I recently completed a significant upgrade to Blogs@Baruch, and I thought I’d blog my hacks and some of the thinking behind them for teh Google to index.

The goal of the upgrade was to get BuddyPress up and running, which will create additional avenues for social publishing and networking around academic interests across the College. The upgrade included two new WordPress child themes, one that uses bp-default (for the home site and all BuddyPress functionality) and one that uses TwentyTen (a new default theme).

if ( is_user_logged_in() )

Since we’re rolling BuddyPress into a system that’s been active for almost two years already, and which has more than four thousand users, I was hesitant to just automatically give everybody public profiles or to make the member list publicly visible. The following simple argument came in very handy in these cases:

<?php if ( is_user_logged_in() ) : ?>
<?php else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>			

I snaked this code through functions in a number of places:

• in header of the BP child theme to hide the Members list (by excluding the page id for the Members page in the “else” statement)
• in sidebar.php file of my child theme, to give logged-in users relevant quick links
• in members/index.php of my child theme, to hide the Members directory
• in members/single/home.php to hide individual Profile pages

I also hide the BP admin bar for logged out users (which is an option built into BP)… So if you’re a visitor to the site, BuddyPress won’t be visible to you.

Logged out:

Logged in:

This is the way we’re going to keep it for now, and I think such a structure reflects our sense of BuddyPress primarily as a tool for the community to get to know itself a little better. Rumor has it that some more granular privacy control will be coming down the pike in future versions of BuddyPress, and we’ll revisit this issue as appropriate.

bp-custom.php etc.

Every BuddyPress install should have a bp-custom.php file located in wp-content/plugins/ which houses customizations. I used this file to change the order of the tabs on Profile pages, and to insert additional menus on the BuddyPress admin bar.

One of the great challenges I’ve had is the fact that one of my good buddies and partners in pizza-eating crime has become one of the top BuddyPress/WordPress developers around, and Boone’s on my IM rolls. I’m often faced with the dilemma of taking an hour to figure something out, or bothering him and getting some code in about 3 minutes. He helped me with code for the tab order:

function change_profile_tab_order() {
	global $bp;

	$bp->bp_nav['profile']['position'] = 10;
	$bp->bp_nav['activity']['position'] = 20;
	$bp->bp_nav['blogs']['position'] = 30;
	$bp->bp_nav['friends']['position'] = 40;
	$bp->bp_nav['messages']['position'] = 50;
	$bp->bp_nav['groups']['position'] = 60;
	$bp->bp_nav['settings']['position'] = 70;
}

add_action( 'bp_setup_nav', 'change_profile_tab_order', 999 );

The additional menus in the admin bar, I figured out with help from the Codex:

function my_help_link(){
  ?>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/explanation-of-buddypress/">HELP!</a>

 <ul class="wp-admin-bar">
<li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/guide-to-buddypress/">Guide to Buddypress</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/for-blog-authors/">Support for Students</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/for-blog-administrators/">Support for Faculty</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/contact/">Contact</a></li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  <?php
}
add_action( 'bp_adminbar_menus', 'my_help_link', 14 );

function quick_links(){
  ?>
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/support/explanation-of-buddypress/">Quick Links</a>

 <ul class="wp-admin-bar">
  <li><a href="http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/about-blogsbaruch/terms-of-service/">Terms of Service</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/blsci">BLSCI</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/bctc">BCTC</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/">Baruch College</a></li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  <?php
}

And, with Boone’s help, I made a change to my wp-config.php file so that Profile (rather than the Activity Stream) became the default component loaded when you visited a member’s page. (I located this line of code just beneath the “/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */” comment, as it didn’t work when I put it at the end of the wp-config.php file).

 /** Sets BP Nav to load Profile first */
define( 'BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT', 'profile' );

These changes are intended to prioritize Profiles. We want our users to share information about themselves and to use Boone’s Custom Profile Filters to connect with others at the College with similar interests. While the CUNY Academic Commons, for which that plugin was written, hopes to connect CUNYs across campuses, we want do this on a more local scale. When all of our incoming students get their Blogs@Baruch accounts next week, they will be asked to fill out their profiles and to begin exploring.

New Default Theme

I also used the upgrade opportunity to create a new default theme for sites created on Blogs@Baruch, a child of TwentyTen which features some Baruch College and CUNY branding/linking and altered css. Aided by this tutorial, I swapped out the built-in header images that ship with TwentyTen for images taken from Baruch College’s library of photographs. Here’s the code for that, placed into the theme’s functions.php file:

define( 'HEADER_IMAGE', get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory') .'/images/headers/baruchcollege.jpg' );

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'blogsatbaruch_setup' );
function blogsatbaruch_setup(){

/* Add additional default headers: All Photos are from Baruch College Visual Standards Library: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/visualstandards/photos.htm */

