West Coast Sojourn 3: Doing a Delicate Dance with Lil Wayne
Also: Who or what is responsible for Elon Musk?
Welcome back for another round of reading, Short Trippers.
Friday was Roberto Clemente Day. The athlete-humanitarian died on the last day of 1972. His impact on the young Dock Ellis (also pictured here) is inestimable.
Long ago I was an intern at the Fresno Bee. My summer project was reporting on “the coming meth menace.” That was in 1987. Since that summer, I’ve been putting words and paragraphs and stories that matter into news media.
If you’re reading this you are likely familiar with some of that non-fiction material, but not most. Certainly not all. Regardless of your experience with me or your expectation of this Substack, I’m going to try to put stories and analysis and ideas that matter into these quick trips.
Already, the project is a vibe. The interactions have brought a bunch of smiles. Already.
Follow West Coast Sojourn on Instagram or chat with us here.
Also, you can earn as much as six months of content access through Substack’s subscriber referral program.
Finally, last week I erroneously said the University of Colorado Buffaloes would travel to Eugene to take on the Oregon Ducks on Saturday, Sept. 16. That game actually takes place on the upcoming Saturday. Know that I regret the error.
And now, on to my third West Coast Sojourn newsletter.
10. Will Our Last Pac-12 Season
Be the Most Remarkable?
Former conference doormat University of Colorado has managed to remain all of sport’s breakthrough story—as a gaggle of would-be Boulder shine gleaners and 60 Minutes’ Deion Sanders interview attests—while being maybe only the seventh-best team in the Pac-12 conference.
Saturday night’s double-overtime win over meh intra-state rival Colorado State suggests the Buffaloes’ narrative’s fairytale aspect might be a wrap. Sanders and Son have a visit to Eugene, OR up next, and if the 10th-ranked Ducks and a rabid Autzen Stadium crowd are going to be a lot for football’s flavor of the month, Colorado’s conference schedule is going to test the pious coach’s belief in a higher power.
Dig: Washington and USC are two of America’s very best teams. Twenty-second ranked UCLA scored 59 in a tune-up against North Carolina Central. (See below for more on lopsided tune-ups). No. 16 Oregon State (3-0) sacked San Diego State’s quarterback seven times in its 26-9 win and are the best Beavers I’ve seen outside of an extremely dirty joke. And polling says Utah has the eleventh-best team in the country.
At least Colorado gets a break on October 15. That’s when Boulder hosts the Stanford Cardinals. One of America’s best-funded sports institutions, Stanford lost to Sac State of the Big Sky Conference on Saturday.
Oregon Live
Lil Hit
Environmentalism thought leader Naomi Klein has long had a public intellectual doppelgänger in Naomi Wolfe, author of The Beauty Myth. Up until COVID-19 the confusion had only been awkward. When Wolfe transformed into a well-platformed conspiracy theorist, the awkwardness became a legit problem.
WNYC
9. Shohei Ohtani Has Left the Building
Photo by Mantas Hesthaven / Unsplash
All signs point to y'all not watching baseball, which means you don’t know that an all-but-literal Babe Ruth 2.0 had been performing miraculous feats for that anonymous franchise down in Orange County. It’s a pity that baseball’s Paul Bunyan has yet to appear in a meaningful Major League Baseball game.
(Of course, this spring tens of millions of Earthlings saw the stunning conclusion of Angels in the Ultimate Spotlight.)
On Friday, the home run-hitting strikeout pitcher cleaned out his Anaheim locker and hopped a Japan-bound plane to have elbow surgery. This winter Ohtani will become a free agent and likely reappear in a city with a legit baseball tradition. Word is that he likes Seattle and Boston, though L.A. and S.F. are reportedly in the mix.
Japan Today
Lil Hit
The reported beneficial effects of microdosing psychedelics in the workplace are improved mood, energy, focus, and divergent and convergent thinking. But the practice calls for lots of legwork and careful consideration.
Wired
8. Sure, You Can Mock Lil Wayne’s
Delicate Dance with Kamala
Lil Wayne performed at the hip hop 50th birthday celebration put on by Kamala Harris, the former Cali “top cop.” Social media made good natured jokes about the MC vet—he’s everywhere while not having made a quality album in over a decade—performing the saucy “Mrs. Officer” at Harris. But hip hop fans have been roasting Wayne for his gibberish-filled rendition of “The Motto.”
Instagram
Also at the fed joint were MC Late, Roxanne Shante, Jeezy, Slick Rick, D-Nice (of course!), and Common. (Will Smith’s invite, let’s assume, was rescinded.)
It’s hard to draw super-relevant hip hop artists when you’re the fuzz, even if you’re potentially the first Black female president. (Weezy’s Trump beholden.) Call me a villain, but I feel pretty good about that.
Lil Hit
Hours before I stopped taking tips for this Sojourn edition, my Jersey homie Kevin Powell texted his last-licks essay on hip hop’s 50th anniversary. Powell’s piece deals with the in-room elephant: The music aspect of this culture declined into malaise quite a bit ago. The read is worth the wait.
Politico
7. Do You Recall The Sports Reporters?
Days after news broke that Bryant Gumbel would be ending his hard-hitting HBO series Real Sports after 29 years, I put on the most consistently smart sports podcast I know and learned that the episode would be its last. Have we run out of places to go for in-depth sports journalism? Or have we run out of interest?
The Sports Reporters had biases, but felt transparent.
Deadline
Admittedly, Real Sports was packing but a fraction of the cultural capital it had from 1995 through 2010 and even later. Regardless, great reporting still was happening on the HBO show. Its reporting on how sports gambling is being monetized is as good and critical and concerned with consequences as anyone’s journalism.
