Did some 400s yesterday and they felt good. I'm finally getting some turnover, and they were about 2 sec faster than usual. The barrier is often coordination/lack of turnover, but since starting to work on the speed and starting to do some of Derek's drills that has changed somewhat. The barrier yesterday was muscle fatigue. That is good.
Check out this video about biking in Manhattan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ
I wonder if biking in big cities is completely a lost cause. I think it is, at least, I think patching dangerous bike lanes onto busy streets is a half-assed non-solution to the problem of cars in the city. It's amazing how 100 years ago cities were built with cars in mind as if the energy supply were infinite, and it's amazing how difficult it is to restructure something as overbuilt as a city. It's also amazing how hostile people are to trains in the US. I think about O'Hare in Chicago and how the only way to get from the airport to downtown without a car is on the slow-ass blue line. The airport was built under the presumption of automotive dominance, with easy access to the Kennedy highway that builders thought would be the quickest way into downtown. Now everyone either suffers in Kennedy traffic, or shakes along on the slow plodding El train into downtown. They need a high speed train from O'Hare directly into the loop that could get people from point to point in less than twenty minutes. Or else they could make people bike!
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
is it cool to like "Hotel California"?
I kind of like the song, but I hear that hipsters make fun of it. What about the Eagles in general?
Reasons "Hotel California" is uncool:
Reasons "Hotel California" is uncool:
- Covered by Gypsy Kings, hairy-chested Mediterranean singing group whose CDs supplied the soundtrack to the nervous third dates of 45-ish divorcees in mid-90s California.
- Hipsters say so, but then again, the song's an easy target, so maybe it's cool after all.
- Last heard in dental office
- Don Henley's solo career
- In April 2001, when the Navy spyplane collided over China with a fighter jet, the captured American sailors sang it to their captors (the first foreign policy crisis of Bush administration)
- It makes you think of adult contemporary, mullets, hottubs, divorcees, and fake tans.
Friday, June 10, 2011
an easy week
I haven't been running too much this week, and it's been nice to have an easy week. I have been focusing this week on a lot more speed stuff, including some sprint drills Derek taught me, and on a 70 minute run yesterday morning I stopped at the track and ran some sprints and 200s. I'm pretty sore today from all of that. The exciting thing is, though, that it's racing season, with local 5Ks almost every weekend, and I'm excited to see what I can do at a distance that's not really the one I train for. Frequent racing is not only fun, but helps get you very fit, fast, and mentally tough. So we'll see whether this summer will bring a 5K PR. I'd very much like it too. I don't think I've run under 17:00 since high school. I wonder if I can. Last 5K I ran was something like 17:13 (I think) and that was in the middle of marathon training last fall.
On a totally random note--here's my plug for the PBS series Downton Abbey, an enchanting Edwardian period piece about a fictional family of English aristocrats in the ominous years between the sinking of the Titanic and the start of WWI. There's a whole lot to say about it, but seriously, I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone. It's absolutely great.
I'm also reading Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan -- here's a plug for that. His Age of Reagan begins with Nixon and ends with Obama, and it's the story of the entree of the extreme right into the mainstream of American political life and the eclipse not only of New Deal Liberalism, but moderate conservatism. Reagan is central to his story, but in the end, he's less important than the extremists--like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Pat Buchanan--whom his own un-ideological pragmatism and politic willingness to compromise ultimately leaves disappointed and disaffected. Wilentz redeems Reagan from right-wing haigiography and left-wing demonizing, and the 40th president who emerges from his portrait is one whose achievements in ending the cold war owe to luck and private idealism rather than to the hard-line stance he often faked in his rhetoric.
On a totally random note--here's my plug for the PBS series Downton Abbey, an enchanting Edwardian period piece about a fictional family of English aristocrats in the ominous years between the sinking of the Titanic and the start of WWI. There's a whole lot to say about it, but seriously, I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone. It's absolutely great.
