Shots in the Dark

Someone asked me below what I thought of the negotiations between the Yankees and Derek Jeter, which are now finished. Jeter got three years for $51 million, and the Yankees are now looking at signing pitcher Cliff Lee. (I wish they wouldn’t: a six-year contract for a 32-year-old pitcher who, per Randy Johnson and many others, may not make the transition to pitching in New York? Nuts.)

Like any good Yankee fan, I stand by Derek Jeter. But I’m ambivalent about this deal. Part of me wishes that he’d recognize he’s just not a great shortstop any more and settle for, say, the paltry $15 million a year the Yankees first offered. And part of me admires Jeter’s competitiveness and his sense that he should get paid what the market will bear. Yet another part wonders how the Yankees will fare with a 38-, 39- and 40-year-old shortstop.

It returns to this theme of men and ambition, which has been cropping up in my cultural life lately.

As you know, I’ve been reading Keith Richards’ book, Life, and finally finished it. By the end, I liked it—and Richards— less than I had in its first couple of hundred pages. Appropriately for someone who mocks the penis size of his “friend” Mick Jagger, referencing Jagger’s “tiny todger,” Richards comes off as kind of a dick. There are some things men do not do to each other; mocking a friend’s equipment in a worldwide bestseller is one of them.

You won’t find this perspective in any of the ravishing reviews of the book, certainly not Liz Phair’s idiotic hero worship drool published in the Times. It’s easier to laud Richards’ rebel cool; he’s the bad boy in high school whom no one wants to call out. But what is cool, really? What values underlie it?

Richards comes off as a tepid father—he talks of taking his 7-year-old son on tour with him, giving the boy the responsibility of waking Richards from drug-induced sleep in order to perform, and he’s famously away on the road when his two-month-old, whom he’s barely seen, dies.

He’s certainly not much of a boyfriend, despite his protestations that he never chased women. (They chase him.) He cuckolds his bandmates on several occasions. (There’s no sign that they returned the favor.) He’s brutal on Jagger in more than just the one way.

(Jagger responds in last week’s New York Times “T” magazine, saying, “Personally, I think it’s really quite tedious raking over the past. Mostly people do it for the money.” Which unconvinces, because Mick Jagger has never taken offense at money.)

As Richards describes his years of horrific drug abuse, it’s hard not to have sympathy for Jagger; anyone who’s ever been in a relationship with an addict, any kind of relationship and any kind of addict, knows just how difficult that is, and if Jagger became obsessed with control, which it sounds like he did, when your bandmate is on heroin for a decade or so, wouldn’t you?

Richards has a frustrating inability to talk interestingly about the music he makes has made. It is, of course, more important that he make it than that he can write about making it. But still…somehow the way Richards describes the songwriting process, you wind up feeling that, well, one should have just listened to Exile on Main Street again. Not Keef’s fault, but that’s where the magic lies.

Also—no one gives a damn about the X-pensive Vinos. (You can get their greatest hits for six bucks on Amazon.) Maybe we should. But I doubt it.

Perhaps most frustrating is that Richards, who’s so insightful and interesting about his childhood and the Stones’ early years, doesn’t address the band’s long decline. When did the Stones last make music that one had to hear? With Tattoo You, released (yikes) 30 years ago. Jagger and Richards were both about 37 at the time—Derek Jeter’s age now. What happened? Is it true, as Coldplay’s Chris Martin says in the new issue of Q magazine, that “you have to have done your best work” by your late 30s? Or is that just a romantic artistic myth?

Of course, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary—look at U2, or Bob Dylan, who have made vital music well past their 30s. Each case is different; there’s no knowing—just as there’s no knowing when to hang it up. In the Wall Street Journal the other day, John Jurgensen argued that Dylan has come to suck so badly, he should quit playing live. (Judging from the one time I saw Dylan, in 1986, that has been arguable for some time.)

This issue is coming to the fore now that a generation of performers is hitting old age, along with their baby-boomer fans. Not unlike their R&B predecessors, such as the still-touring Four Tops, most classic rock acts are delivering note-for-note nostalgia, but on a bigger scale. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters scored one of the most successful tours of the year by rolling out “The Wall,” updating only the 1980 stage technology. But for the handful of acts releasing new material and trying to stay relevant as artists, there’s no late-career blueprint.

