A Special Way of Being Afraid

Kermit the King

2012-01-19T23:39:00.004-05:00

I haven't seen The Muppets yet. At this rate, it seems that I will eventually see it on or from Netflix, which is what I say about almost all new releases now. And then, of course, I don't end up seeing most of them on Netflix. My Netflix queue currently has something like 400 movies on it, and I'm pretty sure I've had one disc out since about last February. So if I'm honest with myself (and I can be, for a two-hour block late every Thursday night), I may never see The Muppets.

That's just to say that I don't have the full context for Noah Millman's review of the movie, which I recently happened upon. It's hard to finally judge this review. The fact that it doesn't topple over into total poser-dom is a small miracle. Maybe the seriousness with which he addresses it is a joke, but it doesn't feel like that either. I guess I love the Muppets enough myself that I'm willing to go along with a lot of this. Yet there's also something so insane about the excerpt below. Visit yourself and make up your own mind. For now, that excerpt, with the bold italics most decidedly mine:

In virtually every scene – most especially in his emceeing of the show – Kermit seemed to me to be phoning it in. It’s partly a problem of character – this Kermit is exceptionally passive, never coming up with solutions for problems, always ready to admit defeat. But this could have worked brilliantly if it had built to a big moment of recognition that this is what he was doing, and he finally returned to his true self. (Kermit is the Aragorn figure of the movie, the true king in self-imposed exile because he doesn’t believe he is actually fit to be king.) But that moment of recognition never really came. We got the speech after the moment – the speech about not having really failed and how it doesn’t really matter if they lose the studio or their name. But we didn’t get the moment.

But it was more a problem of performance. Kermit, in his prime, was a great leading man, a blend of Humphrey Bogart’s rumpled integrity and Cary Grant’s barely-suppressed hysteria. (Sorry, I’ve been reading Stanley Cavell again.) This Kermit doesn’t seem like that character grown old – it seems like that performer going through the motions.

From a Stovetop Far, Far Away

2012-01-18T12:32:00.004-05:00

Not distant planets. Frying pans.

(Via Spot)

The Movie List: 25-21

2012-01-11T23:21:00.007-05:00

Where were we?

25. "It defeats its own purpose."

Raging Bull (1980)

Boxing offers archetypal plots that filmmakers can’t resist. The number of movies about boxers are out of proportion to even the sport’s heyday, which was a long, long time ago. Many of the sport’s giants have come from bad backgrounds, achieved great heights, and met ignominious ends. Many of its tomato cans are hard-luck studies in trying to flail your way out of a corner. The stories write themselves — or just about — which has led to the following, to name just a few: Body and Soul, Champion, Cinderella Man, The Champ, the Rocky series, Ali, Million Dollar Baby, The Boxer, The Fighter. Those are off the top of my head.

But Scorsese, being Scorsese, takes it to another level. First, as he always has, he got the best of Robert De Niro, who’s incredible here. And then there’s the composition, starting with the justifiably iconic title sequence, during which De Niro as Jake La Motta warms up in slow motion to a piece of music from Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana. (You can hear cinematographer Michael Chapman discuss the popping light bulbs in that clip if you scroll down a bit here.) Chapman deserves a ton of credit for the film’s stark-but-lovely look.

There was a particular scene available on YouTube when I first started drafting this (in 1984), but it’s gone now. It’s at the public swimming pool, but Scorsese starts with the camera up high, then trails down a brick building, follows the path of a young black boy as he jumps into the pool, and then tracks across to De Niro. It’s a beautifully fluid motion, like reading. Raging Bull is like an unforgiving but lyrical novella; not exactly uplifting, but perfectly made.

24. “I swear, if you existed, I’d divorce you.”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

Thinking about getting married? Or even just feeling affection for another human being? You might want to avoid this film adaptation of Edward Albee’s award-winning 1962 play. To understate it: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor play a couple who don’t like each other. To properly state it: Take the angriest you’ve ever been. Take the drunkest you’ve ever been. Combine them. Multiply them by four. Add the most resentful you’ve ever been. Take one more drink. Now light yourself on fire. At that point, you might feel some fraction of what associate professor of history George and his wife Martha are feeling as they verbally assault each other.

Censors faced a string of impossible decisions, leading to outcomes like deleting the word “screw” from the film but leaving in the phrase “hump the hostess.” It’s easy to sympathize with their plight. The script certainly has its profane moments, but it’s more that the sheer intensity of the thing feels filthy. What do you make of a husband flatly saying to his wife, “There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won”?

George Segal and Sandy Dennis are very good as Nick and Honey, the wispy young couple who are witness to the carnage, though the most unrealistic part of the movie might be that they don’t run screaming from the house after five minutes. Or less.

23. “Are you here for an affair, sir?”

The Graduate (1967)

22. “You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do.”

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Some people grew up with the height of the French New Wave, others during the Golden Era of 1930s Hollywood. I grew up in the 1980s. This position in the time-space continuum was not by choice, of course, but it certainly heightened my enjoyment of John Hughes’ movie about a Chicago teenager playing hooky with his best friend and his girlfriend, which came out in 1986, when I was 12 and orders of magnitude less cool than Ferris. (It’s 2012, and the grayer and pastier Matthew Broderick gets, the more I feel like I’m catching up.)

I can’t imagine there’s much more to say about this movie, so I’ll share a couple of facts learned from my old friend Wikipedia: One is that David Denby, a critic for New York at the time, called Ferris “particularly awful,” and “a nauseating distillation of the slack, greedy side of Reaganism.” The moral of the story? Denby is as dependable a guide as he’s ever been. (Though Wikipedia does say that Hughes was a Republican.) I also learned that “Several notable people have called Ferris Bueller's Day Off their favorite motion picture, including Wolf Blitzer, Dan Quayle, Michael Bublé, Simon Cowell and Justin Timberlake.” I didn’t opt to place the movie at No. 22 on my list instead of No. 1 to avoid being lumped in with that group, but I can’t say I’m upset about the coincidence.

Here’s one of those banal facts that still manages to feel earth-shattering (or at least rapidly age-inducing) to me: It’s been 26 years since Ferris was released, and there were 19 years between it and The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock is vastly different from Ferris (he’s closer to Ferris’ fragile best friend, Cameron, who contemplatively sinks to the bottom of a pool in a scene that echoes The Graduate), but the protagonists do share one thing, which is a sense of coming to the end of something with no idea what comes next. Ferris might play the uncertainty much cooler than Ben, but these are movies about blind transition out of youth. As the years pass, I take points away from The Graduate for all kinds of things — Hoffman’s performance is one-note; I love Simon & Garfunkel, but the songs don’t really fit the movie; Katharine Ross’ character is a weaker element than I think she’s supposed to be (but oh, Katharine Ross). But I still love its look and much of its humor, as in the scene when Ben meets Mrs. Robinson at a hotel. The shot of him holding the door for the parade of elderly people is great.

The Graduate is often talked about as a generational snapshot, but I think it holds up because of its oddball tone and its cinematic qualities. The Time Out film guide says director Mike Nichols “couldn’t decide whether he was making a social satire or a farce.” They mean it as insult, but that might be what makes it work. A pure farce or pure social satire may have misfired in any number of ways. This sometimes uneasy combination gives it a winning personality all its own.

21. "From now on, I would like to be a good guy, and a good gambler."

Guys and Dolls (1955)

There are many people under the age of 50 or so who have never seen this movie, and there are many people of all ages who have seen it and don’t like it very much. Leave aside, for a moment, that the people who don’t like it are implying that Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra could appear in something together in 1955 and that thing could be bad. That’s faulty argument No. 1. It’s true that some of the singing is amateurish, and if you’re not fond of Damon Runyon’s patois, I suppose this variation of it could grate. (I’m a big fan. “The oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.” Come on.) There are some things, though, that are argument-proof, and this clip is one of them:

A Smiling Orange and Mr. Met

2012-01-06T00:59:00.007-05:00

My friend T. has issued a challenge to his "friends and allies" to join him in blogging at least once a day for the next 30 days. And I'm not one to back down from a challenge. (This is not true; if you so much as look at me funny I'm likely to run screaming. More accurate to say that I'm not one to back down from this challenge.)

I'll start light because I'm a bit rusty, as you might imagine. So let's start the streak with two looks at one of my favorite subjects: mascots. This is from ESPN's account of West Virginia's 70-33 shellacking of Clemson in Wednesday night's Orange Bowl:

But safety [Darwin] Cook made the pivotal play by returning a fumble 99 yards for a touchdown to break the game open...

After Cook crossed the goal line, he gleefully leaped on mascot Obie, a smiling orange, and they both tumbled to the turf. Obie rose unhurt and resumed her duties.

Cook and Obie met on the field after the game and shared a hug.

"I didn't know you were a girl," he told the mascot. "I apologize."

Video of the incident, and the orange mascot pretending to vomit into a trash can on the sidelines afterward, is here.

And then this, from a New York Times piece today about Mr. Met, the mascot of the New York Mets:

The Mets maintain a “no comment” position about Mr. Met, apparently to maintain an aura about his life. They refused last week to discuss the precise size of his head or what it is made of; how many people have played him; or details of his endorsement work. A spokesman for Mr. Met declined to comment other than to say, “Mr. Met never speaks.”

The article is accompanied by a slide show, including an image of Mr. Met with Bill Clinton, and another with this caption: "Conan O’Brien’s late-night show performed a sketch in which the Phillie Phanatic gunned down a suicidal Mr. Met."

"I don't get close to people, or something. I'm weird, I guess."

2011-11-13T00:00:00.003-05:00

Tonight I had occasion to reminisce with a friend about watching (separately) Later with Bob Costas, a show that ran from 1988 to 1994. (It continued with other hosts after Costas left.) It was a half-hour engaged conversation with one guest, something like Charlie Rose with a light source and an articulate host. We searched online for a few clips, and we found this interview Costas did with Mickey Mantle in 1994. This was an NBC News special, I believe, and not from Later. But we watched it tonight transfixed. The interview is often moving, and the pre-recorded profile is well-written and expertly put together.

"I'm glad you've found a twee little game that doesn't tax you too much."

2011-10-13T10:01:00.003-04:00

Just stopping by this wasteland to share an exchange on Slate that made me laugh. This is between two commenters — I abbreviate their handles to Fred and Taylor — and it appeared underneath a story about the red Solo cup, a plastic staple among partygoers and evidently the subject of a new Toby Keith song. The cups are also among the tools used for beer pong. Fred's attitude about the game's history is crystal clear below. Wikipedia would anger Fred. The site claims the current game of beer pong "evolved" from an earlier version that used paddles. (The site's entry on the paddle game is worth at least scrolling for the number of details about rules and variations of play.) Now, I'll hand things over to Fred:

Fred:

Also: That nonsense with the triangle of cups is not beer pong. It's a watered-down fluff activity for today's inconsequential college students. Beer pong uses a full table tennis table, paddles, one ball, and one cup per player. The fay triangle thing is to beer pong as wiffle ball is to baseball.

Taylor:

No, the triangle is beer pong, because beer pong is a drinking game, NOT an athletic activity. The goal is to show grace under fire (where grace is standing upright, and fire is approx a 6 pack of long necks). Now if you had to pound a boiler maker before each at bat in wiffle ball, I bet it would be a much more interesting game.