I'm also reading Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan -- here's a plug for that. His Age of Reagan begins with Nixon and ends with Obama, and it's the story of the entree of the extreme right into the mainstream of American political life and the eclipse not only of New Deal Liberalism, but moderate conservatism. Reagan is central to his story, but in the end, he's less important than the extremists--like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Pat Buchanan--whom his own un-ideological pragmatism and politic willingness to compromise ultimately leaves disappointed and disaffected. Wilentz redeems Reagan from right-wing haigiography and left-wing demonizing, and the 40th president who emerges from his portrait is one whose achievements in ending the cold war owe to luck and private idealism rather than to the hard-line stance he often faked in his rhetoric.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
training in the heat.
Today was too hot to run. While I relish the so-called character building aspects of cold weather running, with its Jack London, "To-Build-a-Fire" facing of the elements, I gladly let the heat have its day. In sub-freezing weather I once ran a marathon PR, but when the temperature jumps over 80 I choose AC over training every time.
We are in Tammi's hometown now and Tammi's brother is a top-notch, professional physical trainer. Instead of going for a run today, we let Derek, Tammi's brother, run us through a half hour of sprint and agility drills. It was a huge neuromuscular challenge, and it opened my body in some new ways.
We are in Tammi's hometown now and Tammi's brother is a top-notch, professional physical trainer. Instead of going for a run today, we let Derek, Tammi's brother, run us through a half hour of sprint and agility drills. It was a huge neuromuscular challenge, and it opened my body in some new ways.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
hot weather running, if you like sex and the city you hate homeless people
The last two days have been unbearably hot relative to the cool temperatures of May, and morning runs have left me drained. It takes me a good two weeks or so to get used to warmer temperatures. I have come to accept this as part of summer running. It slows my runs, saps my motivation to run, makes me sleepy while reading. (Of all the pleasures of academia, falling asleep while reading on the couch is the professional hazard I love best!)
This season's Bachelorette is shaping up to be even weirder than the others, mainly because they taken down the fourth wall of reality TV and this season's contestants are as savvy and conscious as ever about the show's cliches, rules, and history. Contestants refer on-air to previous seasons, to the cliches of saying you're "there for the right reasons," and even, in the figure of Bentley, to the ways in which they're manipulating reality TV for personal gain. Bentley, of course, is there for all the wrong reasons, but he represents the way the Bachelor/ette series has been able to integrate into its dramatic arcs what was once the story of the post-final episode tabloids: contestants' use of the show to advance their own fame. If brazen confessions of self-interest once violated the rules and the spirit of the show, the fame calculus now merely introduces another ingredient into the pie, another peril that the bachelor or bachelorette must face.
While Ashley is one of the smarter bachelor/ettes, a savvy political infighter who clawed her way out of the pack to a runner-up spot that's now the de facto conduit to getting your own season, she's about to be outsmarted by Bentley--who creates drama by abandoning any pretense of being there for the right reasons, or even of thinking Ashley's hot. And the fact is, Allie and Ashley (with their cute little names you might give to a Golden Retriever puppy) aren't half as attractive as the men on the show (though they are about twice as smart). While they're less threatening than the hottest women on the Bachelor, viewers can identify with the spunky cuteness of someone like Ashley more easily than with the icy beauty of someone like Roslyn, who had the "inappropriate" relationship with the producer two seasons ago.