	$blogsatbaruch_dir =	get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');
	register_default_headers( array (
		'Baruch' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/baruchcollege.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/baruchcollege-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Baruch College', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Elevators' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/elevators.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/elevators-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Elevators', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Reading' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/reading.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/reading-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Reading', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Streetsign' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/streetsign.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/streetsign-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Street Sign', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Turnstiles' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/turnstiles.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/turnstiles-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Turnstiles', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'VC View' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/vcview.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/vcview-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'View from VC', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),
		'Windows' => array (
			'url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/windows.jpg",
			'thumbnail_url' => "$blogsatbaruch_dir/images/headers/windows-thumbnail.jpg",
			'description' => __( 'Windows', 'blogsatbaruch' )
		),

	));
}

function remove_twenty_ten_headers(){
	unregister_default_headers( array(
		'berries',
		'cherryblossom',
		'concave',
		'fern',
		'forestfloor',
		'inkwell',
		'path' ,
		'sunset')
	);
}

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'remove_twenty_ten_headers', 11 );

And here’s what it looks like:

This new theme is sharper than what previously loaded, and TwentyTen is customizable enough that I think a lot of our users will just keep it as their primary theme.

Bye Bye Userthemes

Finally, I’ve done away Userthemes on Blogs@Baruch. The last two WP upgrades have required hacks to keep the plugin only half-working (I’ve never been able to turn off Userthemes on blogs… once you go Userthemes you’ll never go back!). It’s such an important part of what we do on the system that I wanted to cease relying on such an unstable plugin. Instead, with Tom Harbison’s help, we copied all of our custom themes into the theme library and renamed their folders to the site id for which they were intended. We didn’t activate these themes site wide, but rather went one by one through the blogs, editing the template, stylesheet, and theme settings for each. Not the perfect solution, but it feels more stable than relying on Userthemes.

Those are the hacks that I remember. I’m sure there are a few that I missed.

If you’d like to take a look at the child themes, here they are: Blogs at Baruch BP (child of bp-default) and Blogs at Baruch (child of TwentyTen).

photo credit: Ian Sane™

Jim Groom and Brian Lamb recently asked me and some of my fellow CUNYs to reflect on how we’ve “designed or conceptualized” the publishing platforms we oversee, with a focus on the role of networked collaboration in public higher education. The question is a big one, and it spurred me to think about the roots of my work as an educational technologist, an #alt-ac that emerged for me rather incidentally out of the work I was doing while training to become a historian at the CUNY Graduate Center, and which has led to Blogs@Baruch.

See, a myth is out there that one day the Reverend Jim Groom wandered into the University of Mary Washington from the wilds and revolutionized open source university-based personal publishing when he launched UMWBlogs in 2007. But this is only part of the story. Jim cut his teeth as an educational technologist in the same accidental way I did; we were both graduate students preparing for traditional academic careers. Our paths converged in 2004 when we met as Instructional Technology Fellows at the CUNY Honors College (which is now the Macaulay Honors College). I had already worked for four years at the New Media Lab, with the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, building Virtual New York City, and had taught history at Baruch. My work with ASHP taught me much about collaboration and the power and necessity of networks when doing new kinds of intellectual work in a discipline, and my teaching at Baruch had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of teaching at a public institution with an incredibly diverse and unique student body. Even before doing work as an instructional technologist, then, I had learned the catalytic value of connective networks and the pedagogical rewards of working in a “non-traditional” classroom setting.

As ITFs (a group of graduate students who are now overseen by the great Joseph Ugoretz, who unfortunately came on-board after Jim and I had moved on) our job was to work with faculty members who were teaching in the College’s core curriculum to make smart use of the laptops every student was given by integrating technology into pedagogy and cross-campus events. As Fellows, we met every couple of weeks to discuss our work and share ideas, and while many Fellows saw these meetings as a burdensome distraction from their much more important doctoral work, I always saw in them an opportunity to think collaboratively through methods and pedagogies that were in circulation but were not very present throughout much of CUNY. Those exchanges with Jim, Zach Davis, Jeff Drouin, Wendy Williams, Emily Pugh and others were very much the foundation of the work I’m now doing. They helped shape my sense that teaching with technology was about exploring and embracing new possibilities rather than reinforcing existing structures. They showed me that there was as much to learn from breaking down and reflecting upon the processes by which we produce knowledge as there was in using technology to engage deeply with content. They sharpened my understanding of experiential learning, and got me to focus more on nurturing sustained engagement than meeting the heavy coverage that’s always expected of teachers of history. They also taught me that doing this kind of work while in constant conversation with others is really the only way to do it, for if you’re doing it right you should be raising more questions than you’re answering. Many spaces in higher education — especially those that revolve around making sense and use of new technologies — would benefit from increased dialogue, reflection, and collaboration. Being part of a network that exists within and beyond our home institutions foregrounds those qualities in our work.

