Football is over and Peyton Manning is the story: Does Eli pass the Matt Ryan test →

The idea that the NFL is a passing league isn’t a new one, but the inequity between the two conferences has never been clearer. The three best passers in the NFL are all playing in the NFC, and the relative dearth of talent at the position in the AFC is the reason that Vegas has the conference as a 3-point underdog in next year’s Super Bowl already.

Here’s a way to determine whether a team has a decent quarterback in place or not — let’s call it The Matt Ryan Test. Matt Ryan, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, is an above-average player whose best years are still ahead of him, but he’s unlikely to ever be confused with Joe Montana or Johnny Unitas — the very definition of “decent.” The Matt Ryan Test is this: If you’d trade your team’s quarterback for Matt Ryan in an even exchange, then your team doesn’t have a decent quarterback in place.

In the AFC, only a handful of team’s pass the Ryan Test — the Patriots, the Chargers, the Steelers, and the Texans are the only teams with a starter in place who’s at least as good as Matt Ryan. There’d be serious conversations in Oakland and Cincinnati about it, and regardless of what Broncos fans think, John Elway would have Tim Tebow stuffed in a suitcase before the Falcons hung up the phone.

As football season comes to a close, so too does my Culturemap football column, Down And Distance enter its offseason. Thanks to everybody who read it and wrote in, except for those who threatened me for pointing out that Ben Roethlisberger has been credibly accused of rape more than once (fuck y’all!) and give this last column a read!

We introduce the concept of The Matt Ryan Test, speculate about what the speculation surrounding Peyton Manning will be like (boners swordfights around the ESPN offices!), and lament the fact that during the rest of the primary season, there will be no easy football metaphors to reach for, leaving us woefully restricted to comparing the candidates to baseball and basketball players until things heat up as the 2012 NFL season kicks off…

Seriously, though, getting to write a weekly column where I wrote about football as a social, political, and cultural force through which we view ourselves as Americans has been a dream project of mine for a very long time, and I had so much fun doing it that I am apparently right now typing a weird acceptance speech on Tumblr. But thanks, sincerely, to the people who read it and wanted to talk about it with me, and especially to Culturemap for saying yes to a kind of weird idea (when they were just launching, no less) that they knew would take half a year to complete. This was so much fun for me, seriously.

The Road To Juggalo Recovery →

My name is Dan Solomon, and I am a Juggalo.

Well, like an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, I’m a Juggalo. I haven’t spent much time listening to ICP since I was 20 or so. I bought the Jack White single, though, and most of the songs that everybody made fun of, I thought were pretty funny. (Y’all, that “magnets: how the fuck do they work” line was a joke. You were laughing with them, you just didn’t realize it — which makes you the asshole, I’m pretty sure.)

Anyway. I never painted my face or anything, but Juggalos weren’t quite the same thing back then that they are now, so who knows how into it I’d have gotten if I’d been 19 years old in 2010? I always found it weird that there was so much Juggalo hate out there, in any case — not just because it’s got some seriously ugly classist/bullying undertones to it, in most instances, but because the group is a comedy group. They always were, and the butt of most of their jokes are themselves, so being all, “ICP is so stupid” always struck me as missing the point: these are the dudes whose own lyrics include gems like “What is a Juggalo […] / he’ll eat up Monopoly and shit out Connect Four” and “Fuck all 52 states!” They’re not expecting you to take them seriously.

So, I was bouncing some ideas around with my editor at Adult Swim a little while back, right around the time that this year’s crop of obnoxious first-person reports from the Gathering Of The Juggalos started coming out, and I wanted to write something that had fun with the idea of being a Juggalo, but which also was pretty firmly on their side. Hence, a 12-step program to help Juggalos leave the fold was born.

The comments section on this one is nuts, too. ICP haters seem to love it, and they talk all sorts of mean shit to the Juggalos who comment, but whatever — those people are assholes. I was honestly thrilled, though, to see so many positive comments from self-professed Juggalos. I’m glad they got it — it’s a gentle ribbing from somebody who understands, not an attack, and it was super fun to write (Cat Stevens, y’all!). Maybe the best part, though, was having an excuse to re-visit The Amazing Jekyll Brothers and The Great Milenko in the name of research.

So go on, Juggalos. It may not be a lifestyle you’ll be able to sustain forever, but I’m for you and not against you.

Ten A.V. Club Austin stories worth noting.

Is it tacky to do your own greatest hits? Well, hell — nobody ever accused me of being classy.

In honor of the A.V. Club Austin’s announcement that it’s shutting its doors, here are ten stories I wrote for the site that I was particularly proud of.

