Friday, November 20, 2009

Catching Up

Well, this may be my longest interval between posts---life seems to have been really busy lately. And, while those of you who know me know that I have pretty definite opinions on a lot of stuff, I don't always feel a need to vent them, and, I tend to not want to get negative in this blog. (I figure nothing good can come from complaining publicly about things and, especially, people.)

But even so, a lot has been going on, so here are some thoughts about stuff that's happened lately:

The Year of Roller Derby

2009 will go down in my personal history as the Year of Roller Derby. (Or maybe the First Year of Roller Derby.) Over the course of this year, I went from being mildly interested in derby to being a hard-core superfan of the sport. I followed the Windy City Rollers' for an exciting home season, culminating with an edge-of-the-seat hard-fought bout for the Ivy King Cup in which the worst-to-first Manic Attackers came from behind to win their first cup. In the course of that, I got to "coach" a team as described in my earlier post, and I met a lot of interesting people. Then, the All-Stars became the focus heading into tournament season, and I ended up going to Minneapolis for the North Central regional tournament, which was a blast (and which, coincidentally, Windy City won). I also checked out Chicago's other derby league, the Chicago Outfit. We're lucky to have two leagues in town.

The league on the whole is going to be very different next year---a lot of skaters, including some very prominent ones, are retiring. I'm really going to miss Malice with Chains and Megan Formor, who were always riveting to watch, but more importantly were strong leaders and key parts of the league chemistry. I think I commented earlier about derby skaters having a professional half-life of about three or four years... They both are four-year skaters who are leaving at the top of their game. I can't blame anybody who after four years has had enough of an activity as physicially punishing and time-consuming as derby. Despite its growing popularity, it's still an amateur sport; there's no money in it for the players (indeed, they pay to skate). But, it's sad that these truly great players who clearly still have plenty to offer, leaving. And that's just in our league; one wonders how many other great skaters can't or don't keep up with the grind. I don't know a whole lot about other leagues but even I know of some great skaters who are out of it.

The national tournament this year was a real eye-opener---the West division surprised just about everyone by coming in and running roughshod over the rest of the country. Because of the distances involved and the associated cost of traveling to bouts, teams from the rest of the country didn't play that many bouts against the West teams, so although the stats told how well they did against each other, it was not that easy to tell what that meant compared to teams from other regions. And to be honest, the derby community was (until the weekend of November 13-15, anyway) pretty east-centric. Philadelphia, Gotham, Windy City and Texas were the dominant teams east of the Rockies, and even though the team from Olympia, Washington, beat all comers all year, I don't think anybody really thought that they were in that league. Well, come the tournament, everybody got a bucket-of-icewater-in-the-face wake-up as not just Oly but also the other two teams from the West (Denver and Rocky Mountain, also from Denver) handily trounced the big teams from the east: Denver beat Windy City; Rocky Mountain beat Philly; and Oly beat Gotham, and none of those bouts was really a nail-biter, either. Oly ended up winning the whole shebang. Texas did beat Rocky Mountain in the semi-finals to prevent a Western sweep of the tournament. Denver did employ some controversial (legal but despised) tactics in several of their victories, which might be prohibited in subsequent rules revisions, but I don't think anybody could deny that Oly just out-skated and out-played everybody else. So, the bar has been raised. The non-west teams are now on notice that they're not as good as they thought they were. This makes the loss of Megan and Malice right now all the more painful, since Windy City is going to have to step up their play to regain their position at the top of the rankings list, and it will be just that much more difficult without two of their best defensive players.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to next season. The local league season in particular should be quite fun. My friend Kelly's team, the Fury, should have a much better season this coming year---although they are losing one of the league's top jammers with the retirement of Eva Dead, their team on the whole appears to be emerging from this round of departures relatively strong, and I think they'll be right in the thick of things. And, this year saw the organization of a second "travel team", which Kelly is on, so that will bring more other teams to town. Can't complain about more derby!

It appears that somebody is trying to put a men's derby league together in Chicago. Although I love to skate, and love to watch derby, I haven't really been fired up to actually play derby, thus far anyway. That may in part be due to my current "fat and out of shape" status. But if they have some sort of organizational skate I might check it out. I played town-league ice hockey for two years while I was in law school, and that was the best shape I was ever in in my life, so maybe a skating sport is what I need to get fit again. As long as I don't destroy my knees getting there.