Around 26:30 into of Meadowlarkers, Episode 90, talk turns to Saudi money that’s begun pouring into athletics, via golf. “The existential threat of where we are,” according to host Howard Bryant. It’s an issue that’s bound to transform salaries, ownership, and where in the world players sign. “That wave is coming and nobody can do anything about it.”
Lil Hit
Jake Powell was a New York Yankees hero whose offhand racist comment to a radio reporter became lore. How Powell ended up a loser with a gun in his mouth is fascinating and informative. But weren’t players of his ilk part of a broader conspiracy?
Washington Post
6. Rub Some Petroleum Jelly on ’Em!
Sometimes it feels like a huge chunk of the country is on strike. In actuality, it’s only two pillars of industry that are failing to work in this week of late-stage capitalism. In this moment, only a smidge over five percent of American industry is actively striking.
Feel better now?
And while I’m more than happy to now know who United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain is, that strike down in the southernmost region of this newsletter’s coverage area hits me where I live—physically, spiritually, and intellectually. On a week where management and labor are scheduled to meet, the writers strike takes precedence.
NPR/The Guardian
Bill Maher and Drew Barrymore announced that they’d be bringing back their talk shows. Then the latter reversed her decision, tearfully, after suddenly realizing that she values writers. Or, she loves not being despised by those who value writers. Maher’s just a self-involve prick. Even for That Town. Always has been.
According to The Ankler, Apple has begun suspending deals as conventional wisdom says the strike will last all year.
Lil Hit
Now that California’s cannabis cafe law is poised to go into effect in January, let’s see what’s on the table for us future patrons.
LAist
5. I’m Allowed 1 Screed Per Newsletter
Why the fuck was Ohio State playing little-ass Western Kentucky? (UCLA fans’ ears can feel free to burn here.)
In a clean world, the No. 6 Buckeyes would be ashamed to be playing THE University of Kentucky. Never mind some divvied-up geographic subset of Bluegrass players. The Buckeye kids would have gotten a better workout in an intrasquad matchup against the reserves, you cannot make commercial TV content out of a scrimmage.
YouTube
OSU paid The Hilltoppers $1.8 million to absorb the Saturday beat down.
The preamble of this college football season has been ridiculous. Only now are teams of consequence beginning to play each other en masse. It’s like the commercials before the feature at the multiplex. Christ.
4. ‘Who or what is
responsible for Elon Musk?’
Some people look forward to the latest Walter Isaacson tome. But some folks also enjoy purchasing doorstops. And some people are super-into being seen buying big books about generational talents.
Gary Shteyngart isn’t any of this book-person types. And he appears to have had fun pillaging Issacson’s new longread, “a dull, insightless, doorstop of a book.”
The Guardian
The novelist says that Isaacson fails to explain what makes Musk a world-class asshole, despite interviews with his confidantes and co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends. The Simon & Schuster publication offers myriad psychiatric and other theories for Musk’s “demon moods,” including bipolar disorder, OCD, and a form of autism that, apparently, we no longer call Asperger’s Syndrome. A lot of people have these conditions without being relentlessly dick-ish.
$ graph: “There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your saviour turns out to be the world’s loudest crank?”
3. Would You Prefer Overreaction
or an Off-Field Football Murder?
First impressions say that this journeyman NFL defensive back killed his mom. (I mean, the article’s accompanying photo makes dude look guilty AF. Looks, in fact, like he’s standing for his post-murder interview). That to me is more interesting than trying to suss out who’s legitimately good at professional football in mid-September. Having said that:
ESPN
Dallas is for real, I can see that. San Francisco and Philadelphia in the NFC, too. (My younger boy insists that the Giants will be okay, and I keep reminding him to stay away from fentanyl.)
In the AFC. Tonight, Miami looks good, as does Baltimore, and the Chiefs are bound to shape up. Cleveland has a road trip to Pittsburgh, and you know how I feel about The Browns. (The first sports team I loved looks strong and I simply cannot root for them.)
2. New York to Submit to Big Weed
All of the states working through the difficult process of legalizing weed, none has committed to benefitting those most damaged by the War on Drugs than New York. So, how is it that tomorrow the state may make an enormous giveaway to big weed?
The City
Profoundly mediocre and unduly famous quarterback Jim McMahon—Neil O’Donnell appears to be his nearest comp—has a new cannabis brand. Celebrity brands usually aren’t very good, but McMahon’s industry involvement is remarkable in that he stars in a mainstream sport. Ditka can’t be happy.
Audacity
1. That Black Rocker Is So Articulate
Photo by Jakayla Toney UnSplash
Rolling Stone founder and former publisher Jan Wenner’s rock “masters” are all white. He talked about why this is the case in the rollout for his new book of interviews from the mag, and that explanation cost Wenner his seat on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Board of Directors.
Variety
Anyone who’s read Rolling Stone knows its North Star has been white rockers. Black artists have been treated like booster rockets, disposable beyond genre liftoff, and pretty much needed to be bluesmen or Tina Turner to get their due in contemporary terms.
The racism and misogyny of Wenner, 77, is of little interest to me beyond archival terms. What’s always bothered me more is rock journalists’ insistence on defining rock articulateness by literary terms. Rock journalism and music journalism have been biased in this way at least as much as by race and gender.
Rock isn’t (wasn’t?) an expression of technological virtuosity, it’s a mode of feeling. And no one has articulated the feel of rock-and-roll life like Black artists. The voice of Marvin Gaye, for example, spoke volumes. Wenner, however, never sat down with dude.
Lil Hit
Reporter Jim Trotter—currently of The Athletic—has filed a lawsuit against The NFL, alleging that, among other things, the league inhibited his reporting and refused to hire Blacks for leadership positions while he was employed by the consortium.
Wide Left