“Counting Crows Are Better Than Your Favorite Band,” February 11, 2009
I wrote this one immediately after Sean, the site’s first editor, opened up pitches to include bloggy-style personal reflections. I was so psyched to have an outlet that would pay me to express my very sincere love of the Counting Crows. Counting Crows fans liked it, too — it got linked so widely that it even ended up in the hands of a guy who wrote the Sioux City Journal’s music column, who plagiarized it. (The paper later issued a “correction” saying that I should have been credited — though not paid, I guess? — which is no longer online. You can find it on the Google search results if you look for “jesse claeys,” who “wrote” the story and “plagiarism”.)

“Uh-Oh, Rush Comes To Town: A Limbaugh-Centric Guide To Austin,” April 15, 2009
This one was really fun. Rick Perry made some off-the-cuff remark one morning about how Rush Limbaugh should move to Austin, and we took that as a cue to suggest all the douchey places he should hang out.

“A.V. Club’s extremely shallow guide to the Austin mayoral race,” May 3, 2009
We weren’t set up to cover politics at all at the A.V. Club Austin, but I managed to talk my editor into this one, which just made fun of the various candidates for Mayor in 2009 for having silly names and stuff. Lots of quality Carole Keaton Strayhorn jokes!

“Don’t forget the lube: Competitive eating tips from Carnival-O-Pizza champion Chris Floyd,” December 2, 2009
I really loved that the A.V. Club gave me a chance to interview just about anyone about just about anything, and find things to celebrate about totally random folks. Chris Floyd turned out to be a pretty awesome guy who taught me a bunch about competitive eating — including that I’m nowhere near the athlete I’d need to be to do it properly.

“Faking Your Way Through New Media Art And Sound Summit,” June 15, 2010
Actually, this one sucked. Not the story — it’s a fine entry in the Faking Your Way series that I launched (and which is now apparently part of the A.V. Club wheelhouse, which is a neat sort of validation). But the reponse to it, wow. I had approached some of the people participating in this avant music festival by explaining to them the exact concept; some of them were apparently uncomfortable about participating, but answered my questions anyway. When the story ran, they were subsequently furious about it. Read the comments — it’s harsh, and ridiculous. I had been a big supporter of Church Of The Friendly Ghost until that point — it’s a small organization dedicated to bring non-commercial music to Austin, and I always respected that, and liked the people I knew who were involved. But this all left a really sour taste in my mouth that, hey, is apparently still there. What a bummer.

“Questions We Would’ve Asked Billy Corgan,” September 20, 2010
We got dicked around by Billy Corgan for an interview, which he would only grant if he could be assured print coverage. Apparently BC don’t truck with the Internet. When it came up against our deadline, rather than spike the idea, my editor and I agreed that it’d be fun to do a blog post about the things I would have asked him about. Which is probably a better read than the interview would have been.

“The Franzen-O-Meter: Ranking the authors of the Texas Book Festival,” October 14, 2010
One thing I learned how to do, gradually, by working with the A.V. Club was to incorporate the socially-conscious stuff I liked writing best into the arts & entertainment framework that the site had established. This was especially challenging at the A.V. Club because the site favored heavily formatted, angle-driven stories. This one, about the media’s obsession with Franzen and dudely authors last year, I think accomplished something I’m proud of.

“Every Hall Of Famer Artist Summer Anne Burton,” April 6, 2011
I got to interview a handful of my friends for the A.V. Club — pals who’d released a record or had a cool event coming or maybe even who were making theater, early on. But this was definitely my favorite, because about a week after the interview ran, Summer’s Every Hall Of Famer project blew the fuck up. It’s not because of this story or anything — that stuff had to have been in the works before this ran — but it was really neat to be at the start of watching someone I know get a lot of national media attention, and to have been a part of it.

“The Twilight Singers at The Parish,” June 1, 2011
The type of arts/entertainment writing that I’ve always been less confident in is straight up reviews. I get all troubled about it — “Who am I to stand in judgment? I don’t even play an instrument!” and stuff like that. Especially with music, which I think I probably relate to differently than most music critics. But I eventually found a voice that I felt was fair to both the performer and the audience, and I’m happy with how this one came out.

“From West Texas to the Billboard 200: An Explosions In The Sky oral history,” June 16, 2011
I worked my ass off on this, and put together something that I’m really proud of. Explosions In The Sky is a band that has always meant a lot to me, and I was really excited to be able to tell their story so fully. This’ll be the hardest sort of thing to re-create, without the A.V. Club as an outlet. I know there are a handful of local outlets who’d be into this sort of story, but I doubt I’ll be able to get all of the necessary people to participate if it’s not for a brand as recognized nationally as the A.V. Club. Meanwhile, the national sites that I work with might be kinda interested, but it’s tough to ask anyone to commit 3,000 words to telling the story of the Austin roots of a local band, even if they’re famous around the world now.