Fred:

Your brag about the longnecks suggests you don't understand that real beer pong involves drinking as well. What did you think we did, just play ping-pong with cups in the way? (For that matter, players also stand upright in both games. I'm not sure you know what you're talking about at all.)

Six longnecks? Wow, what time does dad want the Camry back? We used kegs. And there's nothing wrong with a drinking game that requires action and coordination. How can you show "grace under fire" if you're never under fire? (A ball zooming at your head is fire. A "toss" is not.) Sorry if you quail at the prospect of even a mild "athletic activity."

I'm glad you've found a twee little game that doesn't tax you too much. I'm just mystified to see that you had to steal another game's name for it. Let's agree from now on to call your triangle game "weenie toss," and leave beer pong to the ones capable of playing it.

Begin your next rebuttal with an accounting of what you were doing in 1986, if you were even alive. That's when I learned the game.

Scarebros

2011-10-06T16:58:00.003-04:00

Via BuzzFeed, which says: "These hidden camera shots from Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada, tell me three things: 1. Bros love going to haunted houses together. 2. Bros are easy to spook. 3. We should call them 'scarebros.'"

These shots are incredible. Three below, but click here to see many more, most of them as good.

Gallery 35

2011-09-11T09:51:00.002-04:00

View of Lower Manhattan from Exchange Place, New Jersey, by Camilo Jose Vergara.

PBS and Slate have more of Vergara's photos of the Twin Towers, here and here.

Me and Philip

2011-09-08T17:50:00.006-04:00

My friend Brad sent me this e-mail today, which I found highly entertaining, so I thought I would share:

If you went to the state fair and got a caricature drawn of you, and the artist working the booth was Diego Velazquez, I think the resulting portrait might look something like any of his portraits of King Philip IV.

Remember, I did say caricature. I do mean that he kind of looks to me like a comic impression of you, not you. He painted this dude a lot. Must’ve been a bigshot in Velazquez’s day. There are a lot of him when he was older that don’t look as much like you. Also, this is just a portrait. The “action” paintings are always of him hunting or riding a horse or owning a valuable dog — all things that I don’t really associate with you. But every time I see a Velazquez painting of Philip IV, I always think — there goes Diego painting Johnny again.

Hopefully this does not offend you. If you have to have an artist obsessed with your likeness, you can do a lot worse than Diego Velazquez...

Mavs.

2011-06-12T23:23:00.003-04:00

I don't think Dirk Nowitzki had anything left to prove. If the Heat had come back and won this series, what could you possibly say other than that Dirk is a great talent and a gamer? Still, it's incredible how sports will sometimes provide a story line like this one — incredible that five years after a brutal loss, Dirk hoists the trophy in Miami, to mirror the Heat winning the '06 title in Dallas.

And I've made enough bad predictions in my life (like everyone else) that you'll have to let me savor picking the Mavs in 6.

Unbelievable series. Let's do it again next year, shall we?

Dirk.

2011-06-02T23:50:00.003-04:00

This is why you watch sports. Because 25 minutes ago, I was about to post something here about how it didn't look good (at all), but I wouldn't completely give up or stop watching the series. Because at least for the moment, the deep hope that this series might make up for a brutal loss in 2006 has been kindled in a way that almost perfectly mirrors that series. What an insane, unlikely comeback. And doubly sweet because I had seriously underestimated how much I might hate this Miami team. I know most of the country was there well before me, but I've always been a late bloomer. I've always liked Wade, and I've said before and will say again that he and James are the two best players in the league. But between James and Bosh and the almost Lakers-like Miami fans, I'm now far more invested in this thing than I should be. I'm 37 damn years old. Over the past three or four years, I've found my ability to get goofy-lost in rooting for a team seriously hampered. But I was just hopping around the living room like an idiot a few minutes ago. I really like and respect Nowitzki, and this Mavs team seems like the antithesis of the Heat in terms of attitude. I almost get the feeling Nowitzki won't be able to celebrate even if he does win a title, whereas BoshLeWade threw themselves a championship-caliber bash before the season even started. We'll see what happens from here. There have been a few stretches of both games where Dallas was more than able to hold its own. There are also stretches where they let up on defense and James marches to the hoop like Sherman to the sea. Heading back to Dallas, the Mavs should certainly be pumped up — if they can use that momentum and the home crowd to stay maniacally focused on defense, then this could be a classic series. They're still the less naturally gifted team (with Wade and James on the other side, you'd pretty much have to have Magic and Jordan to not be less naturally gifted), but they're still deeper and — possibly — tougher. But all of this is just the adrenaline talking. What a game, what a game.

Dirk Takes His Talents to South Beach

2011-05-30T22:39:00.005-04:00

This has the potential to be a great NBA finals, both on the court and in terms of "story lines," which I normally dread in sports. The Mavs being here was considered by most to be highly unlikely, so we didn't have a lot of time to anticipate or get used to the idea of a rematch of the 2006 finals. But what a great rematch.

In '06, as everyone knows, the Mavs collapsed and lost four straight after being up 2 games to 0 and leading by double digits late in Game 3. The other story was — oh, wait, I think a ref from '06 just called someone else for fouling Dwyane Wade — the officiating. The Mavs totally blew their collective top and deserved to lose that series, but even neutral observers noticed the whistles. I can vividly remember, in Game 6 in Dallas, one play where, just before pulling up for a jumper, Wade nearly fully extended his arm into a defender, and the foul went the other way. Star treatment in the NBA is part of the game, but this was something different, something bizarre.

That series was gut-wrenching on so many levels. Game 4 was — almost inevitably, after the disaster in Game 3 — a blowout by the Heat. But in the other three Miami wins, the total differential was six points (including a 101-100 overtime Game 5). The next season, the Mavericks lost their first four games, and then played the next 78 as if each one could somehow erase the previous season's result, finishing 67-15, tied for the sixth most regular-season wins in league history. They then lost in the first round of the playoffs to the lowly — but quick and high-scoring — Golden State Warriors.

In terms of back-to-back bad exits, it's hard to imagine worse. And I don't mean hard to think of one that was worse, but hard to fictionally engineer one that could be worse. After the Warriors' series, Dirk Nowitzki went off to Australia for a few weeks, forgot about basketball, grew a giant beard, and became the NBA equivalent of Al Gore after the 2000 election.

There won't be any neutral observers in this series. There will be Heat fans, Mavs fans, and Everyone Else, who, in this case, will likely be rooting for Dallas. LeWadeBosh made sure of that.

Dirk went 2 for 13 from the field in Game 5 of that Golden State series mentioned above, and it's hard to believe anything like that could happen again, the way he's been playing for the past month. Dirk's the big key, since he's one superstar against two in this series. But I still think Dallas' depth, though it's being mentioned, is being underrated in a league with a lot of shallow teams at the moment. This is not to mention Tyson Chandler and Brendan Haywood, who, if the game plan is sound, should give Miami more problems down low than the East could. The 2-3-2 home advantage for Miami is huge. I don't like that at all, and I think it means Dallas has to win one of the first two to have any chance whatsoever. I've been predicting them every round (and not feeling crazy about it), so I'll continue: Dallas in 6. Dirk and Kidd's desperation and their supporting cast over two of the best players ever.

Enjoy it.

NBA Semis Predictions

2011-05-15T23:38:00.002-04:00

Here are my predictions for the NBA’s conference finals. I write this not knowing what happened in tonight’s Chicago-Miami game. (I passed by a local bar on my way to pick up dinner earlier, and saw a score that was close to tied in the first quarter. Since then, I've watched the last installment of South Riding, a British melodrama-porn series on PBS, and finished a terrific novel called Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter. I’ll go to ESPN when I’m done writing this to find out the final score.) I offer these projections while humbly noting that I correctly predicted all four winners of the recently ended quarterfinals.

In the West, I like the Mavericks. Oklahoma City has some tremendous young talent, but I think Dallas’ depth has proven to be a great asset, and OKC — whose four best players are ages 22, 22, 21, and 21 — has taken a big stride this year but might need one more season before they reach the finals. The Thunder might own the Western Conference for the next decade, and they could certainly win this series. I just think the Dallas veterans’ hunger will keep OKC’s reign at bay for at least one more spring.

In the East, I’ll take the Bulls. They didn’t look dominant against average teams in the first two rounds, but it feels like most people expect Miami to win this series, and that reversal of pressure might help a team that isn’t used to being a No. 1 seed. Miami still has the two best players in the league wearing its uniform, but Derrick Rose is quickly joining their ranks and Chicago is a fuller team. (Almost every team is a fuller team.) Plus, the Bulls went 3-0 against Miami in the regular season (granted, by a total margin of eight points), and I don’t consider Miami to have a terrifying home-court advantage, so the Bulls should be able to realistically win at least one game there, meaning they’d only need three of the four games in Chicago to advance.

So: Chicago and Dallas. Now, what happened tonight? . . . Whoa. A blowout, 103-82, Chicago. Quite an opening punch; we’ll see how the James-Wade Industrial Complex responds.

“A thousand pages of ideological fabulism. I had to flog myself to read it.”

2011-05-10T13:27:00.004-04:00

Following on my somewhat recent post about Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged, here's a clip of William F. Buckley talking to Charlie Rose in 2003. He discusses Rand, her influence, and a negative review of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers that Buckley commissioned:

Chambers' review of the novel ran in the Dec. 28, 1957, issue of National Review, and it's well worth reading in full, partly because it's hard to imagine a widely read conservative publication making a case like this today. Here's a piece:

[Karl Marx], too, admired “naked self-interest” (in its time and place), and for much the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.

The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.

(via Open Culture)

The Big Sweep

2011-05-08T23:14:00.003-04:00

[This post was started this afternoon, during the fourth quarter of the game, and finished late tonight.]

Well, the big story going into this round of the NBA playoffs was that Dirk Nowitzki had never faced Kobe Bryant in the postseason, which is crazy when you consider that they’re two of the best players for the last decade, in the same conference, on teams that make the playoffs every year.

The big story exiting this round of the NBA playoffs is that Nowitzki is 4-0 vs. Bryant in the postseason.

I’ve been giggling for the past 15 minutes, despite the fact that the punk-ass Lakers have been doing everything they can to effect Dallas’ fate in the next round by playing like it’s roller derby. It’s rare that you get a chance to revel in a basketball win for something like an hour while the game is still being played. Rare that you get to just laugh at Phil Jackson’s smug face as he takes in what’s happening to his team. (I actually like Jackson, but now’s not the time for diplomacy.) It’s 101-68 right now — sorry, did you not get that? 101-68 — and the last two fouls by the Lakers have been, in the accurate words of the announcers, “a disgrace.” It looks like the WWF out there.

So, before I get to the two points I wanted to make about this series (but was scared to write about until it was officially over), let me just wish Lamar Odom, the pouty Pau Gasol, and the overrated Andrew Bynum a very happy summer.

Now it’s 112-78.

OK: The first point I wanted to make is about fandom. As a kid, I was a Knicks’ fan, and it was soon after I moved to Dallas that New York played its epic but futile string of playoff series against Michael Jordan’s Bulls. I spent those series spazzing out in front of the TV, rooting for the Knicks in a way that’s completely lost when you reach a certain age. I was sometimes elated but also truly suffered through those games.

