Friday Arts

I spend my mornings while I'm getting ready for work auditing songs for my tab room playlist. Mostly rock, mostly lively. Most albums yield a song or two. When I first started putting the list together, it was hard to keep from adding all the songs off some albums, like Help, for instance. I mean, seriously. What are the bad songs on that album? By now, 1839 songs later, I'm on more obscure, or at least less obvious albums, although there are a couple of major groups I had to remind myself to listen to, and of course, there is music that I just missed the first time around. Very little of the music is of recent vintage. When I try to listen to new music, I usually don't get very far. There are exceptions, though. Just not many. We are not exactly living in a golden age of rock.

These are the albums I listened to in the last week, and the songs that made the list:

No songs, Foghat, Foghat – I have no knowledge of this group, except the name is familiar and maybe they might have had some hits that were on the radio that I’d recognize. They got together in 1971, when I stopped following rock for a while. I listened to their first eponymous album this week and thought to myself that this stuff seemed good, so I put it on hold and will go back to it in the future. Quite promising, I think.

"Hamburger Midnight, " Little Feat, Little Feat — Another eponymous 1971 debut album. In this case, I have a bit of fondness for the group, having acquired a bunch of their albums during the 90s, when I used to run with my Walkman and would acquire cassettes pretty much at random from music clubs when there was a big sale. Only one cut stuck out on this album, but I did enjoy listening to it.

No songs, Super Session, Kooper, Bloomfield and Stills — For some reason, “You Don’t Love Me” was already in the playlist. I considered "It Takes a Lot..." but decided I could live without ever hearing it again. Back in the 60s, Super Session was one of those albums that everyone in the universe seemed to own and no one ever played. For a while you could sort of enjoy “Season of the Witch,” but it got old pretty fast. The key thing about this album was that it was a one-sider—i.e., an album where either one side or the other was really good and the other side wasn't, which meant that soon that other side simply disappeared from existence—something that disappeared in the CD era. There were other albums like this over the years (like Abbey Road), but this one sticks out for some reason. The Bloomfield side A is just noodling. The Stills side B is more noodling, but it least it tries to have the odd song, like "You Don’t Love Me." (And I'm a sucker for Leslie cabinets.) The reason everybody had this album was that Kooper was just coming off BS&T after their first (great) album, Bloomfield was just coming off Electric Flag after their first (great) album, and Stills, late of Buffalo Springfield and two (out of three) great albums, was about to record CSN’s first (great) album. It set the stage for future supergroup albums, even though it wasn’t that good. The bottom line is, a couple of sides of nothing much but noodling is, in the long run, nothing much but noodling. Go out and write some songs.

"Strange Days," "People are Strange," "Moonlight Ride," "Love Me Two Times,"  Strange Days, The Doors — The Doors are one of the more interesting groups of the 60s. Their first album was everywhere, one of the first really 60s albums, following all the mostly British Invasion stuff. "Light My Fire" was played so often on the radio that when I hear it now I have to immediately switch it off. (The Animals’ "House of the Rising Sun," another organ riff ear worm that seemed to be on the radio every five minutes, brings a similar reaction.) People loved the Doors after their amazing and different debut album and eagerly purchased their subsequent albums, like this one, each of which was a little less satisfying than the previous one. For all practical purposes, from day one we got to watch this group unravel after starting at the top. Morrison became more and more of an embarrassment. I saw them at their notorious Singer Stadium concert where people were throwing chairs at the stage out of sheer boredom. This was, I think, right after Morrison’s Florida brouhaha. At least he didn’t expose himself to us. Over the years since the group’s demise, they seem to have continued to dim in people’s estimation. You hear a couple of their hits on classic radio, but you don’t hear anyone playing their albums if you pop over to visit. You might call the Doors a deacquired taste, assuming that’s the opposite of an acquired taste. Nevertheless, when I walked past Morrison’s grave in Paris, it was covered with recent tributes. Astounding. But not far away, Chopin’s grave was covered with even more recent tributes. This was as it should be. (For the record, Oscar Wilde's grave was blocked off to stop people from kissing it into total erosion.)

In which we discuss internet use at tournaments

The question arose about what the computer use policy would be at Rather Large Bronx. It’s an interesting question.

In the real world, and more specifically, the world in which today’s high school debaters will be tomorrow’s working citizens, digital access is a given. Not only is facility at manipulating online information expected, but in many ways the level of that facility will determine career success. As educators, we should be preparing students for this reality.

Another reality we must accept is the nature of computing in today’s world. Before generally available connectivity to the internet, the data to which you had access was the data on your various disk drives, evolving from floppies to harddrives and flashdrives and tiny SD cards. Aside from your physical backups, however, nowadays it’s all in the cloud. Chromebooks, which are ubiquitous, cheap, very popular as education devices and more than enough for most people, usually have no meaningful built-in storage. Plenty of laptops and tablets are likewise pared down to minimal interior storage in favor of accessing cloud data (and creating lighter, more portable devices). And finally, schools are finally all coming online. With rare exceptions, there is wireless available at all tournaments, and while it is occasionally spotty, it does work, and over time it will only get better.

