2003-04 Vital Source Mag – April 2003
The “Other” Baseball
By John Hughes There you sit, at Miller Park again. The new leaders – Payne, Melvin and Yost – have made a good impression on you, and so, as an act of faith, you have trekked out to the ballyard and paid dearly for parking, tickets, peanuts and Cracker Jack. You are seated in this vaulted structure, which, despite the leaky creaky roof, impresses you. The losing doesn’t torment you like it once did, because by now it’s as familiar as a March blizzard in Milwaukee. But even amidst all the splendor Brewers baseball has to offer, you’re still feeling bad. If you are any sort of baseball fan, this is a scenario not unlikely to play itself out in your life soon. The 2003 season begins while this edition of Vital Source is on newsstands. The Brewers will resume play and you will find yourself watching them, thinking “what is wrong with this picture”? And if you give it a moment’s thought, the answer will come. For all the talk about the market offering the price it’s willing to bear, about these players just getting what they can as anyone else would, it troubles you that they are paid so much. True, it is just one symptom of a greater illness – the mass profiteering of professional sporting organizations on every front, from palatial stadiums to insane merchandising – and salaries are just another side effect. But the magnitude of their income, compared to the rest of us, seems a dishonorable allocation in a sport to which the majority of Americans, most working class, once felt a deep connection. The Brewers’ payroll this year will be roughly $50 million. Their opponents, on any given day, will have a payroll varying from $50 million to over $100 million. So, with 25 on each team, that’s 50 athletes out on the ballfield you’re observing, making $100 million to $150 million, or higher, for laboring from mid-February, with the beginning of spring training, until October 1st, or, if they’re quite good, until around November 1st when the World Series ends (and they are awarded an enormous bonus). That is a stupendous sum of money. In a world in which school teachers and nurses and social workers and construction workers and waitresses do heroic feats daily, and face budgetary pain nightly, to see young men making that sort of money, without even passion to offer fans, makes you feel like an accomplice to a crime each time you pay for your ticket, each time you pay $5 for a macro-beer. The yearning for passionate baseball If you’ve been a fan awhile you can remember Clemente, Yount, Yastrzemski, Aaron, Munson and Seaver, can remember the passion they poured into their treasured craft, and what it felt like to revel in their joy. Now, you feel nausea, or worse, echoes of the ennui that permeates the field below as you watch now. In comparison, players today mostly seem like poseurs, who would rather be at […]
Apr 1st, 2003 by Vital Archives
The Blow
By Jeremy Saperstein The Blow is Khaela Maricich. Formerly known as Get the Hell Out of the Way of the Volcano, Maricich has released at least a pair of tremendously idiosyncratic records featuring her strong breathy vocals, and appeared with other artists from the K stable, including Phil Elvrum (The Microphones) and Calvin Johnson (K czar). Sounding like a multi-tracked cross between a child’s nonsense rhymes and the tight harmonies of some sort of weird classical chamber music, Maricich’s songs never fail to make me think, either because of her clever turns of lyrical phrase (“Don’t you think we should kiss while Hüsker Dü is playing?/Do you like Grant Hart’s songs?/Do you like Bob Mould’s songs?/Have you ever sung along to ‘New Day Rising’?”) in “Jet Ski Accidents”, for example, or “Someone said that you’re a piece of paper/a piece of paper just pasted on the sky/I’ve a hunch that you’re a giant ball of rock/a million miles from me and all the people in the town”) in “The Moon Is There, I Am Here” or her clever and sophisticated-seeming (while maintaining a blisteringly charming naivety) compositional skills (the aforementioned “The Moon Is There…” or the contrapuntal harmonies in “The Touch-Me”). Throughout, the sparse instrumentation and smooth pop melodies make Bonus Album a far better bet than the studied twee of other new pop bands. Khaela Maricich is a hardcore original, like Beck or Captain Beefheart or any of a thousand others. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next as I enjoy this release.