When I moved back to New York in 2000, the Knicks were starting what could very kindly be called a Lost Decade. From the management non-stylings of Isiah Thomas to the selfish play of Stephon Marbury to the perennial bench-riding of high-salaried black holes like Eddy Curry, the Knicks were not just a bad team: they were entirely unlikable. So it didn’t take me long to stop rooting for them.

This was also the time when the Dallas Mavericks were becoming consistently competitive, which was a shock after the 1990s, when they were less a laughingstock than just a nonentity. With the Knicks languishing and the Mavs rising, it wasn’t difficult to be drawn to Dallas. Plus — and this seems key — I tend to live (in my head) where I’m not (in body). The nostalgia I felt for Dallas didn’t manifest itself in other sports; the Mavs got all of it.

This year, I should have regained some enthusiasm for the Knicks. They finally turned things around enough to get a couple of stars on the roster and spark some hope for the future. But I felt nothing. I didn’t care at all whether they beat the Celtics in the first round of the playoffs.

The second thing to talk about is the result of the series itself. The way it happened is obviously shocking — the two-time defending champs being swept and completely humiliated in Game 4. But from the beginning, the prevailing wisdom was that the Mavs couldn’t win the series. That was silly. ESPN.com had 14 “experts” (their word) choose the winner of the series before it started. All 14 picked L.A. Not one person envisioned one 57-25 team beating another 57-25 team. One reason for this, I’ll get to below. But let’s stick with tangibles for now:

Bill Simmons said on Twitter during the game today: “This would be a stunning sweep. On paper, L.A. has 4 of the best 5 players in the series. Their 4th best player (Odom) would be #2 for Dallas.”

This misses the point on a couple of levels. The first is that it overrates Odom (and probably Bynum, too). As L.A.’s potentially second-best player, Pau Gasol could have been a difference in the series, except he didn’t show up. Past him, I think the talent gap at the top isn’t that extreme. But more importantly, look away from the top. Kobe put it simply at the press conference after the game: “Their depth hurt us.” Dallas has four or five guys off the bench who can contribute. Past Odom, the Lakers give significant minutes to Shannon Brown and Steve Blake. That’s rough.

It also ignores that there were specific areas where Dallas had a big advantage. One was Nowitzki, who presented a match-up nightmare (and does for most). Another was point guard. Yes, Jason Kidd is 503 years old (he’ll be 504 next March), but he’s also one of the best (and now “craftiest,” which is a much nicer way of saying “ancient”) point guards in the history of the league. His backup, J.J. Barea, is a bit of a magician himself. The Lakers countered with Derek Fisher, who shot 38% from the field and averaged less than three assists a game this year.

Lastly, the “choke” issue. This is the most obvious explanation for how 14 people could all pick the Lakers to win the series. The Mavs have been dogged by this ever since they lost the 2006 finals to Miami after almost going up 3-0. And the way they handled that series as it unfolded, yeah, choking was part of it. They got rattled. The next year, as a 1 seed, they lost to the Golden State Warriors. I could argue that wasn’t a choke, though it was horribly disappointing. Did the Spurs choke against Memphis this year, or were they just outplayed? Golden State was fast and high-scoring that year, and the Mavericks had played the regular season at an insanely high gear for the NBA. The most surprising thing about that series was that Golden State looked like the better team. Odd, yes. Choking, not necessarily.

But I think back to A-Rod in the 2009 baseball playoffs. Had he come up small in the postseason before that? Often. But you give a guy that talented enough chances, and he’s going to make something happen. Likewise, you add some key supporting talent to Dallas, and L.A. loses a step, and here we are. It’s not shocking, and I think the choking theory, for any relatively high-achieving team or individual, over time, is a bit lazy. Now, get back to me if they lose the next series in four.

Osama, Meet Obama

2011-05-03T11:11:00.005-04:00

I was alone at home Sunday night when my younger sister called and told me that President Obama would be speaking momentarily about a national security issue, and no one knew what it was.

These were not calming words.

I don’t need to recite to you the litany of things that might be going wrong. (Yet I recite them to myself on a regular basis.) It was just a few minutes later when word about the subject circulated. Like everyone else, I reacted on a few different levels:

One level was sadness, just because anything that vividly takes me back to 9/11 and its aftermath is an inherently unhappy thing. Those were tough days, so I got choked up for a few seconds while waiting (interminably) for Obama to speak.

Another level — what might have been something resembling relief if bin Laden had been killed in, say, 2002 — was now more accurately described as weary satisfaction. In recent years, it already felt like al Qaeda was severely splintered (though not toothless), and that bin Laden was a mythic motivator rather than a real-life general. Capturing or killing him started to feel just as mythic — and more a Where’s Waldo?-like test of patience and vision than a top strategic priority. But of course, it was still good news. Mythic motivators are important. And so is justice, however long delayed. Bin Laden was not just a murderer, but a longtime, calculating, political one, so I see nothing wrong with him being killed in battle, as it were. It was his choice to make that one of his possible paths to the grave.

The resultant celebration was surprising to me. I have nothing against it, per se, though I’m more the type of person who would only gather and yell in public for something sports-related. When it comes to things like war — and a lot of other things besides — I’m more like the guy at left, who spent part of the night of bin Laden’s death mourning a loved one at the Pentagon memorial.

I didn’t lose anyone on 9/11, and I’m certainly not going to shed any tears for bin Laden, but overall I feel like this is one small, just event in a much larger string of incredibly sad events. And unlike V-E Day, to take one example, this is not a clear-cut finale to something. The battle we’re in (the world is in) is untraditional, and it can’t be stopped by one accomplishment.

I did take a moment to celebrate. One of the first things I did after hearing the news, being a 21st-century nincompoop, was happily post this video from the 1980s to Facebook and Twitter. But when I saw the celebration outside the White House, I was surprised by the size and demographics of it. So many of the celebrants looked like high school kids. Bruce Arthur, a Canadian writer whose work I’ve come to know through his entertaining Twitter feed, was in D.C. for it:

People climbed trees and lampposts, until they were asked to stop. Many were so young. . . . It was the primal hunger to experience history, to live a part of something bigger, to be on TV rather than watching on TV. They wanted to be the man swinging the hammer on the Berlin Wall, to be the Navy man or the nurse sharing a kiss in Times Square on V-J Day, to be the dancing crowds in Tahrir Square.

Arthur found a woman whose younger sister was killed at her desk in the Pentagon on 9/11, and asked for her reaction to bin Laden’s death:

“We were elated, but in the meantime we were also sad,” Monica said, “that someone’s life was taken. I would say that he deserved what he got. Can I say that? That he deserved what he got. Us being a Christian family, we’re supposed to learn how to love and forget, to forgive people. But it’s very hard.”

You can absolutely say he deserved what he got. Not being a Christian myself, but being quite nonviolent, I still think it’s a perverse extension of sympathy to waste much of it on someone like bin Laden. There are all kinds of people who do bad things who I can see deserving sympathy, even of the deepest, most radically Christian kind — people in terrible circumstances, otherwise decent people who do something awful in a fit of passion, stupidity, madness and/or panic — but he’s not one of them.

At the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, who was also in D.C., offered another perspective on the crowd’s jubilation:

Almost everybody was Twittering their excitement. (A Twittering mob is a less terrifying mob.) A lot of beer was drunk and spilled. The scene was boorish, of course. Triumphalism is often not a pretty thing. But still distinctions had to be made. This crowd burned nobody in effigy, nobody’s flag, nobody’s books. It had assembled to celebrate an entirely defensible act, whose justice could be proven on more than merely nationalistic grounds. After all, Osama bin Laden killed even more Muslims than Americans, and represented one of the most poisonous ideas of our time: the restoration, by means of sanctified violence, of a human world without rights.

Well said.

My other thoughts that night mostly revolved around the mainstream media (which is just embarrassing on almost every level) and Obama. When my sister called, I turned on the TV, which was on NBC, to find Donald Trump earnestly addressing La Toya Jackson in the boardroom. Earlier in the week, I had seen a video clip of Trump getting huge cheers from a crowd by saying that the country has no leadership.

Round 2 Picks

2011-05-01T20:01:00.003-04:00

A quick prediction post for this round of the NBA playoffs: I got 6 of the first 8 series right. I didn't see the Spurs' loss coming (who did?), and I didn't think very closely about the Orlando-Atlanta series. Atlanta finished the season so cold that I'm sure I would have still picked Orlando, but I've liked this Hawks team for the past few years. I can't think of another team that's been as consistently competitive over the past three or four seasons without a superstar on the roster. I like the way they play.

I expect the Bulls to play better than they did in the first round, so I'm picking them over Atlanta, but it could be a close series. The pick is dependent on Derrick Rose's health. I like the Heat over the Celts. I realize I'm writing this after they already won Game 1 today, but I have a $10 bet with a friend that says I felt this way before today. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes seven, but I feel like the Celtics are just on the wrong side of the age equation, and the fact remains that the Heat have the two best players in the NBA wearing their uniform. I think they prevail.

In the West, I'm sticking with the Thunder, even though they obviously match up badly with Memphis, being 1-4 against them this year after today's convincing loss. I guess I just refuse to believe that Zach Randolph is suddenly the key to making a run at an NBA title. In the other series, it's impossible to be objective, because I'm a big Mavericks fan. Even taking that into account, I can't remember a 57-win team getting less respect than the Mavs have this year, especially in playoff predictions. And I get it. They've had two legendary chokes in recent years, against the Heat and the Warriors. (The refs get a big assist in the Heat example, though the Mavs folded like babies in the face of it; the Warriors just weirdly whipped them. I think the Mavs put way too much energy into the regular season that year, playing every game like it was a finals game after collapsing to the Heat the year before.) So, they've choked. And Jason Kidd is 472 years old. And after Dirk, there isn't a clear No. 2 guy. I get all that. I'm still going to pick Dallas to win it. Kobe might prove to be human, and the Mavs might prove that choking is not a genetic thing, it's a circumstantial thing. I look at the way they picked themselves up after an awful loss in Game 4 of the Portland series, and I like what I see.

Liz, Woody, Paul, and More

2011-04-26T23:00:00.002-04:00

I promised three posts today, so if i don't get up at least this second, I'll have trouble sleeping. (That's not true. I'll sleep like a baby either way.)

The last few days I've been watching several old clips from What's My Line?, the identity-guessing game show that originally ran from 1950 to 1967 on CBS. On each episode, the panel would try to guess the occupation of an average person by asking yes-or-no questions. But they would also occasionally don blindfolds and be asked to guess the identity of a mystery celebrity guest. YouTube has a treasure trove of this stuff. Most notable is a bizarre and entertaining appearance by Salvador Dali. (I linked to that a long time ago, and I highly recommend you watch it, either again or for the first time.)

Below I'm embedding a few more of the clips I've most enjoyed over the past few days, with just a line or two of introduction. As you can see from this complete list of the guests, there's plenty more to search for if you're in the mood.

Elizabeth Taylor, gorgeous, of course, and charming in her efforts to disguise:

A very young Woody Allen leads with a strong joke, written down, and then does a blunt job of disguising his unmistakable voice and stumping the panel:

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who finish with a funny anecdote that would not fly in today's more uptight times. (Well, today we're more uptight and yet not uptight enough. That's a subject for another time, or times.) Paul Newman: Coolest man to ever walk the planet? Discuss.