It becomes a given, therefore, that a lot of debaters will have their evidence stored in the cloud. It becomes a given also that a lot of debaters might be running devices without any ports at all (like my MacBook or my iPad). So the idea of limiting internet access is questionable out of the gate. If there is no way to realistically expect students to have their evidence in a round other than via the cloud, we don’t really have a choice but to allow access to that evidence. The only viable alternative is to mandate physical evidence and thus bring back the evidence tub. And that’s not going to happen.

The point that was raised in our discussions was, what about cheating? First of all, I would state categorically that any definition of what constitutes cheating would define the sort of thing that the incredibly vast majority of teams would find abhorrent. I’m wary of a worldview that suspects that teams are in general champing at the bit to break the rules, regardless of whether it’s via computer use or falsified evidence or, well anything. They aren’t. My glasses are not so rose-colored that I believe people aren’t capable of wrongdoing, but I think (and hope) it is rare.

With debate computer use, the two big suspicious areas are communication with persons outside of the round, and access to general information. As far as the first is concerned, this is a clear violation of any ethical approach to debate. Teams can’t ask someone outside of themselves for help. You may have a coaching staff of a hundred people, but they send you into the round on your own. The coach doesn’t send plays into the quarterback’s earphone during the huddle. So I think we can clearly prohibit out-of-the-room communication. Then again, I have to wonder what good that sort of communication would do. Something comes up in a round on, say, Rawls’s difference principle, which you’ve never heard of. So you text your coach to explain the difference principle and refute the attached argument during your two minutes of prep time? The same applies to access to information. Let’s say your opponent brings up Derrida, whom you’ve never heard of. You’re going to look him up on the interwebs in two minutes and come away not only with an understanding but a rebuttal? The only person who could ever do that was Mrs. Derrida, and even she had to wonder at times what the guy was talking about.

So I come down on the side of not bothering to get carried away with banning of this, that or the other regarding computer use. On the one hand, the train has left the station, and on the other hand, where it might verge on actual unethical exchanges, it’s probably totally worthless. But it doesn’t hurt for a tournament to post a policy, just to have it covered. That policy should be something about disallowing communications with persons outside of the round, and leave it at that, which is what we will do at the Bronx. As things play out, the only ones who will ever bring a rules violation against a team is the other team. Given that the complaining teams comprise excitable adolescents, let’s not make easy for them to cause a ruckus over nothing.

In which we bid a fond farewell to an old classic

I mentioned yesterday that the Monticello tournament has been cancelled. I was thinking about it, and as I recall it, I’ve been going to this one without a break for over 20 years. When I first starting judging, when my daughter was a novice (complaining that I dressed too weird to sit in the back of the room), Monti had a semis bid, and lots of divisions, including in LD JV and Varsity. They were big divisions, and over the years my team did very well in them. One year I went, and the person who was going to tab the thing couldn’t make it. Rose J-T saw me in the auditorium and asked if I wouldn’t mind, making this one of the earliest tab jobs I had. It became a regular business, that I would handle their pairings. Plus for a while we held a one-day tournament there every year under the auspices of the Mid-Hudson League. Districts were there once or twice too. So I’ve always had a lot of Monticello in my schedule.

There is a decent hotel near the race track, but early on I always stayed at the downtown EconoLodge. My favorite memory of the place was one night there was some sort of violent disturbance, and the main desk called my room to ask me to go find out what was happening and report back to them. This, of course, was the last time I stayed at said EconoLodge.

Monti got its TOC bids stripped away because of politics on the board, and not for anything having to do with the quality of the tournament. Back then, politics on the board were vicious, mendacious and positively putrid. I was on the board for a while, and the whole experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Overall, as I’ve written over the years, while there are some positive aspects to the TOC, its influence overall in debate has not been positive. But that’s another story. The point is, without its bids, Monti slowly lost business. Granted, it is off the beaten path, but you get on a bus and there you are, which is true of virtually all the tournaments anyone around here goes to. The bid-only mindset is what really killed it. Honestly, it’s been hanging by a thread for years. It’s no surprise that the thread finally snapped.

I look at my calendar nowadays and, unlike a decade ago, I do not see a regional tournament there every weekend. Our once vibrant area is not what it used to be. I understand that there is ebb and flow, but it’s not like the debaters aren’t there. But leadership of those debaters is not what it used to be. The Mid-Hudson League, for example, was run by the various coaches in the region, all of them in the tab room filling out index cards. I sort of got the impression that they weren’t necessarily all terribly fond of one another, but they got the job done of providing rounds to all their students. Today? Rounds are a lot rarer. Which means people have to travel a lot further. Which means that money is tighter. None of which is a good thing.

Anyhow, RIP Monticello. Rose J-T will try to salvage something, perhaps on another weekend, and I hope she’s successful. I mean, well, second favorite memory: One year, we were done with the tournament and decided to eat before leaving town. We went to the local Chinese restaurant. The special of the day was corned beef and cabbage. 

‘Nuff said.