Apr 1st, 2003 by Vital Archives
April 2003
Dear Readers, Between the time this issue of Vital Source was created and actual press time, America entered into war with Iraq. This is one of the disadvantages of being a monthly publication, and our lack of coverage of the war and its implications, for April anyway, cannot be helped. For May, I would love to share reader letters and short essays on the war, especially from people whose lives are directly touched. Please send all correspondence to editor@vitalmilwaukee.com, or by mail to the address in the staff column. The war is being televised, and things are happening quickly. While I feel confident we’ll never fail to support our troops again (a la Vietnam), there are underpinnings to this particular conflict that, if unchecked, will bring fundamental changes to our democracy. In an increasingly technological world, access to information is the key to power. But the stripping of personal freedom and overt censorship are not the answers. Individual liberty, access to due process, and innocent until proven guilty are the cornerstones of our Constitution. Fundamentally, we as a nation agree on two key points: we want our men and women home quickly, and a swift end to the war. But we must take care that, in our zeal to “end oppression” in the Middle East, we do not eliminate oppression’s most powerful natural enemy – a nation of free peoples – our nation, the United States of America, and the democracy for which it stands. A perfect snapshot of our confusion occurred on Oscar Night. Michael Moore, in his acceptance speech for Best Documentary, was met with a mix of boos and cheers (boos were later mostly attributed to Teamster crew members) when he said (speaking on behalf of himself and others present onstage): “… we live in fictitious times. We live in a time when we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president… We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it’s the fictition (sic) of duct tape or the fictition (sic) of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush.” All Oscar winners are technically given 45 seconds to speak from the stage. At precisely 45 seconds, Moore’s microphone was cut mid-sentence and the orchestra began to play. Conversely, Richard Martin’s acceptance speech for Chicago ran well over a two minutes, but contained no political references. He was not cut off. And even though Adrian Brody mentioned the war in his four minute accectpance speech, he only went so far as to wish a speedy end to the conflict and to express his support of the troops. Brody was also not censored. This may seem a small event, but all who watched the Oscars witnessed censorship first hand. We must pay attention to these breaches of free speech, whether or not we agree about their content. Consensus is not the point. Free speech is at risk. Please read Paul McLeary’s We The People. It covers […]
Apr 1st, 2003 by Jon Anne Willow
The Belles
By Jeremy Saperstein I’m pretty sure I’ve sworn off nice pop records a hundred times. Some sort of social consciousness bug invades my system and I swear I’ll never listen to simple lyrics of love again. But I always crack. Omerta is a fine record to crack to. The Belles are, surprisingly, only a duo – Christopher Tolle and Jake Cardwell – from Lawrence, Kansas (the stomping grounds of American pop legends The Embarassment), but the sound is anything but sparse. Filled with power-pop and indie-rock allusions, the record will get a lot of references to other bands whose name start with ‘B’ – Beatles, Big Star, Beach Boys – and that’s not a bad comparison. The opener, “So, I Sing” is a bit of chamber-pop with what sounds like a mellotron and some gorgeously lush backing vocals, while “You Can’t Have It All” rocks with a bit of acid lead guitar seemingly lifted directly from a Buffalo Springfield record.
Apr 1st, 2003 by Vital Archives
The Homeschool Choice
By Lucky Tomaszek “Where do your kids go to school?” “Well, actually, we homeschool,” I answer a little hesitantly. “I really like being with my kids, and homeschooling works well for our family…” I’m trying to be PC, trying not to start another controversial discussion with this well-meaning woman at Chuck E Cheese. But after letting that last sentence trail off, the silence thickens. And I realize that there is more I would like to say. I want to tell her that I have been teaching my children since the day they were born. I know them better anyone else, and know how each of them learns. I am intimately aware of their strengths and weaknesses and I know how to push them a little farther, without pushing them so far that learning becomes a chore. But it seems my opportunity has passed as we both go back to laughing at the antics of our children ascending into neon colored tubes and dropping into the ball pit. After several minutes, she says… “No offense, but why would you want to do that?” To start with, my interest was piqued when a homeschooled child won the National Spelling Bee in 1997, and again when first, second, and third place were all won by homeschooled children in 2000. And a little later in 2000 I read an article by Helen Cordes that said that homeschooled children are accepted to Stanford at “twice the rate of conventional schoolers.” I did a little more research and discovered that the average homeschooler scored in the 75th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, compared to conventional schoolers who scored in the 50 percentile. I must admit that the tragedy at Columbine High School in April 1999, and all the other shockingly similar tales weighed in to my decision making. Of course, there was also the personal journey I made as a mother. I stay home with my kids, and I have devoted a lot of time to guiding them through childhood and helping them become loving, generous, and freethinking little people. When my oldest daughter turned five, I put her into kindergarten. I had obviously thought a lot about homeschooling, but in the end I decided that it would probably be better for her if she went through conventional school. We gave it our all! We bought the cute ‘first day of school’ dress and the box of crayons. We took a lot of pictures that day, and she was adorable. The first week went well, she seemed to enjoy school and had lots of new songs and finger plays to teach us at dinner each night. The second week was a little harder. She was more reluctant to go to school in the morning, and when I picked her up after school she had less and less to say about what she was doing all day. “What did you learn today?” I would ask. “Nothing,” she would respond. The third week was worse; […]
Apr 1st, 2003 by Lucky Tomaszek