Music News

The big news: I joined a new band, an 80s alternative cover band called Dec8de. It's pretty close to exactly the kind of music I like to play, so I'm pretty pleased. Our public debut is the day after Christmas at the Dark Room in Chicago. I'm playing bass, which is my main instrument, and it's nice to be back on bass again---it's been about a year since the Bill Tucker project faded away. The other guys in this band seem to know what they're doing. Hopefully it will be commercially viable!

The Xylenes are still going, but we've decided we're going to change our focus to play originals. That means we have to WRITE original songs. I've got a few ideas I've accumulated, but I really hope some of the other Xylenes reveal themselves to be nascent songwriters. Thus far, the Xylenes have been sort of an educational program, but we're coming up on the four-year anniversary of the forming of that group, and by this point I think it should either be a real band, or if not, I'm not interested in putting a bunch of time and effort into it. Up until this year, our M.O. was to learn a set of tunes and then play what was essentially a showcase for our friends and relatives. This year we've tried to be a "real" cover band, but it doesn't seem like the other Xylenes (or at least, not all of them) really want to do that. So we're going to try the original music route. It could be interesting, if nothing else.

A Great Read

I want to put in a plug for a great book: The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. They wrote a book called Generations a while ago in which they posit a historical cycle in American history, and in this new book they employ the theory from the first book to predict things that may happen in the next couple decades. When I read Generations, it was like a long string of "lightbulb" moments---lots of "Oh, I see, that explains it!" experiences. So I'm inclined to give their predictions a lot of credence. If nothing else it is very thought-provoking. They wrote The Fourth Turning about ten years ago, and events between then and now have generally followed the patterns they predicted. If you want at least a pretty good theory on why society has gotten to the point it has and where it's going to go from here, these guys have one.

New Whiskey Discovery

I'm interested in whiskey. I like to drink it sometimes, but more than that I'm fascinated by how it's made and all the variables that go into making a bottle of even the most mundane Bourbon. I'm particularly interested when someone makes whiskey that's different from the "usual suspects". Whiskey is a very tradition-driven field, and it takes chutzpah to try something new. Or even something old that's not the same kind of thing everyone else is making. The parameters of what can be whiskey are very broad, but due to tradition almost all whiskey falls into a few fairly narrow categories. Even within a category like Bourbon, there is really very little variation among the major distillers. The fact that they nevertheless produce a fairly wide range of products just shows how much room there is under the whiskey umbrella, and hints at all the other things there could be.

If you read the federal regulations regarding whiskey, you'll notice that there are categories listed that don't appear to have many if any existing examples. One such is corn whiskey. Corn whiskey (as opposed to Bourbon, which is also made from mostly corn) is not required to be aged and contains a very high percentage of corn in the mashbill. Corn whiskey is similar to the whiskey that was made in the pre-Prohibition, pre-industrial days by people who ran small stills for their own or very local consumption. It's often called moonshine, even by the people who make it now, but I think that carries with it some unfair negative connotations. Contrary to what that label might suggest, it's possible to make good corn whiskey, if you know what you're doing, and for generations it was made on farms and in the Appalachian hollers, until Prohibition transformed illicit liquor production into big business and ensured a focus on quantity over quality (and indeed over toxicity).

For a long time, the only corn whiskey that could be commonly found was a product called Georgia Moon, which came in a canning jar and was sold as a novelty. It was an ordeal drink, something you'd give to buddies prefaced with, "Hey try this! It's moonshine!" and they would hack and cough at its rough finish. It was never intended to actually be good, and because that's all you could find, I think it did (or at least, may have done) lots of harm to the reputation of corn whiskey.

But lately, a new corn whiskey has appeared in stores, called Virginia Lightning. And this stuff is actually good! I bought a bottle just out of curiosity, to see what it was like, and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's GOOD young whiskey. It reminds me a bit of the Death's Door White Whiskey that I wrote about earlier, except that that is made from wheat and this is made from corn...and you could buy about three bottles of Virginia Lightning for the costof one bottle of Death's Door. (I still like and support Death's Door, too, because I am happy to see someone making a wheat whiskey.)

I recommend Virginia Lightning to anyone who drinks spirits---not as a novelty, or because it's different, but because it's good. It's actually quite smooth for its potency, and has a good flavor. I'm very pleased by the burgeoning craft distilling movement in America in recent years, but I wouldn't recommend or support anything that wasn't fundamentally good. Virginia Lightning is. So, explore corn whiskey, a historically significant and nearly lost style. I suspect you'll be glad you did.