I remember the specific ITF meeting in Spring 2005 where Jim shared a maps project he had done on WordPress with a class at Hunter College, and excitedly riffed on the pedagogical possibilities of self-publishing on the open web. It wasn’t until that Summer when I started to play with WordPress on my own that I saw what had gotten him so excited. I’ve mused before that the edtech revolution started not in the classroom, but in the baby blogosphere. In February 2005, Zach Davis and his wife launched a blog (using Movable Type, if I recall correctly) about their young daughter; in March 2005, Jim and Mikhail Gershovich launched blogs to document the lives of their young sons; I followed suit a couple of months later with my own baby blog. I can’t speak for the other blogfathers, but in my case blogging about my child served multiple purposes: it was a needed distraction from my dissertation research that also pleased far-away grandparents; it spurred me to explore presenting a wide range of media online; and it lulled me into my first tentative steps towards real hacking. I knew HTML and CSS and had built sites using Dreamweaver and Fireworks and Flash, but I was no hacker and was never much interested in code. But by blogging and making movies and art about my child I came to see more clearly the power of the lowered barriers to self-publishing provided by a software like WordPress. And that I was doing this in concert with other like-minded academic geek dads made me feel as though my efforts were part of some larger trajectory.

By Fall 2005, I was ready to roll WordPress into my support for courses. I had worked for two years with a faculty member, Roz Bernstein, whose pedagogy was proto-edupunk in that she always required her students, after studying a particular art form, to produce work of their own in that form. We had previously done a project where students crafted PowerPoint presentations inspired by the movie Capturing the Friedmans about their own families, and the students had come up with some fantastic creative work (work that I still use today to challenge arguments that there’s no such thing as a good PowerPoint). So when her students were studying collage, they were tasked with making collages of their own and to write about their creations. We scanned the collages and shared them along with the notes via a WordPress blog. This process opened up second and third layers of dialogue, as students commented on each others’ work asynchronously and then reflected upon the process in classroom discussions (including a memorable discussion of what was gained and loss by the process of digitization). I’ve often said that Baruch students are among the most interesting college students in the world, and none of them realize this. Their stories are so rich and varied that assignments which urge them to mine their pasts to find the raw materials with which to create and reflect are invariably rewarding. Maker assignments done here that encourage students to bring what they already know to what they’re learning are successful time and time again.

After a few additional projects at the Honors College I joined the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute in 2006 as a CUNY Writing Fellow. Mikhail, the Director of the Institute (who I had first learned of through his baby blog), wanted to bolster support for “computer-mediated instruction,” and had talked me into leaving the Honors College. The opportunity to see what could be accomplished with these tools in a non-honors setting appealed to me, as did the opportunity to get experience with WAC/WID theory. Finally, I was interested in seeing if we could expand support for open-source applications at the College. Mikhail gave me the freedom to develop some faculty development initiatives around teaching with blogs, and we ultimately supported 10-12 different course blogs per semester (on single installations of WordPress) between Fall 2006 and Spring 2008. We worked with English, Law, Sociology, Anthropology, and Journalism course, and we did everything from small, project-based assignments, to research paper scaffolding, to collaborative research using a wiki, to creating a news blog of student reporting about New York. And I started blogging about my work at Cac.ophony.org.

Those two years of work as a Writing Fellow, while I was finishing my dissertation, really drove home the extent to which we were working on something that was new to our campus and University, something that was needed because it connected the intellectual/academic work that students were doing in school with the digital literacy that they were developing only outside of the curriculum, and which they would need wherever their careers took them. I continued to stay in touch with Jim and learned from the way he distilled his network through a political and pedagogical prism to which I was sympathetic, a perspective which had in-part been forged by professional experiences at CUNY supporting teaching, learning, and scholarship with technology. I followed with great interest as his experimentation led to UMWBlogs, and discussed with Mikhail the opportunity to systematize and scale up what we had been doing up until then only on a piecemeal basis.

Blogs@Baruch evolved out of these discussions, and has very much depended upon the interplay between a broader network of teachers, learners and scholars out on the interwebs and the unique community we continue to engage with at Baruch College. A significant part of my job is to mediate this interplay, to bring ideas and inspiration mined from my expanding network and to try find a place for them within the curriculum at Baruch, and to then to share back my reflections on the results. We’re getting ready to roll BuddyPress out on Blogs@Baruch this Fall. Our goal in doing so is to congeal a platform that already has more than 4000 users into an academic publishing network. We hope doing this will make more explicit the fundamental fact that what’s happening on small corners of our system is connected both to other developments around this school and around CUNY, and also to a broader community within higher education of people finding their footing on the open web, and using that footing to launch themselves forward. Baruch students and faculty have much to learn from these connections, and also much to give.

photo credit: waferboard

I’m preparing to roll BuddyPress out on Blogs@Baruch later this month, and I’ve grown a little concerned about the implications of doing so. I thought I’d write up some of my concerns and see if the Internets has anything wise to say about them.

Our goal in using BuddyPress is to try to draw out and congeal an academic publishing network out of the various work that’s being done across the system. We hope to give students a platform to track their work over their careers at the College, to make connections with students with similar interests, and to cultivate a profile in a space they’re somewhat familiar with that we can support and that they can build as they desire. But I’m anxious about a few things.