And lastly, mostly for my friend Dez, a future president really hamming it up:

Like I said, there's a lot more out there. Others I enjoyed include Ed Sullivan, Wilt Chamberlain, Alfred Hitchcock, and Paul Newman (again, solo this time).

A Case Study: The Importance of Lyrics

2011-04-26T22:29:00.002-04:00

A friend texted me the other day, and I’m paraphrasing: “I wonder if the Hold Steady would suck without their lyrics.”

I haven’t spoken to him to clarify what he meant by this, partly because making the argument more precise would keep me from speculating about it here, and I’ve felt somewhat desperate for material the last few days.

I’ll deal with the argument he’s less likely making first. If Craig Finn didn’t write great lyrics, he’d be in trouble. He has plenty of geeky charisma, so he can sell things, but he’s not a singer. He’s a shouter. If he were shouting the lyrics of, say, Def Leppard, I don’t think he’d have much of an audience.

I guess the more serious question concerns the band’s music. On the first couple of records, the music doesn’t have a whole lot to recommend it aside from conviction. There’s an unimaginative kind of chugging going on behind some songs, like “Hornets! Hornets!” or the first half of “Stevie Nix.” But the latter isn’t just a good example of the lyrics being more important (“you came into the ER / drinking gin from a jam jar / and the nurses making jokes about the ER being like an after bar” and the ur-rock lyrics “lord, to be seventeen forever”), its second half is an example of the more subtle music that, I think, the band started using to increasingly good effect.

The gentle opening of “First Night” on Boys and Girls in America (still my favorite record of theirs) could be used by Bruce Hornsby, which some might see as an insult. I don’t mean it that way, even though I'm hardly a devoted Hornsby fan. (I know I’ve mentioned this before, a long time ago, but the best idea for a cover I’ve heard in years remains my friend S.D.’s suggestion that the Hold Steady cover Hornsby’s “The Way It Is.” That’s genius. Though how the band fares with covers is an open question. I like their version of Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” once it starts kicking up dust, but their version of Springsteen’s admittedly unimprovable “Atlantic City” is best left undiscussed.) Anyway, the Hornsby reference makes me realize something: There are undoubtedly fans who think the band’s first two records are far better than the slightly softer dynamics of the stuff since. That’s fine, but I think Finn’s brutish affect has to be offset by something, and the keyboards and harmonicas and more melodic numbers are completely OK with me.

All that said, the musical pleasures in even the band’s best numbers tend to be guilty ones (think "The Boys Are Back in Town," for one), and sure, those always benefit from strong vocals, strong lyrics, or both. And Finn’s great at various forms, from the quick character sketch (“She looks shallow but she’s neck-deep in the steamy dreams of the guys along the harbor bars”) to the aphoristic (“started recreational / ended kinda medical”). He’s also funny (“Chillout Tent”) and solemn (“Citrus”), and often both simultaneously, which is no mean trick. If the question is, would the Hold Steady be a less serious band without their lyrics, I think the answer to that is an obvious, even resounding yes. But with the right voice at the front, and some semblance of passable lyrics, I think the friend mentioned above and I would still listen to them with the windows down.

For Shame

2011-04-26T01:32:00.002-04:00

I fall at your mercy. Three straight days without a post. (Or four, depending on how we count it.) Am I returning to my old ways? My old neglectful ways? I'm not. I swear. I'm sorry, Kevin Nealon. I didn't mean to hurt you, baby.

It's 1:40 here, and past even my bedtime. (Well, I stay up till 2:00 fairly often, but I'm feeling . . . zzzzz.)

To make up for my recent delinquency, three posts coming tomorrow: one with audiovisual aids that I find highly entertaining, one about a band's lyrics and music, and another the longed-for return of the movie list. Rejoice!

Foiled

2011-04-21T23:55:00.002-04:00

I'm essentially breaking the streak tonight. Though given how I post things after midnight, you might not be able to tell. If I post something at a reasonable hour Friday, you might be fooled into thinking the streak is technically still alive. Over the weekend I'll have time to post a few things, so we can all look forward to that. In the meantime, you can visit my friends ANCIANT and Dez, who are on their own streaks and doing a bang-up job of it.

Laughter on the R Train

2011-04-21T01:32:00.003-04:00

I'm so deliriously tired right now that I can't even pretend I'm concerned that this revitalized blogging experiment has recently lacked a certain joie de vivre. (That's French for "good blogging.") One reason I'm not concerned is that I can make up for it in the coming days and nights, which promise to be less busy. Another reason is that I'm so tired that I could convince myself this blog, and even my material existence, is just a figment of some distant god's imagination.

Riding home on the subway tonight, around 11:15, after meeting a friend for a drink after work, I was reading Out of Sheer Rage by Dyer (see previous posts). I have about 20 pages left now. I was trying not to laugh out loud, because laughing out loud alone in public — even if you're reading, so the source of the laughter is relatively clear — is goofy, and perhaps even easily confused for psychotic. (Why I should be self-conscious about this when so many of my compatriots in this city are obviously, even flamboyantly psychotic is an issue for another time.) I was trying not to laugh during several different passages, one of which described the way everyone in London exaggerates their cold symptoms. ("If people have a cold they say they have flu; if they say they have a cold it means there's nothing wrong with them.") In another, he tried to convey the satisfaction he took and the time he saved by not caring about one of the arts. ("Not being interested in the theatre provides me with more happiness than all the things I am interested in put together.")

The 23 pages I have left could be a retelling of an episode of Mr. Belvedere in the voice of Katie Couric, and I still think the book would be among my favorites.

The Uncapturable

2011-04-20T00:05:00.002-04:00

My good friend who blogs at A New Career in a New Town has been reading some uninspiring books lately. I can't say the same. Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is almost too good, the kind of thing that could easily keep me from trying to write something of my own. I'm trying to use it, instead, as inspiration. Dyer's approach in the book is not unlike filmmaker Ross McElwee's approach in the documentary Sherman's March. Each of them sets out to understand a subject and ends up talking mostly about himself. Dyer gets much closer to his ostensible subject, D.H. Lawrence, than McElwee does to Sherman, but both works posit life as inscrutable, terrifyingly (and exhilaratingly) subjective, essentially uncapturable but worth trying to capture. I've been working on and off on my own idea for a nonfiction book (working on the idea, not the book, alas), and perhaps there's something to learn about the possibilities for it from Dyer and McElwee. Well, of course there is.

Another question is whether Dyer will inspire me to read Lawrence. I'm torn. On the one hand, I remember reading stories of his in college and not being particularly interested. One of my smartest friends thinks The Rainbow is awful. There's so much to read, and Lawrence wasn't very high on my list. Should Dyer's own wonderfulness bump him up? It helps that Dyer argues most for the value of the letters and travel diaries, which I might be more drawn to at this particular time than, say, Sons and Lovers. I've put a few of his books in my Amazon cart, tentatively. Whether I end up ordering them or deleting them, only time will tell. It's a tenuous position Dyer would understand very well.

Vintage Shots of the Great Game

2011-04-19T02:15:00.005-04:00

My friend Miles, who blogs at It's Gone, recently linked to a terrific set of old baseball photos by Leslie Jones, a cameraman who worked for the Boston Herald-Traveler from 1915 to 1956. The Boston Public Library is digitizing tens of thousands of Jones' photos. Three are below (click to enlarge). A few dozen more can be found here.

Working on Worthwhileness

2011-04-19T01:38:00.004-04:00

I'm glad to be blogging again here. It's different than what I do at The Second Pass, on more than one level, and it's satisfying to keep something going that has no practical reason to continue going. I'm also frustrated. I get up in the morning and attend to a few basic things. I eat breakfast. I shower. I run an errand or two, when the errands are urgent enough to shock me from stasis. (I'm hoping to join a gym again soon, which has never worked out all that well for me, but which is becoming more and more imperative. So that will add something to the routine some mornings, for at least a little, optimistic while.) I try to do something — and sometimes more than one somethings — related to my books site. I leave for my job, which starts at 1:00, a little after noon. I stay there until 9:00 or so, and then come home to do things that include spending time with my girlfriend, more work on the books site/other writing, reading for pleasure/the books site, spending time (drinking/eating/etc.) with friends/family, watching TV, checking my e-mail, checking the box scores, and all the other things that range from wasteful to necessary and, taken together, constitute life. I now end up blogging, on most weekdays, sometime after midnight, and this doesn't leave me the time I'd like to make the posts as worthwhile as they might be. (Realizing that even eminently worthwhile is relative in this scenario.) I do feel reconnected to the blog, and I think this 30-day experiment will last past the month, but my circumstances are also much different than they were in the ASWOBA heyday (you know, the years covered in Ken Burns' nine-part documentary about the blog), and my intentions are sometimes outmuscled by reality. Tonight's Monday. One of my goals this week is to make it so that posting one thing each night, by the end of the week, results in efforts far more satisfying and less process-referential than this one. I make no promises. But I thank you for reading, as always.

Placeholder

2011-04-17T23:59:00.003-04:00

Just back from 36 hours or so spent on the southern tip of New Jersey in a town called Cape May, where we were put up by a good friend, whose parents live there. I had never been to Cape May, and it was an eye-opener. It's a beautiful place, and today the weather was almost ideal (save for a pretty wicked wind, especially near the water). I'm going to write more about it, and maybe share a picture or two (I don't know how they turned out yet; haven't looked), and explain why my friend Dez might be particularly interested in it. But for now, this post is just a cheap way to keep up my 30-day pace. I've been on the road for more than three hours and I need to get up early to take care of a couple of things. So it's off to bed. More of substance soon.

In the meantime, the Mavericks won the opening game of their series, so things are off to a good start. I'm thrilled to see the Spurs and Lakers lose today. I don't expect either to lose their series, but let's just say I wouldn't mind at all having my predictions sunk if they did.

NBA Crystal Ball

2011-04-16T09:13:00.005-04:00

A quick post here, and then another late tomorrow night, and I'll still be on track to fulfill my 30-day promise even though I'm going away for the weekend in a few minutes and won't have my computer with me.

I thought I would offer up my predictions for the first round of the NBA playoffs, partly because I can't imagine anything the world wants or needs more and partly because I like being publicly wrong. Actually, the first round offers some lopsided match-ups on paper, so I'm not going out on a limb with these picks:

In the East, I like the Bulls to beat the Pacers soundly, the Heat to trounce Philly, the Magic to beat the Hawks, and the Celtics to beat the Knicks. (Though, of course, I would love if the Knicks could make that a series, or even win it.)

In the West, just about every so-called expert I've listened to or read in the past few days is picking Portland to beat Dallas, which means that Dallas over Portland is an easy pick for me. When a 6 seed over a 3 seed becomes something like consensus, a pick has become way too trendy to be trustworthy. Suddenly Portland is a world-beater because it traded for Gerald Wallace? Really? I think not. I'm also a Mavs fan, but I feel like I'm using the logical part of my brain here anyway. Spurs over the Grizzlies, Lakers to beat the Hornets. Potentially the most entertaining first-round series is the Thunder against the Nuggets. I haven't seen them play, so I have no idea how the Nuggets became seemingly so much better after trading Carmelo Anthony, but I still think that Durant and Westbrook are too tough with a season of playoff experience under their belt. I like the Thunder to win, and to be a tough out whoever they play next. In fact, unless the Lakers regain their form fast, I think OKC has a legitimate chance to win the West. Not saying it will be easy.

