Nico Muhly on Beyoncé

Then, last Thursday night, I was asleep in a very, very rural hotel in Iceland when the phone made the Noise again. I was almost too scared to check it, but then, in my benighted fumbling, my computer and iPad turned on, and they started making sonic ejaculations too, which they hadn’t made for Michael or Whitney. What is it, I thought, the President? My mother? Of course the answer was that the internet wanted to send me many gigabytes of Beyoncé’s new unannounced album and its attendant videos, and of course I moved heaven, earth, ice, and lava to have my computer in the one square metre of the hotel that could actually make this happen, because I am an homosexual and these Knowlesian dispatches are treated, by cultural necessity, as oracular and as gospel: gnomic, poetic, abstract, and very, very relevant.

At first I was anxious about the description of it as a “visual album,” because these days, which albums aren’t? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Lady Gaga video, but I know that her appeal — even to me, not ever having beheld her on purpose — is partially to do with her Visual Presentation. Beyoncé’s songs, on this album, connect to one another not just musically, but via a seemingly personal, almost Forrest Gump-like time-traveling woman’s journey through various eras and — I shudder to say the word — styles. It’s unbelievably ambitious and through-composed; where the music can feel unrelated from one song to the next, the video is especially and carefully elided, and where the video is stylistically at variance from one song to the next, the music itself creates an emulsion between all the various incarnations of Beyoncé, our tour-guide through heaven and hell. Her voice feels, here, stretched in all the best ways, and she is experimenting with various modes of vocal production, vibrato, enunciation, and textual stylization. She is relishing the individual words of her lyrics, and savoring the shapes of the phrases the songs demand of her. When she freaks, as is her wont, a bridge or a second chorus, it is an insane and welcome delight.

Can we start with the statement that I basically loved this album? And then I will go song by song and talk about what, for me, felt like a reinforcement of this love, and where, in places, my love was challenged? I am going to talk, interchangeably, about the music and the videos, as that is how this thing was presented to me, as well as to the poor taxed wi-fi of the rural hotel and its staff. So if you’ve only heard the music, you should probably watch the videos, and if you’ve only watched the videos, you’re probably fine?

Continue on from there to read the rest of Nico Muhly's epic-length, never dull walkthrough of Beyoncé by Beyoncé.

Stanford Football — beating the odds

According to Stanford’s own Athletic Director, only about 400 out of the 3,500 players who join Division I teams every year have a chance at getting by Stanford’s admissions department. How could Stanford compete with the elite when the majority of the nation’s best recruits were ineligible to attend?

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Trying to build an elite college football program at Stanford is a bit like moving a NFL team to Burlington, Vermont. Elite teams like the University of Texas, Ohio State, and Michigan have student bodies of 40,000 plus students and can command the loyalty of entire states or regions. Stanford enrolls under 20,000 students (7,000 undergraduates) and can’t command the loyalty of the Bay Area. Stanford Stadium seats 50,000 fans to Michigan’s 100,000. 

As a result, Stanford brings in much less revenue than schools with comparable records. A Wall Street Journal article notes that Stanford’s $9.7 million in football ticket sales in 2012 compares poorly with the $27 million average of the four teams ranked higher than Stanford at the time. Stanford’s merchandise sales are similarly bleak. 

 

Good Priceonomics article on what Stanford had to do to build a nationally competitive football team. A lot of it came down to raising more money.

The normal revenues Stanford receives from football are so low, in fact, that its 36 varsity sports teams depend on something no other school has, or would dare rely so heavily on: an athletics-only endowment worth between $450 million and $500 million that pays out at 5.5% each year, people familiar with the matter said.

Stanford needed alumni to cover the difference, and they rose to the occasion. Since Jim Harbaugh took over as coach and led Stanford onto the national stage, donations for Stanford athletics increased “53.4% and new gifts and pledges have increased by 215%.” One alumnus (the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman) pledged $500,000 because he had such fond memories of rushing the field when Stanford beat its rival Cal in 2007. Stanford benefactor John Arrillaga built coach Harbaugh a $50,000 private bathroom next to his office. Few universities endow coaching positions, but Stanford’s head coach and top assistant coach positions, as well as every scholarship for its football players, are endowed to thank donors. The head coaching position is endowed in the name of a former Stanford football player and current private equity founder who pledged $1.6 million in 1989.

 

It's fun if your alma mater has a good college sports program, and I'm glad Stanford's football team is nationally competitive this season, but it all feels a bit arbitrary and ridiculous to be many years out of college and still living and dying by the record of a team you have nothing to do with.

Despite the infusion of cash into the program, I'd love to hear more about non-cash strategies that have helped Stanford given its annual position as a recruiting underdog, though teams are notoriously close-lipped about any strategic advantages they may have hit upon in recruiting and player development. Those would be more broadly instructive, though.

Looking at Stanford's personnel over the years, it seems like team speed has always been underrepresented on the team and so the team has sought an advantage in size on both the offensive and defensive lines. Without easy access to a broad set of data, that's just a hunch, though.