Now, academics love to tell people why the things they like pose HUGE political or ethical problems, and I'm no different. I'm as smug as the rest. So here's one of the many "problematic," as they say, aspects of Sex and the City. SATC colluded with the Guiliani administration in sanitizing NYC and duplicated the city's efforts to sell a cleaned-up, poverty free, minority-free image of itself to tourists from the Jersey suburbs and the hinterlands beyond. If you believe SATC, the post-industrial metropolis is a place where only rich while people live, where Big comes by lots of money through financial alchemy which is all too complex for Carrie try to understand anyway (and work is so boring after all!), and where the only minorities are the occasional tall, handsome professional black man who woos Miranda (or maybe a Fleet Week Hispanic sailor for Samantha). At the same time as Rudy's efforts to make homelessness and poverty disappear from view in Manhattan were taking effect, the show promoted a similar vision, passing off as authentic New Yorkers (as if there were such a thing) what was really a quartet of suburban moms gawking their way to brunch after brunch, cosmo to cosmo. SJP's high heels could echo safely on the walls of Manhattan's no longer abandoned and scary skyscaper canyons. It's not surprising, then, that we have SATC tourism now, because SATC was tourism all along.
Last thing, I'm fully aware that my argument turns on an implicit opposition between the city and the white suburban mom, and I'll admit that it isn't exactly fair or original to make the white suburban mom the protected, sheltered, phobic antonym to all things supposedly urban. It's worth dwelling, then, on why we (not just me, lots of people and implicitly, SATC) tend to think of the white suburban mom as the opposite of the city. There are historical oppositions between the connotations of city as a bad place and of white moms as sheltering and overprotective; we think of suburbs as boring places where sex is for reproduction and cities as exciting places where sex is for fun. We think of white women in the city as potential crime victims, not as people who exercise control over urban spaces. (The point of SATC's gentrification of NYC is to undo this cultural canard and give white women power over urban space, and I give it credit for trying to do.)
This enduring opposition between the suburban mom and the city is one reason the white city mom living in a gentrified area proves so fascinating (not least to the legions of mommy bloggers themselves). Who is this person, we ask. How is she going to transform the city? It's generally hipsters who give her the most grief, concerned as they are that strollers will interrupt their "authentic" experience as city people. Hipsters are a topic for another post. Why do hipsters bother me so much?
This season's Bachelorette is shaping up to be even weirder than the others, mainly because they taken down the fourth wall of reality TV and this season's contestants are as savvy and conscious as ever about the show's cliches, rules, and history. Contestants refer on-air to previous seasons, to the cliches of saying you're "there for the right reasons," and even, in the figure of Bentley, to the ways in which they're manipulating reality TV for personal gain. Bentley, of course, is there for all the wrong reasons, but he represents the way the Bachelor/ette series has been able to integrate into its dramatic arcs what was once the story of the post-final episode tabloids: contestants' use of the show to advance their own fame. If brazen confessions of self-interest once violated the rules and the spirit of the show, the fame calculus now merely introduces another ingredient into the pie, another peril that the bachelor or bachelorette must face.
While Ashley is one of the smarter bachelor/ettes, a savvy political infighter who clawed her way out of the pack to a runner-up spot that's now the de facto conduit to getting your own season, she's about to be outsmarted by Bentley--who creates drama by abandoning any pretense of being there for the right reasons, or even of thinking Ashley's hot. And the fact is, Allie and Ashley (with their cute little names you might give to a Golden Retriever puppy) aren't half as attractive as the men on the show (though they are about twice as smart). While they're less threatening than the hottest women on the Bachelor, viewers can identify with the spunky cuteness of someone like Ashley more easily than with the icy beauty of someone like Roslyn, who had the "inappropriate" relationship with the producer two seasons ago.
Now, academics love to tell people why the things they like pose HUGE political or ethical problems, and I'm no different. I'm as smug as the rest. So here's one of the many "problematic," as they say, aspects of Sex and the City. SATC colluded with the Guiliani administration in sanitizing NYC and duplicated the city's efforts to sell a cleaned-up, poverty free, minority-free image of itself to tourists from the Jersey suburbs and the hinterlands beyond. If you believe SATC, the post-industrial metropolis is a place where only rich while people live, where Big comes by lots of money through financial alchemy which is all too complex for Carrie try to understand anyway (and work is so boring after all!), and where the only minorities are the occasional tall, handsome professional black man who woos Miranda (or maybe a Fleet Week Hispanic sailor for Samantha). At the same time as Rudy's efforts to make homelessness and poverty disappear from view in Manhattan were taking effect, the show promoted a similar vision, passing off as authentic New Yorkers (as if there were such a thing) what was really a quartet of suburban moms gawking their way to brunch after brunch, cosmo to cosmo. SJP's high heels could echo safely on the walls of Manhattan's no longer abandoned and scary skyscaper canyons. It's not surprising, then, that we have SATC tourism now, because SATC was tourism all along.