Invest accordingly.

The Stupidest Things Ever

2011-04-16T00:26:00.004-04:00

At some point several years back, the magazine Entertainment Weekly shook off the second word in the phrase "guilty pleasure." Still, if I'm going to be on a train for 45 minutes and have been staring at text all week and don't feel up to reading my Geoff Dyer book or the draft of a friend's novel or even a magazine that doesn't feature pictures of Ryan Reynolds, it will do. Especially if it's a "preview issue." I'm a sucker for preview issues. Sports Illustrated could put out an issue with a well-designed cover and the tagline "Australian Cricket Preview 2011," and I would think about it for five or six seconds before deciding not to buy it, research how cricket is played, and then read it.

Tonight, I went to Long Island to visit my mom, and I picked up the EW summer movie preview issue at Penn Station. As in any summer, there are movies I'd be interested to see peppered among the movies for people who were born without a sense of shame or aesthetic judgment. I'm curious about the new Woody Allen movie; not because I've invented time travel and landed in 1978, but because it stars Owen Wilson, who I think is great with grown-up material, and Rachel McAdams, who I love beyond reason. I'll also see Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. The guy's a genius, even though I fear after seeing the preview that he's a genius whose voiceovers are increasingly written to appeal to Deepak Chopra. I enjoyed Kung Fu Panda, so I'll see the sequel. I'll even see Super 8, J.J. Abrams' movie about young kids making a sci-fi movie in the 1980s. It looks like it would be at least pleasingly nostalgic, and at most very good. Those are just the bolder names that caught my attention; I'm sure other things will pop up.

In the meantime, what I really wanted to do was share eight quotes from throughout the magazine, all from people involved with various summer movies. Taken out of context, I think they provide quite a bit of context for how the season at the cineplex can feel. Here you go:

"Everyone is going to her lake house to have fun and party and, uh, die, I guess."

"I get to get my Lara Croft on."

"This ain't no regular peacock. He's got a crazy look in his eyes, and he's got Gary Oldman's brain, which is terrifying in and of itself."

"They'd put a sticker where each Smurf would be so that your eye line would match, and there were literally hundreds of stickers all around the room. I thought I was going crazy."

"But they don't know that they're aliens. In the 1800s, nobody knows what aliens are."

"It's 9 to 5 meets The Hangover."

"Because effects have gotten so good, it's like working opposite an actual chimp, but with all the best instincts of an actor."

"It's preposterous. It's just the stupidest thing ever, but it's all in the execution."

McCoy, with a Marv Digression

2011-04-15T00:49:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, my friend John invited me to the Blue Note jazz club to see the McCoy Tyner Trio. I had never been to Blue Note before, and in this instance, as in others, I was glad that John urged me to take advantage of the city, something that’s all too easy to be lazy about. Tyner has had a long career, though he’s probably most famous for being the pianist in the John Coltrane Quartet in the early 1960s.

While I waited for John outside the club, I started talking to a friendly guy who was selling his own CDs. I was holding a couple of books in my hand, and one time as I paced past him (I’m not very talented at standing still), he said, “Hello, writer.” I thought that was funny, so I gave him a chance to sell me on his music. He was slow to do it, happy to talk about other things — like growing up in upstate New York, or the music event he organized each month at the Bowery Poetry Club. He introduced himself as Marv, short for Marvalous. Eventually, he showed me two CDs he had for sale. I asked him if he preferred one over the other. “Oh, I can’t say,” he said. “These are my children.” He did point out, though, that the first was like his independent film, scrappily put together and very dear to him. The second was his bigger-budget movie, more effects, more “pow,” as he put it. Maybe he said more “bang.” They looked equally scrappy to me, and I chose one. After we talked for a few more minutes, he said, “Here, take both of them for that price.” I said no — that I knew where to find him, and if I liked the one I had, I would gladly come back to buy the other one. I keep meaning to listen to the record, but haven't yet. Sorry, Marv. I’ll have to do that, and blog about it. More material!

OK, this is blogging as it happens: I just found a post by another musician who also met Marv on the street, and ended up asking him a few questions over e-mail. In the interview, Marv says he puts in many 12-hour days pushing his music, and he reveals some of the simple but effective methods he uses — like those he used on me — to get people talking. (“I genuinely love people, and that helps I’m sure. Especially in NYC people are many times apprehensive and guarded. So I smile, and ask open-ended questions or make a remark based on an observation, it could be a shirt or a brand that they’re wearing or a sports team, etc.”) I also found this video for a song of his online.

The show inside didn’t disappoint. Tyner is 72 now, gaunt and frail. But his hands can still fly. And the rest of his band, particularly bassist Gerald Cannon and a fierce drummer named Francisco Mela, was strong, joined by a vocalist whose name I don’t recall for a few songs. The clip below is of Tyner in huskier days, in Hamburg in 1996, blazing through Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.”

Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball

2011-04-14T02:16:00.003-04:00

I hate to sort-of-cheat two days in a row, but if I'm going to maintain my streak today, it's necessary. Besides, there are no rules here. Who's even reading this? I got up this morning and took a 50-minute train ride to Long Island, where I met with a tax consultant for 20 minutes, then turned around and took a 50-minute train ride to Manhattan and went to work. It's been a long day.

I've just posted at The Second Pass a brief piece about a baseball pitcher named Dock Ellis. Here's the beginning of it:

Donald Hall has been U.S. Poet Laureate, was educated at Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, and is generally associated with contemplative life in New Hampshire and poetry collections with titles like Kicking the Leaves and The Purpose of a Chair.

Dock Ellis was a voluble baseball pitcher in the 1970s who once purchased a Cadillac custom-designed for a pimp who could no longer afford it. He christened it the Dockmobile. He also pitched a no-hitter while under the lingering influence of LSD, and said of the achievement: “I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate.”

Needless to say, when I discovered, while reading Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods, that Hall had written a book called Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, I felt a strong urge to find a copy.

Please feel free to read the whole thing.

Waiting for the Sunset

2011-04-13T00:33:00.005-04:00

I'm finally taking care of my taxes tomorrow morning, and given that fact, it's miraculous I'm blogging tonight and keeping this streak alive. But given my state of distraction, I'm going to let someone else do at least some of the lifting for me. Geoff Dyer is a writer I've been meaning to read for a while. I've read essays and reviews of his here and there, always impressed, but hadn't yet gotten around to his books. That's changing, and quickly.

I recently talked to a friend of mine about an essay I'm fiddling with off and on about my lack of traveling experience. This wise friend asked if I had read Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. I finished it tonight. In a series of linked pieces that shuttle back and forth through time, Dyer visits New Orleans, Rome, Indonesia, Amsterdam, Detroit, Libya, the Burning Man festival, and other spots, and alternately gains and loses a sense of himself. Dyer is witty, erudite, rakish, and fond of marijuana. His adventures are of the very low-key variety, but it's what he does with them that matters.

I might have more to say about him over at The Second Pass sometime, but I need to read more of him first. Next up is Out of Sheer Rage, perhaps his most famous book, which he describes in this short video here. For now, I thought I'd share a bit from Yoga. This passage occurs when he and a female companion take in a Cambodian sunset:

Sunsets impose a heavy burden on the sightseer. A spot acquires such a reputation as the place from which "to watch the sunset" that you are virtually obliged to go there. Phnom Bakheng was just such a spot. It was a punishing walk, hauling ourselves up the slope, but my Tevas, the Tevas I had bought years earlier in New Orleans, were able to take the strain. As we walked up that punishing hill I thought of writing to Teva and suggesting a couple of slogans: "Tevas Can Take It" was one. Perhaps there was only the one. [. . .]

Serious photographers had their cameras on tripods. One such photographer turned to his wife and said, "Fifteen minutes to go," as though they were colleagues at Mission Control at NASA. Everyone else simply waited. For the sunset. Except for a few all-important details, the scene was reminiscent of Hampi, in India, where we had also flocked to watch the sunset. Pessoa was right: there's no point going to Constantinople to see a sunset; they're the same the world over. But you do it anyway; you go to Constantinople and Phnom Bakheng and everywhere else, and while you're there you catch the sunset. While travelling, in fact, watching the sunset gives the day a purpose and meaning it can otherwise lack. Even so, few things seem more idiotic than waiting on a sunset. Waiting for the sunset becomes an activity, an exercise in abeyance. Idleness, doing nothing, is raised to the level of sharply focused purpose. Expectation becomes a form of sustained exertion. You wait for it to happen even though it's going to happen anyway. Or not happen. Frank O'Hara was right, "the sun doesn't necessarily set, sometimes it just disappears."

Five Songs, Chapter Twenty-Nine

2011-04-12T01:01:00.004-04:00

Remember this little exercise? (If you do, you’ve been reading this blog for far too long.) I abandoned it for a while because I went through the whole favorite 100 albums project, and that more than satisfied my music-writing itch. But that’s been over for a while, and the five songs conceit has been shelved since almost three years ago. So back to it...

“I’m Sober Now” by Danny O’Keefe

My friend Strath introduced me to this song a few years ago, and he’s written about O’Keefe at slightly greater length over at his fine blog. He’s a singer and songwriter from the Pacific Northwest (Strath’s native stomping grounds) who was most active in the 1970s and had his music covered by a number of higher-profile artists. “I’m Sober Now” is all unapologetically maudlin slide guitar and a great tear-filled beer lyric that includes lines like, “they say some folks can make it / livin’ on their own / but the only ones I’ve heard of / was either saints or stones.”

“This Is Why We Fight” by The Decemberists

R.E.M. recently released another pretty desultory effort, but that’s OK, because The Decemberists’ The King is Dead, released in January, already had a lock on the best R.E.M. album of the year. Peter Buck plays on a few songs — one in particular, “Calamity Song,” begins with a guitar figure so reminiscent of Reckoning that it’s ridiculous. "Why We Fight," the album’s penultimate song, has been the one I’ve most compulsively listened to. There have been times I’ve just played it 10 times in a row, and I’m still not sick of it. Its music sounds more Smiths than R.E.M., and the lyric is very much an early Son Volt (or R.E.M., but it’s nice to shake up the references) type of effort, with satisfyingly vague emotion and portent. (“Come the war / come the avarice / come the war / come hell.”)

"We're Not Alone" by Dinosaur Jr.

This is off Beyond, which was released in 2007 and thus has no right to sound as good as it does. This song is both catchy and, to my ears, very moving. "I wanted you to say / 'be around'" goes one recurring lyric. The song shifts less than halfway into a slightly different guitar movement, no less catchy, and a repetition of "If you say we're not alone." Well, if you like guitar rock, and the bands that influenced Dinosaur Jr. (The Replacements) and the bands Dinosaur Jr. then influenced (Buffalo Tom), I think you'll like this song quite a bit.

"The Modern Leper" by Frightened Rabbit

This installment of Five Songs is becoming, with this song, at least 60% about various forms of guitar-driven relationship angst. (80% if you count The Decemberists, which we probably should, because whatever the hell he's singing about, it's probably a metaphor for a girl.) This band isn't everybody's cup of tea. Even I can only take a few songs at a time. The singer's voice, though his Scottish accent has to count for something, can fall on the wrong side of the emo-ish/mewling divide (aren't both sides of that divide the wrong side? you ask, and you are right to).