First, we already have more than four thousand users on Blogs@Baruch, and the vast majority of those accounts were created for course-based blogging. I’m uneasy about turning on profile pages for users who never used the system for that purpose, without their knowledge. My current plan is to send an email out to all users when we turn on BP with instructions about granular control of profile pages. But, as far as I know, that control can only be so granular: with BuddyPress Profile Privacy you can set privacy on a field-by-field basis, but you can’t lock a whole profile page down. I’m hoping Jeff Sayre’s Privacy Component, which apparently is nearing a second beta, can help solve this problem. We’ll be registering incoming first year students for Freshman Seminar and instructing them on how to use the system beginning in August, and we’ll keep Profile pages set to “open” for new users from that point forward (we’ll be updating our woeful Terms of Service as well).  I think it might make sense though to lock-down already existing accounts and outreach to those users with details about BuddyPress’s purpose and instructions on how to manage their profile privacy. I’m uncertain about this, though, both the ethics and how I’d manage this technically.

Second, I’d like for the primary engine of Blogs@Baruch to continue to be course-based blogging. BuddyPress, however, elevates the social networking function to equivalence with the blogging functionality of a WP-MS installation. We’re not building ePortfolios like our friends at Macaulay and don’t have the resources to closely support the development of profiles on a system as big as ours. And I certainly want to avoid the creepy treehouse factor, which is an issue with incoming Freshman.  I just want students to use BuddyPress@Baruch to connect with each other around interests and academic work. So there are a few spots where I’d like to make some choices or changes that could nurture that understanding; for instance, I don’t think I’ll have a link to the members directory from the front page (but have it publicly accessible via internal links); I’ll hide the BuddyPress admin bar for logged out users; and, I’d like to hack BuddyPress so that upon log in, instead of landing at the front page of the home blog, users land at the Dashboard for their primary blog. Any other ideas?

Third, I have to revisit our registration process. In most classes, we use DDImportUsers to bulk register new users. Our most technologically capable faculty members can handle the intimidating two-step of a “self-registration” and the addition of Andre Malan’s “Add User to Blog” widget. Now, with BuddyPress functionality turned on, registration can become more complicated and require more information, which is fine for self-registering users but potentially problematic for those who are bulk-added. The bulk process also only creates new accounts, which I’ve been struggling with for some time; existing users need to be added to new sites individually, and to do so you need both a username and an email address (if I had my druthers, the DDImportUsers plugin would be able to check a list of newusernames|newemailaddress against the user_email field in the wp_users table and if a email address exists, add the user with that address to the individual site… and then to go on to register all the new users).

As the system grows, this is becoming a bigger problem since every semester a higher percentage of Baruch students have accounts on the system and find their way into new classes that use it. In an older version of WPMu you were able to add users to individual blogs simply with an email address, which was preferable because the cross-referencing is a pain. But that pain is balanced on the other side by the agita that would be caused if nervous first-time blogfessors are made to manage a multi-step registration process. In the past, I’ve taken the pain on in exchange for the benefit of drawing more users onto the system, and it’s been a good trade. I’m not sure yet how BuddyPress fits into this equation and how it will impact my overarching goal of easing the registration process, but wanted to get the issue out there. In the long term we’re looking at LDAP integration, but we’re not there yet. One solution is BP Group Blogs; but that creates additional steps in the registration process and we still want to make things as sleek and streamlined as possible.

These are my concerns for now, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come… any feedback, questions, and exchanges from out there in the wild are welcome and greatly appreciated.

My little girl finished kindergarten today.

Here she was on her first day:

And here she is today:

The difference in her face is striking to me; it’s like a year of school has swapped out her babyness and replaced it with, I don’t know… wisdom? Knowing? I mean, yes, she’s like 15% older than when we took the first picture… but she looks like she’s aged.

I have a mixture of emotions about her experience and her school and the place we’ve chosen to call home. And she can be incredibly difficult for her mother and myself to deal with to such an extent that I quiver when I think about what awaits us in her teenage years. But I’m unequivocally proud of what a good, eager and curious learner she is, and more than anything in my life I love watching that take shape. The other day she said to her mom, “isn’t it kind of sad when you finish a book?”  I can’t think of another phrase I’d more wish my six year-old to say.

David Simon can’t seem to open his mouth without revealing what a prick he is, and how proud he is of his eminent prickitude. Let’s stipulate that he’s made brilliant television, and to a certain extent I agree with the words of Steve Brier: “I abide arrogance in people who have something to be arrogant about.” I proselytize about The Wire to no end, and I’ll follow his career and devour everything he does.

But he’s got two obnoxious beefs that run through his work that I’d like to highlight: he hates New York and he has disdain for people who watch television. Of course these statements are overdrawn, but only because Simon overdrew them first himself. Here’s a clip from a talk he gave a couple of years ago at Eugene Lang College at the New School:

There is no city more vain about its position in popular culture, more indifferent to other realities, more self-absorbed than New York City…. You guys think you know urban America, you don’t know shit anymore.

