The 19 inning game and Loyalty

Can't believe I am writing two posts about baseball in a row, and about fans from two teams opposite to each other across the bay and with almost opposite behavior! I'm talking about the Giants and the A's. The latter played against the Anaheim Angels on Monday night. I was busy watching other stuff late at night and realized I didn't find out who won. It was midnight and I'm surprised the game was still going on, in extra inning. Another 1.5 hr passed by. I was almost done with the video I was watching and about to go to sleep. Checked the result again. OMG it was still tied! Finally the game ended ~1:45am. The A's have just played the longest game, a 6.5 hr one, in team history! I listened to the highlights while I was in bed. What a great game! The A's trailed the Angels 2-7 in middle of the 8th. I definitely won't blame the fans for leaving at that point. But they scored 4 in the bottom of the 8th and 1 more in the 9th (down to their last out. Cespedes hit a long single to the outfield for the RBI) to tie! Both team scored again in the 15th (again, the A's were down to the last out and tied) Brandon Moss hit a 2-run walk-off homer to win the game for the A's in the 19th inning. The sports talk radio show host talked about this game, of course, and he estimated around 1000 or less fans stayed till the end to support their team. Those fans were as loyal as you can get. (They and the Giants fan who left in the 7th inning around 3pm in the afternoon in a tied game were beyond comparable)

"Breaking up" with the SF Giants

This has nothing to do with their players and the recent slump, and of course not the management (which could do no wrong because they did a great job building a team that won 2 world series in 3 years) I just don't want to be associated with this fanbase and deal with the greedy bloodsucking businesses near the ball park (or I should say remotely close to) I have been driving to SF to work for years. My office building is ~1 mile from the ballpark and in the past the parking lots here do not charge extra on game day. I guess most people went to the games chose to park closer to the ball park. Well, things started to get crazy last season. The parking lots and garages near the ball park started to charge >$50 and it has a ripple effect: the not-so-close-by parking lots were jacking up the price to ~$30 as well, including the ones near work. Only 1 parking lot sticks with the regular $15 and of course that one got full quite fast (I arrived at 9:45 the other day and almost couldn't get in. They still need to reserve a few spaces for the monthly parker, which I am not)  And it's not just parking. The traffic near the park got busy at that time already but the game wasn't started until 12:30 (or later?) My co-worker who took CalTrain to the city told me the train was jam packed when he was getting to work! That's why I still glad that I drove instead. It would have been crowded on the train back home too. Some riders who left the games were drunk, high or loud (or all of the above) and I wanted to avoid them at all cost. Still, driving away from the city at 3pm could only help so much: the streets outside the ball park was already filled with people leaving the game, less than 3 hours after the game started, in the 7th inning with a 1-1 tie! No way I would call these people true supporters of the team. Why do they even bother to come to the game? Just stay home next time, OK? BTW, it was a really exciting game: the Giants fell behind soon but came back in the bottom of the 9th. Too bad they couldn't win in the end. More home fan support might have helped. Who knows? 

Free Your Mind!

"Free Your Mind" is the title of a series of lectures about improvisation presented by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts and The Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. It includes a wide variety of topics such as food, comedy, dance, visual art and of course music(jazz) which I'm most interested in. The lectures are actually open to public (also streaming online) and I attended the one with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer as the guest.

Dr. Iyer has a very interesting background. Check out this well-written article on him. His parents were immigrated from India. He double-majored in Math and Physics at Yale and then got accepted to the PhD program at UC Berkeley. He also started learning violin at 3. So, that sounds like your typical Asian American kid, right? Wrong! He studied violin 'til he entered college, when he realized he did not have enough time for the highly demanding classical violin training. (The amount of time high-level violinists put into practicing was incredible!) After he came to Berkeley, he got involved in the big musician community in the Bay Area but playing jazz piano (which he taught himself mostly) instead. At the same time, his research focus had also switched from physic to music and technology and eventually earned a PhD in such an interdisciplinary program.

Enough about his background, there were quite a few things they pointed out during the lecture: they talked about improvising during a performance as taking risk, which makes a lot of sense. As a performer, you could always "play it safe" but then if you played something different (e.g. musical or comedy ideas) that worked for the audiences, it would be even more rewarding. Of course it might not work so that's the element of risk.

They also talked about improvisation occurs more often then we think. In fact people improvise all the time during daily routine instead of planning/thinking ahead. Again, it makes sense. Just that most people won't think of that.

They pointed out music is highly related to motions of human. Musical beats mimic human movement (our pulses, our walking paces) In face, the same area in our brain is activated when we hear music or when we move. Finally, they mentioned empathy when hearing music, i.e., the player and listeners would fire similar nerves in the brain. When it comes to our brain and music, there are still a whole lot of unknowns (see the books "This is Your Brain on Music" and "Guitar Zero")