"Pannonica" by Thelonious Monk

A song I've been listening to a bit lately, and you should, too. You can't just listen to that rock music all the time, you know. It'll rot your brain. (Oh, and I listen to the Alone in San Francisco version more often, but the full version on Brilliant Corners is also good.)

Sated

2011-04-10T23:48:00.003-04:00

Now that I'm on a little bit of a roll, with this at-least-30-posts-in-30-days project, I really felt like I would have the next installment of my favorite 100 movies list up tonight. Remember that list? It began in February 1963.

Well, it isn't going to continue tonight, but will soon.

Tonight my brother-in-law very kindly took me and another gentleman out to Peter Luger for some high-quality artery clogging. Peter Luger is a steakhouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it was my first time there. Zagat Survey has voted it the best steakhouse in New York for 26 years running, and this paragraph from Wikipedia gives a sense of its power to draw:

Among the current owners of the restaurant is Amy Rubenstein, wife of Howard Rubenstein, the legendary PR man whose clients have included George Steinbrenner, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump. [Ed. note: Really, all I thought while reading this paragraph was, my God, that's a PR man who likes a challenge.] Famous guests have included James Cagney, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert De Niro, Henry Kissinger, Johnny Carson, and Jerry Seinfeld. [Ed. note: I removed Chuck Schumer from that previous sentence, because come on.] Tennis champion Pete Sampras also liked to celebrate wins at the U.S. Open by feasting at Peter Luger's.

Part of the reason I couldn't muster a stronger blog showing this evening was because I had enough porterhouse steak, German fried potatoes, and cheesecake to kill a lesser man. Perhaps even to kill myself — we'll see how the night progresses. Or doesn't.

ffearless, ffatal, and ffantastic

2011-04-10T02:23:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, I was invited by my friend Eric to a screening of ffolkes, a 1979 thriller about terrorists threatening to blow up two oil rigs in the North Sea. (The movie was released in Britain as North Sea Hijack.) It was being shown for its comic value by a group of young film enthusiasts, and it didn’t disappoint.

Roger Moore, between James Bond movies at the time, stars as Rufus Excalibur ffolkes, aptly described by Wikipedia as a “misogynist freelance marine counter-terrorism consultant.” (David Plotz says, “About that double, lower-case F — a few snooty British names have it, apparently because of a misreading of the Old English capital F.”)

One of the film’s official taglines called him “the man who loved cats, ignored women and is about to save the world.” Also apt. It’s hard to imagine that Wes Anderson and/or Owen Wilson didn’t see this at some point in their younger years. Moore starts the movie wearing a Where’s Waldo? hat and matching sweater and scarf that would have made him perfectly at home on Steve Zissou’s vessel. And his ragtag collection of underlings wear matching black wetsuits that say “ffolkes’ ffusiliers” on the back, a sartorial sameness that isn’t the only thing they share with Dignan’s group of amateur criminals in Bottle Rocket or Zissou’s crew in The Life Aquatic. (The scene that made me laugh hardest features the men training on a makeshift boat on the grounds of a castle. Their pudginess, and lack of precise timing — Moore blows a whistle to signal them to abruptly freeze; the result is a series of faltering stops — slayed me. It might have been meant to; it’s very difficult to tell where the movie is earnest and where it’s intentionally campy.)

Wait, I lied. The biggest laugh for me and everyone else in the room came when ffolkes solemnly told someone, “Both my parents died tragically in childbirth.”

What? Someone at imdb explains how the line made sense (more or less) in the movie’s source material, a novel by Jack Davies, but really, it’s much, much better dropped in here without context.

Another UK tagline for the movie read: “When the next 12 hours could cost you 1,000 million pounds and 600 lives, you need a man who lives second by second.” (The “thousand million” formulation is also good for several laughs throughout the movie, as if the characters are children trying to make a number sound large.) Anyway, it’s true — if you need a man who lives second by second, you need ffolkes. Just be warned that for some of those seconds, he is swigging whiskey from a bottle and/or intently doing needlework that features the image of a kitten.

Here, enjoy the trailer:

Programming Note

2011-04-09T16:13:00.003-04:00

Just a quick note for the three people who I think care at this point. (And no, this doesn't count as today's post.)

I'm in the midst of posting at least once here for 30 consecutive days. This has nothing to do with a midnight-to-midnight sense of days. What I'm doing, more precisely, is blogging once for each prolonged amount of time I'm awake for the next 30 days. I often go to bed well after midnight, so sometimes posts are going to show up then. If you visit the blog first thing each morning, there will be something new there. Perhaps a few things. Spread the word.

The Acolyte Maker

2011-04-08T23:45:00.004-04:00

A co-worker of mine is currently slogging through Atlas Shrugged and hating life. I think she lost a bet. No, she promised a family member she would read it. In any case, she feels obligated to finish it now. She’s constantly telling us she’s nearly a third or half or two-thirds of the way through it, and we keep reminding her that each of those milestones only means she still has thousands of pages to go.

I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 18, I would estimate. I’m not entirely sure. It was after I read The Fountainhead, which was definitely in high school, and I don’t think I read it in college, so 18 sounds right. Around that time, I also read Anthem, a very short novel by Rand, and a decent amount of her philosophical writing (though the novels are really just cudgels for her philosophy anyway). There were several reasons for this: I was a debate nerd, and was reading a bunch of philosophy of different sorts; my dad had read and liked The Fountainhead at some point in his life; one of my best friends in high school was a fairly avid Randian; and maybe most important of all, I was a highly opinionated teenage male who thought, among other things, that religion was patently absurd.

The Fountainhead is fun for stretches. Rand’s insane character names and soapy melodrama would be guilty-pleasure page-turners of a certain stripe if it weren’t for the frequent insertion of multiple-page screeds that say in 10,000 leaden words what could be comfortably conveyed in seven. The Fountainhead has fewer of those screeds than Atlas Shrugged does. (The famous climactic speech in Atlas Shrugged runs to more than 70 pages, though it feels like hundreds, and I can only guess that I made it through it because I was young and had a natural stamina I now lack.)

I was never a Rand acolyte, so it’s not even accurate to say I disavowed her. But like many people, I grew up and realized that her philosophy was, in a nutshell, insane. This is not to say it entirely lacks truth. In fact, it might be fair to say it features too much of one truth. Or to say that its every inch is composed of just one part of truth, leaving no room for any of its other components.

I was motivated to write about this because Salon recently ran an essay by a woman named Alyssa Bereznak, who writes about how her father follows Rand’s dictates to the exclusion of all others. You realize reading the piece that her father is likely a pretty bad person to start with, and that Objectivism didn’t make him that way — like most religions or hyper-strict political philosophies, Rand’s lends itself to chicken-egg arguments: Was the person this way before, or did the belief make them that way?

Bereznak writes:

I don't know exactly why he sparked to Rand. He claimed the philosophy appealed to him because it's based solely on logic. It also conveniently quenched his lawyer's thirst to always be right. It's not uncommon for people to seek out belief systems, whether political or spiritual, that make them feel good about how they already live their lives. Ultimately, I suspect Dad was drawn to Objectivism because, unlike so many altruistic faiths, it made him feel good about being selfish.

Rand had her own reasons for believing what she did. She spent her childhood in Russia, and when she was still a young girl, she saw her father’s business, a pharmacy, taken away from him by the Red Army. In many ways, Rand’s work is a cartoonish morality play about the starkest form of individualism vs. collectivism, and her biography makes that perfectly understandable. It’s also true that individualism is a damn fine -ism, trumpeted by many of the great thinkers throughout history. But Rand made it a hard virtue to defend, draining it of any and all relationship to other people.

In a way, the silent assumption behind Rand's philosophy is that we are always in the position of watching a conquering army take away an innocent individual's livelihood; that this is the core relationship of men. But it's incredibly easy, philosophically, to side with the individual in that scenario. What about every other scenario? The vast majority of humanity (all of it, by any reasonable standard) depends to varying extents on other people. Rand had no use for that fact.

Even genius of the type that floats at the center of Rand's work, to think of it, operates within systems, and those systems can just as easily encourage, nurture, and reward that genius as they can discourage, fear, or extinguish it, as is always the case in Rand’s work.

Rand does for the individual what utopians do for the group — she turns it into something so pure that it’s completely unrealistic, winning a following of zealots but losing anyone who thinks the world is an even slightly complicated place.

AP Headline of the Day

2011-04-07T11:44:00.002-04:00

Colorado Police Pepper-Spray Misbehaving Boy, 8

At first blush, this just appears to be another incident in the decline of collective sanity. But then you read the story, and the kid sounds like a seriously holy terror. And self-aware:

When asked about the pepper spray and what he did, Aidan said: "I kind of deserved it."

The story end this way, with mom agreeing:

Paramedics were treating his red, irritated face with cool water when his mother arrived.

According to the report, Mandy Elliott asked her son what he did.

When he told her he had been hit with pepper spray, she is quoted as saying, "Well, you probably deserved it."

Forget the Hearse 'Cause I'll Never Die

2011-04-06T22:35:00.003-04:00

Before today, there were four posts on this blog since Thanksgiving, which means, more or less, that the blog had died. In an effort to revive it, I’ve promised a friend of mine, who blogs at A New Career in a New Town, that I will post at least once for each of the next 30 days. It’s something he just did himself, and he’s going to continue his streak through the next month as well. (I’ve just now discovered that my friend “Dez” is also taking part in this motivational exercise.)

Why has the blog been so silent? I’ve had a full-time job since September, which wasn’t true for a significant chunk of time before that. And I spend a good portion of my free hours attending to The Second Pass. I recently participated as a judge in this year’s Tournament of Books at The Morning News. (Here’s my quarterfinal round decision. Here’s the final round, in which I was one of 17 judges on a panel.) I spend time thinking about (too much time thinking; not nearly enough doing) other writing projects.

But not much has changed. Some of the things I’ll write about over the next 30 days will be the usual: a vague to not-so-vague sense of dissatisfaction and/or restlessness; music I’ve been listening to; fantasy baseball concerns; what to read next, and how systematic to be about it. It’s thrilling, I know. I’m going to resuscitate a couple of old regular features, and might even get around to finishing my list of 100 favorite movies before we all die and the sun burns down to the size of a charcoal briquette.

For tonight, I’m just saying hi. I’m hoping to finish a piece for The Second Pass before I go to bed, about baseball pitcher Dock Ellis. If I excerpt it and link to it here once it’s up, I won’t count that against my post-a-day promise.

More soon: for real this time.

Cramming for the Oscars

2011-02-27T01:12:00.007-05:00

When the Oscars start tonight, I will have seen seven of the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture, thanks to a late push. I saw four of the nominees in the last week.

Tonight, I sat through (most of) Inception with a friend. It manages the not-rare-enough feat of being both utterly incomprehensible and supremely dumb. I didn't like director Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, but that was more in a this-movie-is-silly-and-overrated-but-still-kind-of-a-joyride way. My reaction to Inception was more of a this-is-one-of-the-worst-movies-I've-ever-seen-and-when-can-I-go-to-bed? kind of thing. We watched much of the last hour in fast forward, which provided about as much intellectual stimulation and emotional engagement as watching it the regular way.

To thoroughly dissect the idiocy of Inception would take far more time than I'm willing to devote to it. Days and days more time. Perhaps months. For one thing, I was offended as someone who has had at least five or six vivid dreams every night for as long as I can remember. The movie seems to have no clue — or interest — in what dreams really are, or what they might represent. But I don't mean to say that's the movie's biggest flaw. They all seem equally big.