Granted this is a rant and certain allowances must be made for imprecise language, but it’s still surprising to see someone who has done some of the most humanistic work in contemporary culture speak of a city as though it itself has the uniquely human qualities of vanity, indifference, and self-absorption, and then to proceed to correlate the development of these qualities with the extent of crime and suffering currently in the city. If he were to argue that New Yorkers were exceedingly provincial, I’d agree with him. If he were to argue that the national media is New York-centric, and that this is because of all the money that flows through Manhattan, and that this reality informs stories that do and do not get funded and told, he’d get no argument from me. But that’s not what he’s arguing in the clip above, or in this excerpt from an interview he did with Alan Sepinwall comparing New Yorkers’ reaction in the aftermath of 9/11 to the perspective of New Orleanians after Katrina:

Although who isn’t self-absorbed when their town has a near-death experience? Were New Yorkers not talking about 9/11 for years afterwards? Was it not a subject of intense discussion and self-awareness? Did New Yorkers not sound to outsiders self-absorbed and preachy when they spoke of 9/11? The sense of entitlement that New Yorkers feel and that they’re not willing to grant to someone else who’s had a life-changing experience is really remarkable. But that’s the nature of empathy: it only goes so far.

Simon starts this bit off sympathetic to those whose city has been through trauma, but can’t help himself from throwing a dig in against “New Yorkers” and their “sense of entitlement.” Fact is, the vast majority of New Yorkers I know who were here on 9/11 wanted immediately to find ways to both remember what happened on that day and get on with the normalcy of their lives. Thought it’s an unscientific claim, I’d bet that as much of all that “never forget” stuff came from outside the city as from the city’s citizens; New York has no singular claim on 9/11 fetishism. Simon seems to be arguing that New York’s location at the center of American economic and cultural power not only crowd out other stories but also delegitimize to a certain extent the stories and voices that do come out of the city. This perspective flattens and ignores the extent to which human and social conflict propels this city forward just like it does any other city, and it does absolutely nothing to help bring stories from other locales to light (perhaps besides fuel Simon’s considerable intellectual fire).

Simon’s beef about New York in Treme flows in-part from his sense that New Orleans didn’t get the national love that New York did after Katrina, and this argument filters into the perspectives of Creighton “Fuck You You Fucking Fucks” Bernettte and Davis “This Can’t Happen in New York” McAlary as well as the intense parochialism exhibited by many of the characters on the show. It also leads to groan-inducing expository lines like the one delivered by Annie’s friend in Episode 9 of Treme when Annie leaves Sonny, her boyfriend and musical partner: “Fucking is fucking, but music? That’s personal.” In New Orleans, such a perspective is to be celebrated because the music, food and culture are wonderful and bohemian and largely uncapitalized, the city’s people have been shat upon for generations by government and corporations, and not many people outside the city “get it.” In New Orleans, other rules prevail. In New York, if you’re a New Orleans-bred trumpeter like Delmond Lambreaux, you seem like a turkey paralyzed by an Oedipal complex if you explore music beyond that which is at your roots.

Simon is even more disdainful of television watchers than he is of New Yorkers. He begins his interview with Alan Sepinwall, who has been among the best chroniclers of both The Wire and Treme, by insulting him. Sepinwall asked Simon what he was hoping to accomplish with the flashback scene that occurs in the season finale of Treme, and Simon snaps “it’s kind of self-evident, isn’t it?” before defending the choice from a critique that the interviewer doesn’t level. Simon adds:

So it’s kind of frustrating, for people trying to blog the show each week like yourself, people trying to comment on it or to anticipate the storyline, to debate the filmmaker’s choices. But it’s a no-win situation. We wouldn’t want to have people not discussing the show, but at the same time, you can’t take the discussion seriously until everyone gets to the end. At the end, people can reflect on what they’ve seen, and whether it added up…. I’ve come to realize that the only commentary I can take seriously are people who react to what’s on screen and how that reflects on the reality they know. That’s the only biofeedback that matters to me.. All the feedback of, “I wish the show would be this, I wish the show would be more of this, I wish this character had less to do, I wish this character had more to do,” that’s of no use. It’s of no use because we’ve already finished production, but on a more philosophical level, it’s of no use. Choices have been made based on the last half hour of film. Every season of ‘The Wire’ built to the last half hour, to the endings. This is my seventh time of having the initial reaction to our storylines be, “I don’t understand where they’re going. Why do they have this? This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t like this character.” If you go back and watch the first episode of any season of “The Wire,” or the first episode of “Treme” or “Generation Kill,” knowing the ending, the choices will be entirely reasonable as a first chapter of something that is novelistic. If you experience it only as something that’s an episodic entity unto itself, I can’t answer that, because I don’t really think about that. I’m not irate about it, I just can’t take it seriously.

So, this is effectively a rant against the consideration as episodes of blocks of television that are constructed and presented as unique entities once a week, with beginning and ending credits, and an assertion that you really can’t say much of value about the arc of a season or a series or a character until you first see all that the “filmmakers” have to say. That’s just idiotic, and flies directly in the face of Simon’s own claims that the art he produces will not allow fundamental human truths to be distorted by the restrictions of form.