Incidentally — the editors at CultureMap asked me to put together an obituary for the A.V. Club, and I obliged them. It’s less rambly and more concise than the one I wrote here on Tumblr, but I think it explains why this site was so unique.

The Battles Of G-Baby →

I have a story in the new issue of the Texas Observer. It’s the first in the magazine’s new monthly format, which is exciting — previously, the magazine ran bi-weekly, so this one will be on stands for twice as long.

The story is about Whitney Perkins, who raps under the name G-Baby. I first met Whitney when I was sitting in on a performance/sharing at Travis County Correctional Complex — Kat teaches theater classes to women incarcerated there, and she invited me to see their end-of-term project. Whitney was definitely the most charismatic performer that day, but I was still very surprised to see her retire a 5-time champion on 106 & Park’s Freestyle Friday a few months later.

The article is about battle rap, and sexism and homophobia in hip hop, and Whitney’s completely indomitable spirit. I’m pretty proud of how this one came out — give it a read, will you?

[down and distance: week one] This is America: Why football matters →

Over at Culturemap.com, my new football column launches today! From the first installment, here is what marketing people might describe as the elevator pitch:

There are a lot of places, online and in print, to read post-game analysis, training camp reports, locker room gossip, and free agency hype. But football is bigger than just those things. The game is part of the same culture as Presidential campaigns, political activism, underground hip-hop, dog-whistle sexism, Thursday night NBC comedies, East Austin hipsterism, Oscar bait film season, etc, etc. All of these things are on the forefront of the culture, and they’re all interconnected. It’s like The Wire.

This is the first edition of Down and Distance, a new weekly column on CultureMap. It’s a place to consider each week of football in a context larger than the locker room. We’re going to talk about the social, political, and pop-cultural implications of the game, because any activity that holds a nation’s attention like NFL football does have those implications. This is sports talk with a broad context.

This first column is about the labor negotiations, the debt ceiling negotiations, and why — even though DeMaurice Smith and Roger Goodell are bumbling, vaguely competent executives who flirted with the notion of blowing up America’s most popular and profitable sport for no good reason — we would probably still be better off as a nation if even those two dudes handled the debt ceiling deal.

Read it, ‘like’ it, share it, tweet it, Digg it, please. We’re going to do some cool stuff over there.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of the Cinema →

My first story for AdultSwim.com is up now. It is about the time last week that I went into a movie theater at 4 o’clock in the morning, having never read or seen any of the Harry Potter series and knowing nothing about the plot or the characters, and sat in the theater for 22 hours, alongside some of the most fanatical Harry Potter fans in the country, emerging as a full-fledged expert in the film series’ mythology.

(Yes, I know — I should really read the books, as they’re much better. But can you read 7 books of increasingly-preposterous length in a single 22-hour span while surrounded by laughing, cheering, and weeping fanatics? I have found no such opportunity to do so, so the Harry Potter series remains, for me, a film experience. But one with which I am now very familiar.)

11:33am: You know who I hate? Draco Malfroy. I’m not alone in this, either – Harry and Ron and Hermione hate him, too, so I think this officially makes me a Harry Potter fan, united with our heroes in hatred of that little blonde-haired prick. I want to throw Draco Malfroy into a Thunderdome-style arena with Prince Joffrey from Game Of Thrones and make them kill each other. Then the hippogriff can eat their corpses.

Insight like that available at the link!

Down and Distance

(I kept a football column on the hip-hop/politics/culture website Troubl.org a few years ago. It was called Down and Distance, and it was about the places where football, politics, pop culture, and the other parts of contemporary American culture intersect. The site was down for a long while, but recently relaunched — albeit without archives. I need to have some of the old columns online at the moment, and this seemed like a good place to keep them. This one is from September 1st, 2008.)

[down and distance: week one] Only in America do they look at rugby and say, fuck it, why don’t you just throw the ball all the way across the damn field?

They call the game american football, but it’s not a descriptor of where the game originated; it’s not a modifier like australian rules is to explain that the game features a variation on the association rules. The game is American Football, and the american part of it is an adjective that describes the style of the game being played. It’s American Football, a game that exists because Americans like to take concepts that are brought to our shores and warp them into unrecognizable shapes, until they look like things that resemble what we see when we look in the mirror. Football is no exception.