This afternoon, I saw Black Swan. I expected to either hate it or be surprised by its greatness. Instead, I thought it was well made but too predictable, and a bit sillier, in spots, than even its self-consciously campy approach warranted. The notion of good girl Nina (Natalie Portman) needing to shed her virginal White Swan personality and get in touch with her inner Black Swan is explicitly set up in the beginning on a kindergarten reading level, and then played out with just enough panache and horror-movie touches to keep things interesting. But until the last several minutes, when things get genuinely creepy and suspenseful, there's a too-regular cycle of scenes: Now she's going to have a bad interaction with her mom. Now she's going to rip off one of her finger- or toenails. Now she's going to feel humiliated by her director. Rinse and repeat.

Earlier in the week, I saw True Grit and The Social Network, both of which I expected to enjoy because of what would be called their connections in horse racing. The Coen brothers are just national treasures, plain and simple. I don't think True Grit is their best, but that leaves it an awful lot of room to be damn good, and it is. How they make such beautifully crafted movies in such quick succession is beyond me. I guess it helps, man-hours-wise, that there are two of them. I was a little worried early on, because Jeff Bridges was borrowing more than a little from Carl of Sling Blade for his voice work. But he reined it in a little, and gave a hammy-but-affecting performance.

David Fincher was a brilliant choice to direct The Social Network. In movies like Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room, and Zodiac, he's proven that he can make stylish, creepy movies even if the source material isn't world-beating. And Aaron Sorkin may be removed from the demographic that habitually uses Facebook, but he's great at what he does. Between his snappy dialogue and Fincher's ridiculously fluid movement between two depositions and the past and present, the movie is a glossy gem. Debates about its realism (and the importance or irrelevance of that) aside, it's top-notch moviemaking.

The three movies I haven't seen that are nominated are The Fighter, The King's Speech, and 127 Hours. Of the seven I've seen, I enjoyed five quite a bit, and I would rank them like this:

1. The Social Network
2. True Grit
3. Toy Story 3
4. Winter's Bone
5. The Kids Are All Right
6. Black Swan
379. Inception

Magnificent Mugs

2011-02-09T11:35:00.005-05:00

At Very Short List, Luc Sante recommends some truly stunning mug shots from early-20th-century Australia:

Unlike the mug-shot convention of portraying the subject head-on and in profile, the protocols were much looser, so that the accused were sometimes pictured once in close-up and once full-length. And the setting was often a courtyard with a skylight, which softened the contrast. Most important, though, the person behind the camera was someone who recognized the humanity of the varied persons who appeared before the lens, who were sometimes monsters and sometimes innocents, but all of whom deserved consideration. (If not always sympathy; in some shots the photographer apparently declared his or her distaste for the subjects by positioning them in front of the toilets.)

Three examples below, but check out the whole amazing gallery at this French web site.

The End of a (Facial Hair) Era

2011-01-06T18:11:00.004-05:00

Those of you who know me well — and at this point, I think it's safe to say that's all of you — know that I'm a Hall & Oates fan. This New York profile of Daryl Hall is worth reading in its not-too-long entirety, but these paragraphs demand immediate attention:

The end of the Hall & Oates era came in a hotel bathroom in 1990 in Tokyo, where they had just performed at a Yoko Ono–sponsored concert commemorating the death of John Lennon. There, in a sad, reflective moment, John Oates said good-bye—to the mustache.

“It really was a kind of spiritual moment for me,” Oates says, laughing. “The mustache represented a me I no longer was. I shaved it off and never looked back.” The next day, he and Hall were waiting at the Tokyo airport for a flight back to the States when Miles Davis appeared. “He came up to me with those red eyes of his,” says Oates. “He got like three inches from my face and kinda drew his finger across his own upper lip, as if he was shaving, and he said to me [in a deep, raspy voice], ‘Now the lovin’s gonna be better.’ ” Oates pauses. “And then he went up to Daryl and said, ‘I used to tell my hairdresser, I want my hair to look just like Daryl’s.’ ”

The whole thing reminds me, of course, of this post from the distant past.

He Fli-i-i-i-i . . . i-i-i-ies.

2010-11-30T22:58:00.002-05:00

Seeing as how this is the first post in November (with an hour or so left in the month), it seems appropriate to share something I’ve been meaning to share for a long time. Below, please find a video for “Like an Eagle” by Dennis Parker.

There are so many things I love about this.

The lip-syncing is some of the all-time best, and it’s particularly great whenever he walks off screen while holding a note. The first of these moments arrives at about the 1:30 mark, at which point the camera pans up to a giant billboard for The Deer Hunter. Perhaps the best camera move ever. (Plus, a billboard for The Deer Hunter? Can we get ’70s movies culture back, please? Pretty please?)

The video is ostensibly designed to be an ode to the excitement of the city. But at around 1:45, he walks in front of a bunch of pallid New Yorkers who view him with some combination of boredom and derision under a gray afternoon sky.

Then, he stands alone in a parking lot, quietly chanting “lookin’ at ya” and “gonna get ya” over and over again. Like so many other things here, it feels like it’s meant to be edgy, but is just mind-blowingly hilarious.

One of my goals in life now, and I’m not kidding, is to recreate this shot for shot with me lip-syncing it at the same exact spots in New York, and then run my cover version next to his on a split screen. If this ever happens, you’ll be the first to know, of course.

There are also clips on YouTube of Parker’s time on the soap opera The Edge of Night. Some of those are pretty good, too. According to the reliable Internet, he was also an adult-film star under the name Wade Nichols. His first film had the fantastic title of Boynapped!

Enjoy “Like an Eagle”:

2-1

2010-10-30T19:34:00.004-04:00

Thoughts while watching Game 3 of the World Series:

— I have a friend who always complains that TV networks pepper their coverage of major sporting events in Texas with very stereotypically Texan images. So far tonight, they've shown a rodeo and a longhorn rubbing its neck against a tree. There are rodeos in DFW, of course. And there are longhorns. But for better or worse, the place is mostly suburban now. You could show a bar or restaurant every now and again. Or maybe the arts district. I'll monitor this the rest of the night.

— Tim McCarver just suggested a runner should have tried to score on a ground ball, when that attempt would have been one of the dumbest base-running moves in recent memory. This is just to say that the world is much as we left it: Tim McCarver is a moronic gasbag.

— Joe Buck, in the bottom of the 6th: "Colby Lewis is doing what Rangers fans have come to expect." If you had asked me for the meaning of this sentence before this year, I would have gotten it very wrong.

— Darren Oliver is getting warm in the Rangers bullpen. In the mid-'90s, when I was regularly going to games in Texas, Oliver was a starting pitcher in his mid-20s. Since then, he has had a thoroughly mediocre — and sometimes worse — career. He's now 40, and the last three seasons have arguably been his best. I'm telling you: when the nuclear winter comes, the only things to survive will be cockroaches and left-handed pitchers.

— It's really the whole Fox team that stinks. If you said I had to spend the next five years in a bunker with my choice of McCarver, Joe Buck or Ken Rosenthal, I would likely ask you if there was a cyanide-pill option.

— Jeremy Affeldt is pitching for the Giants. Only 31 years old, he's still a great Exhibit B in the left-hander argument. He came up as a promising prospect with the Royals in 2002. He had a very good year in 2009 for San Francisco, but in any other profession, we wouldn't have been around long enough to have that very good year.

— Those necklaces so many players wear these days look ridiculous. This site says they're titanium necklaces, and is pretty candid about how they "work": "Baseball players report better control, less pain, and more stamina from wearing this special neckwear and bracelet designed in Japan. Aqua Titanium has been popular among Japanese baseball players for years, and even though there is some scientific debate as to its effectiveness, players can't do without them. Given that baseball is a sport surrounded by superstition . . . it doesn't matter whether the Phiten Titanium Necklace can make you better on the field, considering Yogi Berra's immortal quote on how much of the game is mental. Make sure to order your titanium necklace before next year's baseball season..."

— Cody Ross is a great story, having been picked up by the Giants late in the year, when no one else wanted him, and becoming their best hitter in the playoffs. He also seems to have quickly become a jerk about it. He's had the body language tonight of Kevin Garnett. Humble thyself, dude.

— Rangers closer Neftali Feliz is pretty electric, stupid necklace or no. Unlike some people I could name, at least he doesn't have an asinine beard. Looks like this could be a series yet.

— They close the broadcast with an aerial view of Six Flags, which is right next to the ballpark. Don't know if that's better than the rodeo or not.

Back at the Movies With Dad

2010-10-26T09:08:00.002-04:00

It's been way too long since I shared some of my dad's thoughts about the movies. He keeps sending them, but I've been bad about posting them. (If you're interested in past entries, click on the tag at the bottom of this post -- "Dad at the multiplex.") I had to pass along this brief note from this morning, which made me laugh:

Have I mentioned Secretariat? It was as inaccurate as it gets and Hollywood always screws up sports stories, but it did work on some level. I'll give it some more thought but I think that level is Diane Lane.

The Triumph of the Strangers

2010-10-23T02:16:00.006-04:00

I wasn’t there in time to see that Texas-centric scoreboard, but I wish I had been. It looks pretty great in that picture, and in this one, too. It was taken down in 1984.

My family moved to Texas in June 1988, and it wasn’t long before we went to a Rangers game at the old Arlington Stadium. It might be football country down there, but it was summer, and we were recently transplanted from Long Island, with our sporting priorities straight. We were ushered to our seats by a smiling college-aged brunette who dusted our seats for us. The crowd was polite, even calm. The air was dry but very hot. This isn’t what I had remembered from New York, where fans were passionate about their baseball, but not exactly kid-friendly, and a breeze occasionally stirred.

The stadium had been built in 1965 as a minor league park (here’s an aerial shot of the original). When the Rangers moved in seating was significantly expanded, but the stadium still had a distinctly modest, just-a-bowl feel to it. (Another aerial shot, this one giving the general idea of the revised setup, though it’s from a time when that great old scoreboard was still up.) The Rangers’ shortstop in 1988 was a scrawny guy named Scott Fletcher. Their catcher was a gentleman with a tremendous mustache named Geno Petralli. Their best pitcher was 40-year-old knuckleballer Charlie Hough, who already seemed grandfatherly.

The rest of the pitching staff was full of guys in their mid-20s who had futures ahead of them that ranged from thoroughly mediocre to nonexistent. Two of them were Paul Kilgus, who I always thought looked like his name sounded, and Bobby Witt, who I quickly came to think of as being a prototypical Texan, even looking a bit like Texas initially felt -- square-jawed, no-nonsense, tough and maybe a little thickheaded. (Never mind that he was born in the wrong Arlington -- Virginia -- to properly qualify.)

The Rangers finished 70-91 that year, 33 1/2 games behind the division-winning Oakland A’s. If I were the type to embrace lovable losers, I would have quickly drawn the Rangers to my bosom. Such as it was, my attachment to the Yankees was unshakable. They hadn’t won anything to that point in my life, either, but still. I felt a strong loyalty to my New York teams.

Over the years, the Rangers improved. They also moved into a beautiful new park in 1994. That give things a whole new feel, a truly major-league feel.