Simon acknowledges in the interview that there is space for criticism and discussion of his work, yet he repeatedly detours any question Sepinwall asks about arc and plot and characters and choices that might lead to some reflection and introspection about human nature into rants about how most viewers and critics are brainwashed by tv so deeply that we don’t really know how to watch a show like this:

I don’t mind if a character is selfish or insecure. I just don’t need all my characters to be winning. And in the same way that people often miscalculate or fail to acknowledge the equivocation between high-stakes and plot itself, I think people generally mistake their dislike of a character as poor acting.

Simon has, over the years, become ever more certain that he knows The Truth and that there’s a pretty good chance that you and I do not. Much like Creighton Bernette, who we see once in the classroom and learn immediately that he is a pretty crappy teacher, Simon is much more interested in polemic than in dialogue. His polemics are smart, interesting, entertaining and often right-on. But they’re also becoming gradually more obnoxious in how they proclaim Simon’s single perspective and urinate upon all others. This approach informed some of the fifth season of The Wire, which centered around a fairly simplistic and nostalgic rant about the demise of newspapers. And it’s present periodically in Treme, a show I love, but one whose perspective is represented by a title that doesn’t sport an accent mark even though it’s sometimes spelled with one.  If you don’t know how to pronounce Treme and aren’t sufficiently motivated to get it right, what you think doesn’t really matter.

photo credit: Eustaquio Santimano

Right up there with the complaints about the vuvuzelas at the 2010 World Cup has been tsuris about the Adidas “Jabulani” ball, which was made specifically for this event. Every four years goalies complain about the new World Cup match balls, which have consistently been made to fly faster and to swerve more severely. Glen Levy quotes Cote D’Ivoire coach Sven-Goran Erikkson as saying FIFA should heed the concerns of keepers and field players, yet Levy ultimately concludes that the concern is nothing: the low scoring is due to playing at altitude and to overly-defensive strategies.

I’m not so sure. The ball seems to be affecting offensive play more significantly than defensive play. From the opening match the ball looked to me as though it was coming upon players more quickly than they expected, and that passes were outpacing recipients more than what I’m used to seeing in the football I watch. Goalies were concerned that shots taken from distance would dip and dive and move about unpredictably; but few shots from outside the box even seem to be finding the target.

I decided to crunch some numbers to see if there was any data to support what I thought I was seeing with my eyes. I’m no Nate Silver, though I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. I compared selected ball control stats from the first sixteen games of this year’s Cup with those from the sixteen matches in 2009′s Confederation’s Cup.

The results were pretty striking:

Total Passes Completed
2009: 73.7%
2010: 70.5%

Short Passes Completed
2009: 74.8%
2010: 73.6%

Medium Passes Completed
2009: 77.7%
2010: 77.4%

Long Passes Completed
2009: 61%
2010: 47.6%

Crosses Completed
2009: 34.3%
2010: 18.8%

Corners Completed
2009: 62.5%
2010: 40.6%

And, I also looked at shooting and scoring in 2009 and 2010.

Shots on Target
2009: 40.7%
2010: 34.2%

Shots Wide
2009: 42.2%
2010: 47.2%

Goals
2009: 43
2010: 27

In every one of these categories, control of the ball has been more fleeting in 2010 than 2009. Specifically, you can see that long passes, crosses, and corners have been the most severely impacted plays, sporting the largest differentials from last year to this.

All 32 of the games considered were played in South Africa, so the altitude question is neutralized. I supposed that strategic differences between a 32 team tournament and an 8 team tournament could have some impact on these numbers, as might the pressure of playing in the World Cup. I’m nowhere near equipped to integrate these allowances into my analysis. Now, everyone plays with the same ball, so I don’t think there are any questions about whether or not this situation is “fair.” But what’s above certainly combines with what I’ve witnessed with my own eyes to lead me to conclude that the Jabulani is having a negative impact on the ability of field players to control the ball.

When I was a youth soccer player growing up in Lansing, Michigan we used to regularly play against Eaton Rapids, a farming town about 20 miles outside the urban center. These were always tough games, mostly because the boys from Eaton Rapids were big and strong. Their squads were like little versions of the German national team, and this feeling was reinforced by the occasional racist taunts they hurled at our teams, which featured black and Latino players (and one Jew, me, who was often confused for a Puerto Rican).

But one of the most annoying things about playing Eaton Rapids was that their fans always brought these goddamn cowbells to the games, and would bang them throughout the match. I hated those cowbells, which came to mind this weekend amidst the furor against the vuvezelas that have blared and bleated throughout the first few days of the World Cup.  They’ve caused such an uproar that World Cup organizers were considering banning them from matches.

photo credit: markhillary

Any soccer fan who watched the Confederation’s Cup last year or who has watched South American soccer in the past 30 years will already be familiar with this noise, and discussions about whether or not they should be banned from the Cup have been going on for a year. My feelings? Get over it. I’d much rather the Black Eyed Peas and, especially, Bono and R. Kelly be banned from the Cup; the vuvuzelas are less annoying, and at least they have character and impart a local feeling to the goings on.  Who knows, maybe they even give African and South American squads that are used to hearing them an advantage, which I’m all for given that this is the first World Cup in Africa. That they give idiotic American cretins another thing to whine about also seems an argument in their favor, doesn’t it?

