Veritas Lux Mea March Madness Notes
Don’t look for any historic upsets: I don’t think any of the 1 seeds will fall this year, as 1 seeds are an impressive 40-0 lifetime in the tournament. Florida, Kansas, Ohio State and NC are just too solid.
The 8 and 9 see matchups could go either way in all four games, but we like Villanova, Arizona, Xavier, and Michigan State. The Spartans will have their hands full with Marquette and Dominic James, but I think Tommy Izzo's squad will pull through.
Midwest: Everyone like Old Dominion to upset Butler in that classic 12-5 matchup. There is, on average, two 12 seed or higher upsets every year, and this could very well be one of them. Butler’s a bit overrated at the 5 seed.
Davidson is a sexy pick as a 13 upsetting number 4 Maryland, who many believe are overrated. In fact, Davidson is one of the better shooting teams in the whole tournament. Yet I don’t see them being great enough offensively to get past Maryland.
Winthop is again a popular pick at 11 to upset 6th-seeded Notre Dame, but we think the Irish are just too tough this year. On the flipside, Georgia Tech should be able to upset UNLV in one of those 10-7 matchups.
Wisconsin and Oregon will be fine in the first round and should, if all goes according to plan and efficiency ratings, meet in the Sweet 16.
In the West, we like Kansas easily, Nova in a nailbitter, VT over Illinois, the Salukis to handle Holy Cross, and Duke to get past VCU. Most people are writing Duke off against VCU, a popular upset, but Duke has an efficiency rating of 38-4. They’re big and tough and will have all their ready weapons for the game. I’m not sure VCU will be as tough as everyone thinks.
Pitt should play better than they have in the past and get past Wright State and then Duke in the 2nd round. And we like an underrated Indiana team to hold their seed against an equally tough and more upstart Gonzaga, who still hasn’t figured out how to play D.
UCLA is our favorite to come out of the bottom part of the bracket to match up against Kansas in the Elite 8.
In the East, we love NC and Georgetown, who are both really solid squads. NC is the most compete team in the tournament and shouldn’t face difficulty until they meet up with Texas in the Sweet 16. I think NC’s depth and multidimensional factor will overwhelm Texas and Durant, but it will be close.
George Washington is a great pick coming out as an 11 seed, but they’re playing a Vandy team who has beaten a lot of really solid clubs. I think Vandy is a better club offensively and they’ll be able to move the ball on GW and end their hopes of a Cinderella run.
I like Boston College over Texas Tech because that’s what Vegas tells me.
Do you believe in Washington State? I don't.
Lastly, in the South, you’ve got two teams who I think are both Final Four contenders in Ohio State and Texas A&M. Unfortunately, they have to play each other before that. I think Ohio State will have a tough time getting past Xavier in round two, but Greg Oden should seal the deal for them until they have to match up against a very well rounded A&M club.
Oh yea, and I like Albany over Virginia, and we're afraid of Louisville making a deep run.
There's our picks --- enjoy the Madness!
Film Criticism
Sparta? No. This is madness: An expert assesses the gruesome new epic
The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.
History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.
We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.
And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan "freedom." By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.
Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta's highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas' campaign, despite 300's subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300's Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers...[READ MORE]
Music
Featured Artist: Apostle of Hustle
We were actually lucky enough to stumble upon Apostle of Hustle through Myspace and were very happy that we did. I'm really enjoying what I'm hearing from this band and I'm a little sad it's taken me this long to get around to them.
From a PopMatters review on Folkloric Feel, their 2004 release:
When a record like Folkloric Feel engages us with an idiosyncratic production style, its conception of sound forcibly alters our stubborn perception of pop music. This shift in consciousness is enabled more by electricity and geometry than the chemistry of musicians; simply put, it's all about the coaxing of a sound wave from its source followed by the methodology of its capture. We are given an unexpected pedagogy in how sounds are identified and processed, one that liberates our usual assumptions.
One could argue that Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It in People was the last album to offer this kind of immediate sonic revelation. Folkloric Feel improves and expands its predecessor's palette, and not coincidentally; Andrew Whiteman, the man behind Apostle of Hustle, does time as guitarist for Broken Social Scene. Along with drummer Dean Stone and bassist Julian Brown, Whiteman expands You Forgot It in People's province into a veritable hemisphere: Folkloric Feel is a touchstone of arty indie-rock, sheer aural poetry draped in the guise of pop.
The Apostle of Hustle project was inspired by Whiteman's two-month stay in Cuba, but the music of that country isn't blatantly injected into the record's bloodstream. If there is a Latin influence, it's conservatively suggested in droplets: the thumbed guitar motif and resonant drum thwomps in the gorgeous Arto Lindsay residue of "Baby, You're in Luck" and the spacious percussion congregating in the recesses of the sweetly sublime ballad "Animal Fat" are the most obvious examples...[READ MORE]
From The National Anthem of Nowhere [2007]:
Apostle of Hustle - "My Swords Hand Anger"
From Folkloric Feel:
Apostle of Hustle - "Folkloric Feel"
Apostle of Hustle - "Sleepwalking Ballad"
Apostle of Hustle at Myspace
Apostle of Hustle official website