Last thing, I'm fully aware that my argument turns on an implicit opposition between the city and the white suburban mom, and I'll admit that it isn't exactly fair or original to make the white suburban mom the protected, sheltered, phobic antonym to all things supposedly urban. It's worth dwelling, then, on why we (not just me, lots of people and implicitly, SATC) tend to think of the white suburban mom as the opposite of the city. There are historical oppositions between the connotations of city as a bad place and of white moms as sheltering and overprotective; we think of suburbs as boring places where sex is for reproduction and cities as exciting places where sex is for fun. We think of white women in the city as potential crime victims, not as people who exercise control over urban spaces. (The point of SATC's gentrification of NYC is to undo this cultural canard and give white women power over urban space, and I give it credit for trying to do.)
This enduring opposition between the suburban mom and the city is one reason the white city mom living in a gentrified area proves so fascinating (not least to the legions of mommy bloggers themselves). Who is this person, we ask. How is she going to transform the city? It's generally hipsters who give her the most grief, concerned as they are that strollers will interrupt their "authentic" experience as city people. Hipsters are a topic for another post. Why do hipsters bother me so much?
Monday, May 30, 2011
Desperate Housewives
Today was the first really hot weather run of the season. I went out at 6:30pm for a very easy nine, and it was still around 88 degrees. I wore a bunch of sunblock and didn't push it. Here's a plug for spray sunblock. It's extremely important to protect your skin. Don't forget your legs and face, too.
Tammi and I spent the weekend in New England where I delivered a conference paper - the paper was well received, and the session productive; we were able to go for some fun runs along a really nice river, as well as spend some quality time watching TV from a cushy hotel bed. Nervous about the paper, I had a hard time sleeping the night before and woke up wide-eyed an hour before my 6am wakeup time, when I planned to go for a run. On a little less than 5hrs sleep, after some of the in-house coffee maker's weak filter-packet coffee, I left the room at 5:20 for a solid 80 minutes, during which I saw more people than I would've expected out for early weekend morning runs.
The reason I ran late in the day today is because I stayed up til 1:30 last night watching Desperate Housewives, a surprisingly funny, fast-moving show that's part murder mystery, part comedy, part domestic drama, part suburban gothic. It puts into delightful comic soap-operatic form the four-character Sex and the City formula: neurotic redhead, do-gooder burnette, horsey blond with problems relating to men; Samantha's comic promiscuity is replaced by Eva Longoria's devil-may-care attitude toward mothering. (DH corrects SATC's all-white-girl racial obliviousness to reflect contemporary American demographic realities, it nevertheless replaces Samantha's stock lusty-dame character with hoary stereotypes of Hispanic families: a domineering patriarch, a lax mother who lets her fat prepubescent daughters mess up the house, eat whatever they want, and watch whatever trash TV they want.) Each episode moves quickly in and out of separate plots lines centering on each character.