(Speaking of not knowing when to walk away, I could digress into an anti-Charlie Rangel riff here, but I won’t. Or talk about the patho-tragic fall of John McCain, who should have realized that sticking to whatever principles he may have had was a better cap to his career than winning at the cost of everything he once stood for.)

(I could also point out a gracious example of walking away: sportswriterMichael Wilbon, writing his last column for the Washington Post, saying,

Everything I have now professionally I owe to The Washington Post…

Certain young sportswriters in Boston, who plead for us to sympathize with their gender political plight, take note.)

These are not easy questions (and they are, of course, hardly limited to men). Which is a banal thought. But here are two that, I hope, are not.

One: What fascinates and sometimes inspires is the struggle of every individual to resolve the tension between creativity/living and aging/dying in his or her own life. That never gets old.

(Consider, for example, the difference between how Christopher Hitchens is navigating the imminent end of his life with startling candor—”It’s no fun,” Hitchens writes, “to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body“—and how Michael Douglas is approaching his death, appearing on the cover of People with the mantra, “I’ll beat this.” Musician Phil Collins, meanwhile, plagued with nerve problems that prevent him from playing drums or, more fundamentally, cleaning himself, tells Rolling Stone that he’s considering suicide.)

Here’s the second thought, then: As Baby Boomers retire, and because of extensions in longevity, we’re going to be seeing these issues addressed more than ever, and resolved, I believe, in ways that make life more meaningful for those of us who aren’t there yet.

My former literary agent, Joni Evans, is one of the most elegant people I know. Here she is, interviewed by Charlie Rose, in her capacity as one of the founders of Wowowow.com, a website for intelligent women.

No—wait! It’s here.

Harvard Magazine reports on the Harvard Corporation’s “self-review of its operations and organization,” and the proposed changes it will recommend.

And apparently, that whole thing about how you can’t change the Corporation because then you’d open everything up to interference from the Massachusetts state legislature was just-well, how can I say it?—bullshit an excuse for not making changes.

…according to Senior Fellow Robert D. Reischauer ’63, “We have reviewed the matter thoroughly, both internally and with outside counsel, and have determined that the University has full authority to make the changes voted this weekend by the governing boards. Harvard has also conferred with the Office of the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which saw no reason why the University could not exercise its authority to adopt these changes.”

So that was easy, then.

All record-setting-straight aside, the changes proposed are without question significant.

They include:

—enlarging the Corporation from 7 members to 13

—limiting the terms of Corporation members to a recommended six years

—creating different committees to work on different areas of governance, such as finance

—making the “lead trustee”—formerly the senior fellow—chosen by vote of the Corporation members, rather than a post inherited by seniority.

—instituting quarterly reports to the “community” on what the Corporation is up to

As someone who’s criticized the insularity and permanence of the Corporation in the past, I have to say: Bravo. These changes are fundamental. It’s quite possible that, had they been undertaken sooner, Larry Summers would never have become president…and if he had been chosen, would never have lasted as long as he did. This new Corporation is a recognition of both modernity and antiquity; which is to say, it recognizes that the old Corporation was obsolete and ill-suited to a modern world, and that structural changes will strengthen the board and, consequently, the university.

Certainly this seems to me the most important event of Drew Faust’s tenure.

“As an educator, it’s the lost potential, as a former secretary of state, it’s the loss of leadership, but as an American, I worry about one other thing. The great national myth—to come from humble circumstances and do great things—is what unites this country.”

—Former George W. Bush flunky U.S. secretary of state Condoleeza Rice, speaking at Harvard, quoted in the Crimson.

Let’s just clean up that quote, shall we?

“As an educator, it’s [sic] the lost potential, as a former secretary of state, it’s [sic] the loss of leadership, but as an American, I worry about one other thing. The great national myth ideal—to come from humble circumstances and do great things—is what unites this country.”

(Because you don’t really want to posit that a thing that once existed and now is allegedly being lost is a “myth.”)

