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Monday, November 10, 2008
1,001
Yesterday and today, I took exactly 1,001 photos.

I was a part of two vastly different events – the Dia de Los Muertos parade, and a hike up on Mt. Lemmon.

The Dia de Los Muertos parade is an annual community event that is a wonderful combination of community participation and organized event-making. The actual parade is made of citizens of Tucson, who create fantastic and often monstrous costumes. Some are lighthearted – such as the large paper mache VW bus filled with grateful dead. Others were more morbid – effigies and odes to passed friends and family. The procession wanders along the downtown Tucson streets and ends in an empty lot with a low concrete stage.

And there, every year, some old magic’s made.

A giant paper cauldron, at least 15 feet in diameter, is filled with the wishes, fears, and desires of the thousands of gathered revelers in the field, raised high in the air with a crane, and lit for all to see. Another crane held a dancing troop hundreds of feet in the air. All of this is in addition to the dancing, fire dancers, stilt-walkers and other ceremonial touches.

It’s wild, primal, and very fiery.

Today’s hike was with Nyssa and Rhys and couldn’t have felt more different but still yielded some great photos. As a lifetime resident of Phoenix or Tucson, the notion of leaves that change color, snow, and, well leaves is rather a novel one. So walking through the brisk fall air with the falling leaves on the top of Mount Lemmon was fantastic and fertile photographic territory.

I’m also getting less shy about taking photos of people, although Nyssa is every bit as shy about being photographed as I used to be about photographing others. I admit I do like how sunsets don’t check their hair, though.

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posted by Steve @ 1:56 AM   0 comments
Friday, October 31, 2008
Organizing a Community
I've been reading the posts on 538.com regarding how the presidential campaigns have been run with intense interest. In particular, today's post paints a vivid contrast in volunteer enthusiasm. In the article, there is an implied correlation between the enthusiasm of the effort and the amount of power and trust the volunteers are given.

With the McCain campaign, few (if any) volunteers are given enough rope to so much as talk to reporters, for fear of going off-message. Obama's campaign, on the other hand, gives their volunteers guides but are otherwise given free reign to organize, call, and knock on doors. Sometimes this backfires on the Obama campaign. A long while ago, during the primaries, there was a volunteer with a Che Guevara poster hanging up, and more recently, an Obama caller did some drinking and dialing.

Although -- frankly, that audio is awesomely hilarious!

But the payoff is huge: Every town in America has a slew of Obama supporters creating meetings, doing phone bank parties, and canvassing neighborhoods. 538's correspondents have had a hard time just finding McCain volunteers, while Obama supporters are up late every night in houses and offices across the nation.

The conservative ideal is for people to have the power and freedom to guide their own lives without government interference. It's amusing and ironic that the Democratic candidate is running his campaign in such a grass-roots manner.

All of this is background information for a startling conclusion I came up with while reading that 538 article (appropriately called "The Big Empty"): Obama has run his campaign like a community organizer. That much-ridiculed term, which has served as a talking point and particularly ridiculed as resume padding is going to win him the election.

The role of the President is the most mercurial of the 3 branches of the U.S. Government, and its power and stature has ebbed and flowed through the centuries of our nation. But at the moment, I would say that its role is not unlike that of a community organizer: To develop and implement programs that help the U.S. help itself. Many of the most famous Presidential Programs are community programs writ large: Just Say No, The President's Challenge, and so on.

I've maintained for a while now that the power of an Obama presidency lies in his ability to get Americans to help America. Hopefully he will be enough of a centrist to allow those he inspires to do the heavy lifting.

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posted by Steve @ 12:23 PM   0 comments
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
A Relationship Complicated by Heartbreak
The Phoenix Suns have become one of the best first-round exit playoff teams in NBA history, and notched yet another 'great' series (along with many others that were usually lost), and afterwards my wife and I sat down and had a talk about the Suns. In particular, she pointed out that during the playoffs she would constantly ask her co-workers how the Suns were doing on a game day - not because she especially cared about the Suns (she likes 'em fine but not the way we do), but because she knew that when the Suns lost big games, she had to go home after work and do some psychological damage control on her pissed/frustrated husband.

Put it this way: I have drunk alcohol to comfort myself exactly twice: once because I was wrongly fired from a good teaching job out of malice, and once just after Game 1 of this playoff series, which was a thriller, but ultimately was a loss.

This is no way to treat your wife, or yourself, and it needed to change.

I've determined that in order to be a Suns fan, you have to have a bit of emotional distance from this. This is true of anything that one can be emotionally invested in, but can't do much if anything to actually control: politics, pro sports (i.e., not ones that you're actually playing in), the accomplishments of others, etc.

Games can be exciting, but I have to learn to let it just wash away, after every disappointment. I'm 27 and I've been following this franchise since I was seven or so (1987) - and at this pace I'll have ulcers by the time I'm 30.