It used to be rugby football, of course, even in America. In the 1880’s, it started to change, because they wanted a higher-scoring, speed-based game, instead of a low-scoring game based on brute strength. This is when the line of scrimmage and snap were introduced, when you started having to work for a first down. Before the down-and-distance entered the game, it was possible to hold the ball by running for a few yards at a time and, after scoring, never give the opponent a chance to play. The rules were hammered out of failures- Teddy Roosevelt had to introduce the forward pass to keep people from dying on the field, because it kept happening and the alternative was to ban the game entirely, which was politically unviable. The game and politics have always been intertwined.

American Football exists in its current form because Americans like wars, always have, but didn’t see one on their own soil after the Civil War ended. A jones for war without the threat of our cities being bombed led to the development of a game with rules like the rules of warfare. Off-field generals make the calls for on-field actors to carry out. The game is about holding and maintaining territory, about aerial assault and ground attacks. It is a metaphor that only works properly in a country that has never been threatened by a foreign power the way that most of the rest of the world has. The forward pass was introduced to the game under the first Roosevelt, but it didn’t start being an effective way to play the game until the 1920’s, after World War I started and warfare started taking place in the skies. American football is football, yeah, if you define football as whatever game is the most popular one among any given national identity- the Australians favor the game they call football, same as in South America and China and England. Pretty much everywhere but Canada, football can consistently be defined as the game everyone cares about. In America, the game doesn’t matter much to anyone anywhere else, but that’s part of its charm. It’s not for anyone else. They’re welcome to it, but that’s not the point- it was devised by people looking to break apart something that worked for everybody else, just to see what would happen. It’s like jazz, like Coltrane busting through the confines of “My Favorite Things” to a new form of expression.

[that’s a lot of weighty talk for a game] There are a lot of places to read post-game analysis and locker room gossip, but that’s not the sort of thing you come to Troubl to read. Cool. Sports are a part of the same culture as Presidential campaigns, political activists, underground hip-hop, dog-whistle racism, hipsterism, etc, etc. All of these things exist on the forefront of American culture. They’re all interconnected. It’s like The Wire.

This is the first edition of Down and Distance, a new weekly column here on Troubl. It’s a place to consider the social, political, and pop-cultural implications of professional football, because any game that hold’s a nation’s attention like NFL football does has those implications. This is sports talk with a broad context.

[get to it, then] To start with, this is week 0 of the NFL season. Opening kickoff for the season is on Thursday, at the exact moment John McCain was scheduled to give his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St Paul. But that was before Gustav. Now? Who the hell knows what’ll be happening. John McCain may take a charter plane down into New Orleans in a desperate pander, while the Saints home opener against the Bucs could well take place in Indianapolis. Maybe he’ll show up at Lucas Oil Field and demand a chance to sing the national anthem Sunday afternoon after dropping a heavy-handed guilt-trip on the NFL officials… “I’ll tell you when John McCain wasn’t singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ to thousands of football fans, when he spent five years in a Vietnamese prison!”

There is no pander that John McCain isn’t prepared to offer Americans, and that goes double when football is involved. Check out his line from July in a radio interview in Pittsburgh: “When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the pressures, physical pressures on me, I named the starting lineup, defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron mates.” It’s a moving line, sure, but it raised some flags for me- I remember reading that story years ago, but at the time, he claimed it was the offensive line of the Packers.

I’m a Chicago Bears fan, and I hate the cursed Green Bay Packers, so the story stuck out to me as yet another reason not to vote for McCain. But the Steelers claim revealed a weird element of McCain’s character. This all seems like a very minor thing for anyone to care about, but we are a nation of football fans, and to people who identify with a specific team, the revelation is dramatic. These are arbitrary loyalties, basically irrelevant, and completely random, based on quirks of geography or aesthetics.

I am a Chicago Bears fan, and I loathe the Green Bay Packers, but even I will grudgingly admit that their fans come from all walks of life and consist of good people; similarly, I fucking hate eighty percent of the Bears fans I meet. These identifications mean nothing to anyone, reveal nothing of a person’s character, except that it is an important display of loyalty. Nothing is more pathetic than a fair-weather fan, only around for the good seasons. Dumping your team to score some cheap points is a sign that you can’t be trusted when it comes to even the truly irrelevant. This becomes especially pointed when contrasted with this bit about Barack Obama. Do y’all remember the 2006 Saints? This was a year after Katrina, when they had just come home from playing in San Antonio after a 3-13 season, with a seriously injured Drew Brees in place as their starting quarterback and no expectations from anyone. Somehow, though, they managed to pull it together to make their first appearance in conference title game, capturing the imaginations of the entire Gulf Coast and becoming a symbol of renewal and the triumph of the human spirit, giving hope to people everywhere and inspiring pundits to refer to them as the United States Saints. Everyone was pulling for their fairytale season to continue with a win in the NFC Championship game over Chicago, to assuage the guilt they felt for watching while their city drowned…

Except Barack Obama. A week after he announced his run for President, the hometown boy insisted to anyone who asked his opinion about the game that “the fairytale ends when they come to chicago.”