If it annoys you, turn your sound down, go to a bar, or simply watch more matches. I’ve acclimated myself to them already, much more so than I ever did those goddamn Eaton Rapids cowbells.

Jason Gay offers an even heartier defense of the vuvezela here.

* Yes, I realize that “vuvezela” is not Spanish, but the alliteration was too alluring.

** PS.

As a certified lefty historian, I am well aware of the damage wrought by nationalism, and in almost all areas of my life I abhor the elevation of the group over the common bonds of humanity.

But not when it comes to soccer.

The confluence of my own past with the sport, America’s historic mediocrity on the pitch, and my religious conviction that sport fandom not only justifies but in fact requires a certain level of irrationality make me pull deeply for the Yanks.

We’re in our sixth straight World Cup after missing them for 40 years. Here’s a brief review of the past five performances.

1990

The US qualified for the 1990 World Cup on this goal by Paul Caligiuri at Trinidad & Tobago:

They showed up in Italy with the youngest squad in the tournament, consisting almost entirely of recent college players. They lost all three games: 5-1 to Czechoslovakia, 1-0 to Italy, and 2-1 to Austria. The achievement of this tournament was merely reaching it, though the US did show well against Italy, and would have tied the game had Walter Zenga not stopped a Peter Vermes blast with his rear end.

1994

The US qualified as hosts of the 1994 World Cup, and I was lucky enough to see them play Switzerland in their opening match, which they tied 1-1 thanks to this goal by Eric Wynalda:

In the second game, the US faced Colombia, who were fashionable picks that year to make a deep run behind Carlos Valderrama and Faustino Asprilla. The US shocked Los Cafeteros, behind this fateful own goal by Andrés Escobar (which led to his murder two weeks later):

And then this beauty of a game winner by Earnie Stewart:

The US slipped into the second round after losing their third match to Romania, and was rewarded with a match against mighty Brazil on July 4. Despite the fact that Brazil played the second half with ten men after Leonardo fractured Tab Ramos’ skull with this nasty elbow –

– the US couldn’t overcome Bebeto’s second half tally and the Brazilian ball control, and fell to the eventual champions.

Getting out of the first round was unquestionable progress.

1998

Any progress made in 1994 was returned in 1998 when the US stunk up France worse than the most aged blue cheese. The team entered the tournament in total disarray, and suffered resounding defeats to Germany, Iran, and Yugoslovia. It’s recently come out that John Harkes, who then national team coach Steve Sampson had recently named “Captain for Life,” had been stripped of his captaincy and dismissed from the team for (allegedly) sleeping with a teammate’s wife. This no doubt contributed to the Yanks’ miserable performance on the field, and one can only hope that the similar controversy that recently emerged from within the English side has a deadening effect on the British legs. The effort against Germany was especially troubling, as the usually plucky Americans caved to the physical assertiveness of their opponents.

2002

The 2002 World Cup was the high point of American soccer. After the dismal performance of 1998, few expected the US to get out of a group that featured the host country, the Korea Republic, a tough team from Poland, and Portugal, who had Luís Figo, the reigning FIFA World Player of the Year, and a was a team chosen by many to break through to the late stages. The US faced Portugal in their opening game (which I watched at 7 am ET), and came out confident and aggressive and with nothing to lose. They scored three goals in the first half (one was an own goal), and held on in the second for a shocking 3-2 victory.

After tying Korea (on this Clint Mathis goal):

and then losing to Poland, the US emerged from its group to face arch rival Mexico in the Round of 16: the biggest match the country has ever played. This one was a 4:30 am ET start time, and the US dominated and forced the Mexicans to completely unravel at the end of the game (Rafael Marquez’s hit on Cobi Jones was just as dirty as the Leonardo elbow to Tab Ramos in 1994).

The reward for beating Mexico was a matchup with Germany in the quarterfinals, the same German team that had pushed around the Americans four years earlier. Claudio Reyna, who at that point had enjoyed more success as a professional in Europe than any other American player (and who carried the nickname “Captain America”), had been especially abused by strongman Jens Jeremies in 1998. But on this day he was the best player on the field, and the US got the better of play through most of the game. The refs missed a blatant German handball on the goaline, and the US couldn’t ultimately punch home a goal.

This was a remarkable showing, and indicated to the world that American soccer was indeed capable of a world class performance. The run in 2002 set a new standard for the US side.

2006

The 2006 World Cup greeted the Americans with high expectations, but an extremely difficult draw: Czech Republic, Italy, and the top African side, Ghana. The US came out flat in their first match, falling to the Czech Republic 3-0, before showing brilliantly and confidently against Italy in a physical 1-1 tie in which two Americans (against one Italian) were ejected. Again, the US benefited from an own goal, the only score the Italians would concede on their march to the final. Needing a victory in their final group match against Ghana to advance, the US fell to Ghana 2-1, victims of the Ghanian’s speed and a horrid penalty call in the first half injury time.