The truly maddening thing about the Phoenix Suns are always an A-minus team. They're consistently an exciting, playoff-bound team with realistic hopes for a title. In fact, the Suns have the 4th-best all-time winning percentage of all active teams:
  1. Los Angeles Lakers (.618)
  2. San Antonio Spurs (.595)
  3. Boston Celtics (.587)
  4. Phoenix Suns (.556)
Of course, there are 34 championships between those four teams in 62 years - a little over half - and none of them belong to the Suns. I suspect that the Spurs very recently overtook the Celtics because the Celtics just plain sucked for about the last 10 years until Kevin Garnett's arrival this year. The Suns hold the record for most playoff appearances without a championship (26 of 40 seasons). In fact, they're in the sixth place (of 30+ teams) for how often they're in the playoffs, and the newest team on the list:
  1. Lakers 54/60 (90%)
  2. Sixers 44/59 (75%)
  3. Celtics 45/62 (72%)
  4. Spurs 28/41 (68%)
  5. Pistons 40/60 (66%)
  6. Suns 26/40 (65%)
The lack of an NBA salary cap for a long time is a big reason that the teams from L.A., Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit have such high percentages. San Antonio and Phoenix were born within a year of each other and went through similar growing pains to post very similar winning records, except of course that San Antonio is a bunch of assholes. (I'm bitter, but I'm not alone.)

Although my wife doesn't agree, I argue that the "A-minus" syndrome is actually much worse than being a Chicago Cubs or Arizona Cardinals fan. With those teams, any foray into the playoffs (if they make it into the playoffs at all) is a huge and great thing. Hope rises for a championship, certainly, but to an extent you can be happy just knowing they got as far as they did. Suns fans can't take much satisfaction in being a playoff team because they're always a playoff team. They've missed the playoffs twice in the last twenty years. Even the years they they were out, they weren't terrible (36-46 and 29-53, the former record being good enough for this year's Eastern playoffs). For fans of perenially mediocre teams, there's also the added bonus of having a community of loser-lovers that has grown up around the team. With the Suns, every year has high expectations. It's emotionally untenable.

That's not to say the Suns haven't done me some good, in the NBA, in the Phoenix community, for basketball in general, and even for me personally.

- I have learned to evaluate my own likes and dislikes through this team. In the mid-nineties, I had a huge falling-out with someone who was a Bulls fan. He liked Chicago because he was from Chicago. I decided that was a stupid reason to like a team: what if everyone on that team was a jerk? I thought about this for years; pondered the nature of how where you were born can influence your behavior and how stupid that is. I decided I like the Suns because they're a class act. Not only the current team, but historically the Suns have valued good people, who care about their communities, and even the rebels - Barkley, Shaq - were only bad boys because of their passion and the game. Barkley was acutely aware of it: "I am not a role model." You'll never find a Dumas or a Bowen on the Suns for long, if at all.

- The Suns inspired me to play basketball once during high school, and now again in my adult life. Steve Nash in particular has inspired my current run, knowing that he has roughly the same body type as I do, but has worked on his body and his skills with maniacal intensity. His work ethic inspires me, in practicing my free throws, and also in my music and work.

- I suspect Suns' Charities is one of the reasons the NBA Cares came about in 2005. I don't know if the Suns organization was the first NBA franchise to make charity an integral part of its existence, but I do know it was a good model for the rest of the league to follow when it wanted to clean up its image. Kevin Johnson and A.C. Green, in particular, come to mind as extraordinarily community-minded people. Both are still doing community work and I heard Johnson is even running for mayor in his hometown.

- The Suns have been a point-guard franchise for about twenty years, now. We've had roughly half of the truly great point guards in the last twenty years on our team at some point or another: Kevin Johnson, Jason Kidd, Stephon Marbury (in his prime), Steve Nash, Joe Johnson, Dennis Johnson, and Sam Cassell have all been Suns. I'm a big believer that the game of basketball is best when it is about movement and flow. I believe in my core that things like hack-a-Shaq, intentional fouls, dominant centers, and 70-point games are antithetical to what Naismith wanted: an athletic, skill-based game.

- As a web guru, I appreciate the absolutely ludicrous amount of work that the Suns put into their media. They post thousands of hours of video on their site, have players and staff blog occasionally, and even created a MySpace-like fan community site called Planet Orange. That willingness to explore technology - and spend money on it - in the name of the fan community is impressive.

Ultimately, I'm glad to be a Suns fan. It's a relationship complicated by heartbreak and disappointment but made healthy by the sense that the organization keeps its head up. It continues to have faith in a pure vision of what basketball is and should be; it has faith in its community and despite the escalating cost of games and inaccessibility of the players, makes real efforts to connect to its community.

They have strength of conviction in their work and in what is right; in small ways, through that, so do I.

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posted by Steve @ 4:09 PM   0 comments
 
About Me


Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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