week of January. Until then, we are also preparing to host a winter festival, which will basically feature a huge amount of skiing, sleigh rides, and other more charming versions of the common Christmas in the bay area.

I get the impression that the non-session days here are much more loosely organized than my other jobs have been, which I love. In my limited experience, there is no boss hovering over me to make sure that my job is being completed; no one harasses me for things that they just assigned, nor do they offer constant correction and advice and reprimand; no one "checks in". Instead, I received an assignment yesterday, and I turned it in when I was done; two assignments today went the same way, and this style more properly befits my productivity. In general, the castle is very lovely, things are going smoothly (if quickly) and I am tremendously happy. And so ends the first and simple post.