I may be a stickler about such things, but it’s my humble opinion that anyone opining about the state of education in the United States ought to speak correctly.

And, I admit, I just don’t like Condoleeza Rice, and feel about her as I do with Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and other former Bushies: After what they did to the country, why does anyone listen to them about anything?

Having just spent a day in Qatar a few weeks ago, I’m fascinated by FIFA’s decision to let the desert country host the 2022 World Cup there.

It’s an odd choice, even to someone who isn’t a full-time soccer junkie. (Though I am World Cup-obsessed.) You can’t imagine a less likely place to play any outdoor sport than in Qatar. (The North Pole, maybe.) It’s sand and it’s hot—50% Celsius in the summer.

Doha, the capital, is a surreal city, more artificial than Los Angeles or Las Vegas; by all rights, it just shouldn’t exist. But the Qataris have so much oil and natural gas money, they’ve been able to transform the desert into an oasis of brand-name architecture and imported luxury brands. The skyline below (and forgive the pic, which was taken from a moving car) arose within the last decade, mostly the past five years. My wife, Sarah, and I stayed at the Four Seasons; on our way there from the airport we drove past a building under construction whose purpose was to house the Doha branch of the Tribeca Film Festival.

Doha is a city of contradictions. Qatari women are required to bundle up, covering their bodies and, to varying degrees, their faces in black burkas. But at the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art (below), I saw burka-clad girls happily texting on iPhones, and later encountered an older woman accompanied by her husband whose burka was colorful and beautifully woven, a piece of art in itself, and whose hands bore enough diamonds to make Liz Taylor blanch with envy.

Politically, Qatar is an ally of the US. It considers itself a moderate Arabic state and wants to modernize but must tread carefully; according to Wikileaks, it’s been hesitant to act against suspected Al Qaeda figures but agreed to allow the US to use an air base there for a possible strike against Iran. I suppose there’s freedom of speech in Qatar, but probably more in theory than reality, and Google searches on Doha show an odd theme; the results turn up Doha-related websites that all look like they’re funded by the state, but don’t identify themselves as such.

There’s no soccer culture there that I could see; the sport was brought to Qatar by oil workers, and Qatar’s national team has never qualified for the World Cup. A casual impression suggested that the natives (there aren’t very many, and much of Qatar’s workforce, especially the laborers, come from Asia and the Philippines) aren’t very welcoming to outsiders.

Sarah and I were generally ignored as we walked around the Souq Waqif, a marketplace, where you could buy textiles and grains and fig candies and strong coffee made with condensed milk and lots of sugar. (In fact, there wasn’t much that a tourist would want to buy, which is fine, but the market is still fascinating to wander through.) Ignored—but at the same time, we both got a vibe of not being particularly welcomed.

For a western woman in particular, Doha’s a challenge. Female visitors are strongly encouraged to cover all parts of the body from the neck down—no bare arms or calves, for instance—and I suspect that any woman who didn’t take that advice would find herself on the receiving end of some angry glances, if not more.

At the information counter for the Museum of Islamic Art, a Qatari man very politely welcomed me and discussed the museum’s layout. In the several minutes he spoke to me, not once did he talk to, look at or in any way acknowledge Sarah. (Try this in conversation sometime—it can’t be easy.) My impression is that this was a sign of respect; a man doesn’t talk to another man’s wife. But from an American perspective, it’s disconcerting, and for the subject of the experience, not particularly pleasant.

At the same time, however, massive posters along Doha’s main highway showed images of a female tennis star (can’t remember which one); Doha was hosting a USWTA tournament.

So Qatar has ten years to build a bunch of air-conditioned soccer stadiums. I’ve no doubt they can do it. And getting to Qatar won’t be hard; it has a terrific national airline, Qatar Airways, and an airport whose cleanliness, logic and efficiency puts most American ones (especially New York’s) to shame.

What I wonder is whether anyone really wants to go there, either to play or to watch. Some people have wondered whether FIFA’s decision was the result of bribery. Maybe. But corruption or not, it’s also a recognition of a fascinating new geopolitical player.

Below, the Doha skyline, the Museum of Islamic Art, and the Doha waterfront at night.