Like its sister comedy Weeds, DH updates the durable American genre of the suburban gothic. The gothic has always, after all, been about houses, ever since the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto; it's based around the idea that enclosed spaces enclose secrets, that appearances don't match reality. In the twentieth-century U.S. this genre takes off in the 40s and 50s with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but also, more familiarly perhaps, Updike's Rabbit trilogy. Rabbit, Run mixes in a lot of 50s-existential angst (Rabbit's last name is Angstrom), but you have to remember that despite Updike's well-wrought prose and sophistication and overwritten sex scenes, it's a novel that begins with the main character running through a graveyard and ends with his drunk wife, an example of the desperate housewife who in her physical confinement and mental isolation is a staple protagonist of the suburban gothic, drowning her baby. In novels, houses always function as shiny symbols of the status quo that conceal turmoil within, but in TV shows from the 50s-90s, the inside of the house sets the stage for sitcom comic resolution, and serves as a repository of family values. The placid outside is matched by a placid inside. (Perhaps an exception to this division is the daytime soap--but the soap, of course, is a key genre ingredient of DH.) The genius of DH is to take the novel's gothic approach to the interior of the house and put it in what's really soap-opera sitcom form.
DH takes the gothic very seriously. In another nod to SATC, it begins and ends with pat voiceovers. But instead of the voiceovers being the embarassingly bland musings of ambivalent exorbitantly dressed wanna-be writer Carrie Bradshaw, we have the ghostly voice of a Wisteria Lane suicide, a housewife whose despair took the extremest form. By playing with the various forms despair can take on the spectrum between lethality and comic triviality, the show achives an engaging balance of melodrama, comedy, and utter weirdness.
Last thing: I think of the show and its companion show Weeds as a response to the housing mania of the mid-00s. Everyone's obsessed with real estate, there's a renewed interest in the exurbs and the suburbs--the suburban genre again has its moment. But what DH captures perfectly is the extreme weirdness of the magical thinking characteristic of the moment, the idea that anything and everything can and will happen in the suburbs, the instead of being a place of placidity and stability the suburbs are turbulent, dynamic, dangerous. Despair went both ways in the housing boom as first it was desire that was desperate, a yearning to have a bigger house with all the psychological and (so people thought) financial benefits it would entail. Suburban houses truly were investment vehicles--places on which to wager the future of your money and your future hopes for achieving the suburban norm; when things turned, the despair took a far darker turn.
Tammi and I spent the weekend in New England where I delivered a conference paper - the paper was well received, and the session productive; we were able to go for some fun runs along a really nice river, as well as spend some quality time watching TV from a cushy hotel bed. Nervous about the paper, I had a hard time sleeping the night before and woke up wide-eyed an hour before my 6am wakeup time, when I planned to go for a run. On a little less than 5hrs sleep, after some of the in-house coffee maker's weak filter-packet coffee, I left the room at 5:20 for a solid 80 minutes, during which I saw more people than I would've expected out for early weekend morning runs.
The reason I ran late in the day today is because I stayed up til 1:30 last night watching Desperate Housewives, a surprisingly funny, fast-moving show that's part murder mystery, part comedy, part domestic drama, part suburban gothic. It puts into delightful comic soap-operatic form the four-character Sex and the City formula: neurotic redhead, do-gooder burnette, horsey blond with problems relating to men; Samantha's comic promiscuity is replaced by Eva Longoria's devil-may-care attitude toward mothering. (DH corrects SATC's all-white-girl racial obliviousness to reflect contemporary American demographic realities, it nevertheless replaces Samantha's stock lusty-dame character with hoary stereotypes of Hispanic families: a domineering patriarch, a lax mother who lets her fat prepubescent daughters mess up the house, eat whatever they want, and watch whatever trash TV they want.) Each episode moves quickly in and out of separate plots lines centering on each character.