Now that I'm older, I've tried, with some success, to become a more antifragile sports fan. Like a venture capital investor, I seek to be minimally impacted when my preferred teams lose, but maximally happy when my teams do well. Being a Cubs fan, emotional antifragility is almost a necessity. That's how I think of Stanford Football and the Cubs, for example. If they lose, it's expected and I don't pay it much mind. If they win, it's an emotional bonus.

I had briefly considered not rooting for any particular team for life as it is an entirely irrational behavior. I have nothing to do with the team, it seems ridiculous or even sick to leave my emotional state to something completely out of my control.

However, with my new antifragile approach to sport fandom, the downside is given a reasonable floor, and victories offer nothing but happiness upside. The dramatic thrill of having a rooting interest in a sporting contest amplifies one's thrills from watching, that is some free consumer surplus for a fairly low investment. Even if you don't have a hometown team to root for, you can earn a similar benefit simply by putting down a small wager on one side or the other. It's the reason I will usually enter a March Madness pool even though I don't really like college basketball all that much.

Back to Stanford: if they're going to play, I'm glad they at least choose to play at the big boy table. According to Sagarin ratings, Stanford played the 4th toughest schedule in the nation this year behind just Washington State, Arizona State, and Utah, and the Sagarin ratings have Stanford as the 3rd best team in the nation behind Florida State and Alabama.

The college football season is so short anyhow, every game might as well count, including non-conference games, so fans have more high stakes games to watch. The number of blowouts in college football is ridiculous. I don't know who won when Ohio State walloped Florida A&M 76-0 this year, but it wasn't the fans.

Of course, if Stanford wins 76-0 in the Rose Bowl tomorrow, I won't complain.

UPDATE: One example of a look at a strategic advantage that Stanford might have: its strength and conditioning program, devised by Shannon Turley.

And there was Shannon Turley, the architect of a training regimen among the most distinct in college sports. He is Stanford’s director of football sports performance, and for years, he felt it necessary to write letters to N.F.L. scouts to explain the Cardinal’s nontraditional approach. He stopped that practice this year in the wake of Stanford’s success.

Turley’s impact speaks as much to availability as ability. The coaches recruit speed and size and talent. He believes the best players, the ones most on the field, who sustain the most collisions, also carry the most injury risk. His first priority is to keep them on the field.

From 2006, the year before Turley arrived on the Farm, as Stanford’s campus is known, through last season, the number of games missed because of injury on the two-deep roster dropped by 87 percent. In 2012, only two Cardinal players required season-ending or postseason surgical repair; this year, only one.

In an era in which injuries are more scrutinized than ever, this has made Turley something of a celebrity strength coach. Counterparts from other colleges visited. As did N.F.L. personnel. As did Australian Rules football teams. The student newspaper wrote a three-part series about Turley. Bleacher Report compiled a big article. The National Strength and Conditioning Association named Turley its strength and conditioning coach of the year in 2013.

All together now

The Chris Ware cover for this week's issue of The New Yorker is fantastic. Having just attended my niece and nephew's holiday shows while in Chicago, I can't match this with 10,000 words.

This is the first cover of The New Yorker for 2014. Ware also drew the first cover of 2013 for the magazine, and he wrote about his inspiration for both.

Steve Jobs, along with whatever else we’re crediting to him, should be granted the patent on converting the universal human gesture for trying to remember something from looking above one’s head to fumbling in one’s pants pocket. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that most pre-industrial composers could creditably reproduce an entire symphony after hearing it only once, not because they were autistic but simply because they had to. We’ve all heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos hundreds of times more than Bach ever did, and where our ancestors might have had only one or two images by which to remember their consumptive forebears, we have hours of footage of ours circling the luxury-cruise midnight buffet tables.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed with horror that the memories I have of things like my daughter’s birthday parties or the trips we’ve taken together are actually memories of the photographs I took, not of the events themselves, and together, the two somehow become ever more worn and overwrought, like lines gone over too many times in a drawing. The more we give over of ourselves to these devices, the less of our own minds it appears we exercise, and worse, perhaps even concomitantly, the more we coddle and covet the devices themselves. The gestures necessary to operate our new touch-sensitive generation of technology are disturbingly similar to caresses.

Ugh

I said I'd try to write one post a day for the month, but I missed the past two days. In my defense, I've been really sick, unable to stand up because I'm woozy and feverish, my sinuses so congested with mucus it's like trying to breathe through a straw submerged in wet mud. It has felt worse than normal because staring at bright screens and trying to focus on them has been giving me a headache so I'm consigned to listening to music in my headphones. Not being plugged in to information is very difficult, this must be what addiction feels like.

It does strike me that the same way the digital signs that tell you how long until the next train or bus comes makes the wait more tolerable, if not perceptually shorter, some device I could stick my finger into that would tell me what ailed me and an estimate of how long until my immune system would overcome it would make this whole ordeal more tolerable. Even if it were a wild guess on the part of the device, just spit out of a random number generator, the placebo effect would probably have some beneficial effect.