This outraged a bunch of really easily outraged sportswriters and conservative pundits. Rush Limbaugh lost his shit over it; Jeff Mariotti, a shithead sportswriter for the sun-times, went nuts. Because it was nice to root for the Saints that year, seemed genuinely important somehow. Any politician who wanted an easy pander to the crowds just had to say that he believed we could all emerge stronger from adversity, why, look at the tale of the New Orleans Saints… It’s an easy script to launch into, and a lot of people, when asked about the game, went for it. But not Obama. He took the position of a football fan, and that’s a part of a man’s character, too.

[as for this year…] Another thing sports and politics have in common is that fans of both games love to prognosticate. One would be a fool this year to claim any insight into the potential success of the New Orleans Saints or any other team, except maybe a perennial like the Indianapolis Colts. Claiming that the Vikings are destined for a conference championship showdown against the Dallas Cowboys only reveals one to be as clueless as all the pundits preparing for a Clinton/Giuliani battle last December. Even trying to predict the executive decisions leaves a person stunned by major shake-ups, like the Arizona Cardinals’ decision to start ancient 37 year old Kurt Warner instead of Matt Leinart at QB in San Francisco on Sunday, or the Arizona senator’s decision to select youthful and inexperienced 44 year old Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Mostly the real action happens on the field, and so far this year, we’ve yet to see a single down played.

From West Texas to the Billboard 200: An Explosions In The Sky oral history →

I spent an absurd amount of time and energy on this story, because I was just very excited to tell it. Explosions In The Sky’s music has always meant a lot to me, and there are certain Austin bands who were very much local bands around the time I first moved here — Okkervil River, Explosions In The Sky, even Spoon, to some extent — and their journey to world-famous rock stars has always really interested me. I mean, Will Sheff was my video store clerk for a really long time, you know? Now he’s an Important Figure In Contemporary Rock, and I’m delighted — I loved his songs when he would made snide remarks about the Parker Posey movie I was renting, and I love his music now — but it’s still fascinating to me.

Explosions In The Sky are a special case, because those dudes did things so much on their own terms. I mean, they got lucky, especially with Friday Night Lights (and they’re the first ones to acknowledge that), but there are so few artists who are able to really just shut up, ignore everything about the industry and the wider pop culture, write really powerful and moving music, and somehow still get famous for it.

In that context, Explosions In The Sky are one of the finest artistic success stories I know. So when I pushed this oral history, I was really just partly excited to get to know the guys in the band a little bit (as you might hope, they’re exceedingly down to earth and friendly) and partly interested in learning about that success story firsthand. There were people I wanted to talk to, in order to fill it in, who I couldn’t — Conrad Keely from Trail Of Dead was out of the country most of the time I was working on the story, and I couldn’t get a hold of him even though I’m pretty sure we live in the same neighborhood. Peter Berg, who directed Friday Night Lights, is busy preparing a new TV series, finishing the Battleship movie (with Tim Riggins, y’all), and probably opening a chain of organic sandwich shops in the Pacific Northwest or something.

On the other hand, I got WG Snuffy Walden, who composed the music for the Friday Night Lights TV series, to talk candidly about the experience of being a soundtrack guy brought in to work in the band’s style, which I was really excited about. And Graham Williams of Transmission Entertainment, who gave the guys their first-ever show, provided a lot of crucial background and color from the band’s longest-time fan.

But mostly, I’m just really proud of the fact that this band, whose music really has meant so much to me for so long, let me tell its story. I’ve never had the opportunity to write more than about 1,200 words for The A.V. Club before — this one clocks in over 3,500 words. I’m really pleased with how it came out.

Friday Night Lights auction: Is it worth it? →

In a special Crosstalk feature at the A.V. Club, Erik Adams and I argue the point of the Friday Night Lights prop/memorabilia auction that NBC is holding this week.

Discussed: Is it dumber to buy overpriced television props from a show that’s set in the “real world” than one set in a superhero universe; Is Friday Night Lights really set in the “real world” in the first place; is there a good reason to own J.D. McCoy’s shirt; how much does Austin love itself for being the real town of Dillon? Also: if you bought one of Don Draper’s suits at a Mad Men auction, you’re totally wearing that shit out.