Like its sister comedy Weeds, DH updates the durable American genre of the suburban gothic. The gothic has always, after all, been about houses, ever since the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto; it's based around the idea that enclosed spaces enclose secrets, that appearances don't match reality. In the twentieth-century U.S. this genre takes off in the 40s and 50s with The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, but also, more familiarly perhaps, Updike's Rabbit trilogy. Rabbit, Run mixes in a lot of 50s-existential angst (Rabbit's last name is Angstrom), but you have to remember that despite Updike's well-wrought prose and sophistication and overwritten sex scenes, it's a novel that begins with the main character running through a graveyard and ends with his drunk wife, an example of the desperate housewife who in her physical confinement and mental isolation is a staple protagonist of the suburban gothic, drowning her baby. In novels, houses always function as shiny symbols of the status quo that conceal turmoil within, but in TV shows from the 50s-90s, the inside of the house sets the stage for sitcom comic resolution, and serves as a repository of family values. The placid outside is matched by a placid inside. (Perhaps an exception to this division is the daytime soap--but the soap, of course, is a key genre ingredient of DH.) The genius of DH is to take the novel's gothic approach to the interior of the house and put it in what's really soap-opera sitcom form.
DH takes the gothic very seriously. In another nod to SATC, it begins and ends with pat voiceovers. But instead of the voiceovers being the embarassingly bland musings of ambivalent exorbitantly dressed wanna-be writer Carrie Bradshaw, we have the ghostly voice of a Wisteria Lane suicide, a housewife whose despair took the extremest form. By playing with the various forms despair can take on the spectrum between lethality and comic triviality, the show achives an engaging balance of melodrama, comedy, and utter weirdness.
Last thing: I think of the show and its companion show Weeds as a response to the housing mania of the mid-00s. Everyone's obsessed with real estate, there's a renewed interest in the exurbs and the suburbs--the suburban genre again has its moment. But what DH captures perfectly is the extreme weirdness of the magical thinking characteristic of the moment, the idea that anything and everything can and will happen in the suburbs, the instead of being a place of placidity and stability the suburbs are turbulent, dynamic, dangerous. Despair went both ways in the housing boom as first it was desire that was desperate, a yearning to have a bigger house with all the psychological and (so people thought) financial benefits it would entail. Suburban houses truly were investment vehicles--places on which to wager the future of your money and your future hopes for achieving the suburban norm; when things turned, the despair took a far darker turn.
Monday, May 23, 2011
skipping
I don't feel like running this afternoon. I'm in the middle of writing, and I have somewhere to be at 6pm.
I always worry, though, that if I skip, I'll lose the habit and then bad consequences will ensue. Then suddenly I'll no longer be a runner.
It feels wrong to leave this conference paper with the sticky ending un-stuck, then again, I know come 8pm I'll feel simultaneously lazy and jumpy if I don't go out. But I know that I won't have time tonight to work and I need to crack corn now.
Another argument for morning running--which has been very hard to do lately, because of good habits broken. Stay up too late, then it's hard to go to bed early, then it's hard to get up early enough to run, and so on. Anyway, this is how I take my rest days--leave 'em unplanned, and let life tell you when to rest.
And sometimes I skip to remind myself that I can, just to keep running in perspective so I don't become so obsessed that I can't skip a workout.
Back to the writing...
I always worry, though, that if I skip, I'll lose the habit and then bad consequences will ensue. Then suddenly I'll no longer be a runner.
It feels wrong to leave this conference paper with the sticky ending un-stuck, then again, I know come 8pm I'll feel simultaneously lazy and jumpy if I don't go out. But I know that I won't have time tonight to work and I need to crack corn now.
Another argument for morning running--which has been very hard to do lately, because of good habits broken. Stay up too late, then it's hard to go to bed early, then it's hard to get up early enough to run, and so on. Anyway, this is how I take my rest days--leave 'em unplanned, and let life tell you when to rest.
And sometimes I skip to remind myself that I can, just to keep running in perspective so I don't become so obsessed that I can't skip a workout.
Back to the writing...
Lance
No, not Lance Bass, Lance Armstrong. A doper? Looks like it. It's pretty hard to believe he didn't dope if everyone he beat was also doping, but one thing to think about in this whole sad episode is why we were all so inclined to trust him, so inclined to want to believe he was clean. There's a good article in the New Yorker that's apposite. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/05/say-it-aint-so-lance-armstrong.html
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