That the US failure to advance from this difficult group was seen as a disappointment showed how far American soccer had evolved since 1990. You want to enter your third match of the group stage with a shot to advance, and the US has done that the past two World Cups– although they’ve lost both games!

2010

As the US preps for Saturday’s match with England, expectations are extremely high. Given the US’s experience — including a victory over a full-strength Spanish side and a near upset of Brazil at last year’s Confederation’s Cup — there’s simply no excuse for them to fail to advance from a group that includes England, Slovenia, and Algeria. If history is any indication, however, the US could struggle with this group. They haven’t beaten England since 1950, and always have a tough time with big Eastern European sides (see losses to the Czechs, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia). Slovenia is less experienced and talented than each of those sides, and the US is much more poised than in the past, so they should pull out a victory or at least earn a tie. They’ll be in good shape if they go into the final group match against Algeria with 3 points, and they’d be in great shape if they can get a draw against England in the first game and a win over Slovenia. The US has historically played one great match, one mediocre one, and a stinker in the group stages. Where those efforts are located will make all the difference in the world this year.

The US team has significant questions on the pitch. In previous years, central defense has been a strength, showcasing American toughness, size and poise with Eddie Pope and Oguchi Onyewu. Gooch is just returning from a knee injury, and hasn’t played 90 minutes in nearly 8 months. The other two center backs are the tough-but-slow Jay DeMerit (who tends to play too far off the ball in the defensive third) and the untested Clarence Goodson (who’s good in the air but not nearly as physical as what this position calls for). This could spell trouble for a side that likes to play compact defensively and spring counter attacks. Wing defenders (Carlos Bocanegra, Jonathan Spector, and Steve Cherundolo) are solid but again, slow. Head coach Bob Bradley loves Jonathan Bornstein, who has speed but lacks the size and toughness to compete at this level. We may see him as a situational substitute.

The strength of the current US team is in its midfield, and there’s more talent than can fit on the pitch. Michael Bradley, Clint Dempsey, and Landon Donovan are sure to be in the starting eleven. Bradley generally plays a 4-4-2 lineup, and though he’s tried to play Dempsey up front with Jozy Altidore, he’s indicated he’d like to play two true forwards (it’s looking that the second will be Edson Buddle, who comes in to the tournament in great goal scoring form). So, the big question is, who will be the fourth midfielder? Ricardo Clark has gotten most of the time there in tune up matches, but hasn’t particularly impressed; I’d prefer to see Maurice Edu, who tackles just as hard as Clark but is more solid with the ball (and also has a nose for the goal). The other midfielders — Stuart Holden, José Francisco Torres, and DaMarcus Beasley are capable substitutes, and can each go a full 90 if needed. I hope we don’t see Benny Feilhaber in a game; although he’s got the ability to possess the ball, he consistently disappears from matches and is a horrid defender. Up front, expect to see Herculez Gomez as a late game substitute if the US needs a goal, and Robbie Findley if the US feels it needs to exploit a speed advantage. Tim Howard will man the goal, and will both make the spectacular save and do his best to keep the rag-tag back line organized.

The World Cup is one day away, and we’re two days from what promises to be an epic US match against England. Let’s get the party started!

On Friday I’ll get to begin enjoying my fourth World Cup since moving to New York City. When the World Cup was in the States in 1994, I attended two group stage games at the Pontiac Silverdome: USA v. Switzerland and Brazil v. Sweden. Nothing beats attending a game and absorbing the spectacle and celebration that surrounds it, and seeing it played on real grass inside a dome (that recently sold for just over $500k) was a surreal experience that I’ll vividly remember the rest of my life.

But If you can’t attend the tournament, NYC must be the next best place to be. Thousands of folks are out in their kits, draped with flags, and every other conversation you overhear on the street seems to be about the Cup.  The event unites the focus of the world, and that effect’s on full display in New York. It gives those with ties to other countries permission to flamboyantly celebrate those connections, and for other New Yorkers to join or mock them.  Soccer bars (like Nevada Smith’s or these national rooting spots) are packed with fans throughout the day watching games played halfway around the world, and those fans are usually banging on drums, singing and screaming at each other, and downing pints (whether they have to go back to work or not). Whole blocks shut down in Little Italy, Koreatown, and Little Brazil on those countries’ match days, and fans watch from the street on gigantic displays amidst a carnival.

The best thing about New York City is the opportunity it gives us to sample the world. That’s never more true than during the World Cup.

photo credit: jenschapter3

I’m going to really, really hate England this week. I mean, this human aspect ratio buster features as a striker for that country? For real?

Peter Crouch is a tool. More evidence:

Holmes needs to bounce The Robot up from out his repertoire. He’s embarrassing himself and his girlfriend, and pissing Don Cornelius off.

One of the few things of value to come out of England over the past decade is Ricky Gervais, and even he ragged on this goof:

Now, if I was at all confident in the ability of the US central defense to actually beat this guy to a ball played in the air, I’d get really mean. Or maybe I’m just saving that for Terry, who might be shagging Crouch’s fiance.