They always had a steady stream of big bats. The first couple of years I was there, the heavies were in the homer-or-strikeout mold of guys like Pete Incaviglia, the brute pictured at left. But soon, the team had an entire lineup of fearsomely talented hitters -- Ruben Sierra, Juan Gonzalez, Pudge Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro.

The pitching always stunk. When the team finally made the playoffs in 1996, it did so with three of five starting pitchers sporting ERAs over 5.00. The Rangers won the division again in 1998, with two starters under 5.00 and the other four rotating members of the staff at 5.68, 5.90, 6.53, and 7.66. The ‘99 playoff team was much the same. Not very surprisingly, the Rangers went a combined 1-9 in the playoffs those years, losing all three first-round series. To the Yankees.

At this point, I was reveling in the newness of Yankees thrills. I was 22 when they won it all in 1996, and I’m not looking for any tears, trust me. But I had been a big fan from the age of seven or so, and winning was sweet. I would go to those series in Arlington proudly wearing my Yankees hat, rooting hard for the opposition.

All of that is baseball. But baseball is also tied up with life, as all the purple-prose writers who love the sport are constantly reminding us. So without getting purple (I hope), it’s safe to say that even though I never took the team to my heart, the experience of going to the park -- which I must have done a hundred times or more in the time I lived in Texas -- left me with a lot of memories (and there will be more, I’m sure). At first, it was just me and my dad. It would be mostly us at the games over the years, but in the beginning there weren’t even really options for company, as I was 14 years old, new to the area, not yet in school, and, well, how do I put this, friendless.

My first friend would soon appear, and it was no accident that he was a sports nut -- more like a walking sports encyclopedia. Curtis would go to many games with us. The two of us were (are?) purists, and no matter how many times we heard it, we would always turn to each other with looks of disgust when the stadium P.A. played "Cotton-Eyed Joe" during the 7th inning stretch instead of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." (This was the folksy "Joe" on the fiddle, not the techno-drivel version they play in stadiums today.) One of the best nights at the park involved me and Curt going up to the "fantasy announcing" booth to broadcast an inning. We got to take home the tape, which I have to hope is still around somewhere. Today, Curt is a professional sportscaster.

I saw some great games over the years, but a lot of the most memorable moments were not game-related. Some were almost game-related, like Nolan Ryan famously beating the hell out of Robin Ventura. We were there for that one. Or one night when the power went out and only some of the neon lights in the new stadium were visible. That was eerie but beautiful. Then there was June 17, 1994. It was a Friday night, and the Rangers lost to the A’s 4-2 (according to some online research). Early on that night, my friend Jason returned from the concession stand to say I had to come check something out -- O. J. Simpson was going nuts, leading the cops on a wild-goose chase. We spent most of the night, along with hundreds of other fans, standing up on the concourse, without a view of the field, watching the surreal hot pursuit. (The concourse TVs were also showing Game 5 of that year’s NBA finals between the Knicks and Houston Rockets, but that was put on a tiny split screen, underneath the freeway action.)

If we were a little late for a game, or left one a little early, we would listen to the radio broadcast by Eric Nadel and Mark Holtz. The memory of those two came back to me strongly tonight when an announcer on ESPN’s radio station mentioned Nadel’s long stint with the team. They were fantastic, a good example of something that has nothing to do with the size of your market. The Yankees radio announcers today are almost unlistenable. Holtz and Nadel are, still, maybe the best I’ve ever heard. Holtz died of leukemia in 1997 at age 51. I read somewhere that Nadel used Holtz’s signature game-ending call -- “Hello win column!” -- for the first time since Holtz’s death when the Rangers clinched their first-round series against Tampa Bay.

(One funny memory returned tonight: listening to the post-game shows driving home, Dad and I would marvel at how the duo put an optimistic spin on everything. “Well, this win moves the Rangers to within 18 games of Oakland in the American League West.” Another early culture shock.)

There was purple stuff, too, of course: Attending games with a couple of girlfriends (not simultaneously), one of whom I would write in on an all-star ballot every year, as a National League outfielder, and the other of whom went to her last game with me just a few nights before I left to move to New York, some time after we’d broken up; driving home from games with various friends, listening to various music; always marking the remainder of the trip home by watching the approach of the Dallas skyline, which represented the halfway point, give or take a few miles.

Not sure why I’m recapping all this. I didn’t have some existential crisis during the series that ended tonight. But if I’m honest, I was at least passively rooting for the Rangers. Not because I feel divided loyalties, but maybe just because, after 15 years of resounding Yankees success, including a title last year, I felt a little bit numb toward them. (Plus, something has felt off about both the team and fans for the past couple of years, though that’s vague and would require a lot more words to parse, and half of you are comatose already. The other half have left to play badminton.) Throughout the series, I wasn’t really rooting for either team. But not rooting, when the Yankees are involved, is very strange for me.

Tonight I’m mostly glad for my friends who are Rangers fans, especially Brad, who went to dozens and dozens of games with me over the years. (And with whom I still call the team the Strangers, one of many verbal jokes we share, but certainly one of the laziest and least substantive.) He was at the game tonight and we exchanged text messages as it wrapped up. Dad might have been there, too, I haven’t asked him yet. I’m pretty certain he was rooting for the Yankees if he was. But I’m also sure he’ll be pulling for the Rangers in the World Series, like I will.

In another forum recently (never mind where), I wrote: “Almost find myself rooting for the TX Rangers against Yanks tonight. Suspect my heart is always where I no longer am. A problem, perhaps.” And that was a regular-season game in August! So, something weird happened the past couple of months, and now I’m just glad it’s over. The Rangers have taken a big step forward. They’ve had a great moment. From now on, when it comes to the Rangers and Yankees, my loyalties will be as clear (and as northern) as they should be.

5 Years

2010-10-19T00:52:00.002-04:00

I just realized that the day recently finished was the fifth anniversary of this blog.

Given the nine posts since the end of August, even more thanks than usual to those of you who still click over to see if things are warming up again around here. I sincerely mean to warm it up soon. A new job and the attempt to keep The Second Pass on at least a simmer have me scrounging for time (and energy).

Happy 10th, Andrew

2010-10-11T23:57:00.003-04:00

In my early 20s, I was already a well-established magazine junkie, and I remember looking forward to pieces by Andrew Sullivan in the New Republic and the New York Times Magazine. The pieces were often contrarian, and I was also a well-established contrarian. So when Sullivan started a web site -- just about a year or so after the term “blog” was coined, if Wikipedia is to be trusted -- I started reading it. Ten years later, I still read it. I don’t really visit many sites with regularity, and most of them are functional -- ESPN for sports, the New York Times for news/culture, book blogs to stay up on material for The Second Pass -- but I still consistently visit Sullivan.

He’s celebrating his blog’s 10th anniversary with a series of toasts and roasts from other bloggers. He’s certainly not hiding from the roasts. One reader wrote: “This is a man for whom great art is embodied by the Pet Shop Boys, South Park, and some of the most dreary Sunday-devotional verse and essays ever reduced to fair-use excerpts that don’t violate copyright law.” And some of the other criticisms from readers have echoed those of people I know who stopped reading Sullivan with regularity -- they mostly tired, I think, of what they consider his hyper-emotionalism and his dog-with-a-bone tendency to fixate on a subject to the exclusion of much else. Fair enough.

What I continue to like about Sullivan is that, whatever you think of his more patent complexities (gay Catholic, Obama-supporting Thatcher worshipper, etc.), they do reflect the fact that, unlike so many public voices, he is not a cheerleader for one side or another. Yes, he can chew on issues long after they are flavorless. (You won’t find someone more petrified of Sarah Palin than me -- well, unless you find Sullivan -- but there were times when the torrent of posts about her temporarily drove me away.) But even on divisive subjects about which he holds strong opinions -- torture, gay marriage, the legalization of marriage (about all of which I happen to agree with him, so there’s that) -- he can be remarkably un-strident, even too gracious to the other side.

If I had to guess, I think this stems from his history with debate, which he has mentioned on occasion. He debated in high school, and became the president of the Oxford Union, the famous debating society. My own experience with debate was far briefer and far more modest -- a couple of years at a suburban Texas high school. But I do think that experience lastingly affected the way I see disagreements (when they are substantive). Sullivan has admitted, “I took the losing side, as I always tried to in Oxford debates (far more fun to lose well than to win easily).” I think that in most cases, either side of a debate could “win,” depending on who’s doing the arguing. This is not just because style comes into it -- not just a case of some slickster being able to sell anything -- but because there’s normally a reason why each side feels the way it does, some logical structure beneath the more emotional manifestations of support.

The benefit of thinking this way could be called open-mindedness, though without the mushy Benetton-ad self-congratulation that the term often carries with it. The drawback, of course, is that it can lead to a sort of un-mindedness, a kind of if-anything-is-worth-believing-then-nothing-is-worth-believing cynicism or confusion. Sometimes I think Sullivan fumes about something that isn’t really a debate -- i.e., “Sarah Palin is not fit to bestride the free world.” Other times, as with the Iraq war, I think the debater in him takes whichever side he is defending and defends it to the teeth, rather than trying to see both sides simultaneously. But again -- and I’m not sure why I’m going on at this length -- I think the debater in him more often appears in the way he respects the other side. I have straight friends who are far more shrill about their support for gay marriage than Sullivan is. I might be one of them. He tends to talk about even emotional issues, in which he has a personal stake, in a way that assumes the best of the opposite argument, not the worst or easiest of it. That’s not nothing.

But on the anniversary of Sullivan’s blog, I can’t go without mentioning what I set out to talk about in the first place before rambling. (I stay away from the blog for a while, and this is what happens. I’m like a city dog that just hopped out of the car in the country.) Andrew Sullivan routinely gets a million visitors a month. Or more. I think my blog’s high-water month was probably something like 20,000 visits in a month, and significantly less than that in recent months, as activity has dwindled. But in October 2005, when I started this blog, Sullivan’s variety, voice, and pace -- though different from my variety, voice, and pace -- were inspirations.

As Hendrik Hertzberg said in a note about the anniversary: “I have a profound professional admiration for the Dish as an editorial enterprise. . . . I find that it orients me in cyberspace. It fends off motion sickness. It gives pleasure. I almost always feel a little better after paying it a visit, even when the news of the day is unusually depressing.” I always say that for someone who operates more than one web site, I’m a bit of a technophobe. I agree completely with Hertzberg’s motion sickness comment. For one thing, speaking of comments, Sullivan doesn’t have them -- he curates reader response instead. I think this is a great unsung reason for his site’s success. There is a sense of a controlling intelligence at the Dish, not the anarchic -- and, let’s face it, ignorant and vicious -- community that normally springs up beneath the fold at such popular sites.

On more than one occasion, Sullivan or his colleagues have linked to a post here, or at The Second Pass. I believe in each case I had sent them an e-mail pointing to the post in question. But still, in each case the link was a thrill, a cup of coffee in the big leagues. So in addition to thanking Sullivan for the decade of enjoyable reading, I thank him for the support. I know thousands of other minor-league bloggers like me have reason to do the same.

Anybody Home?

2010-09-30T02:05:00.002-04:00

At a time when, like me, you're probably wondering if this blog is capable of sustaining life, we get this:

Gliese 581g (whose first name is pronounced GLEE-za) circles a dim red star known as Gliese 581, once every 37 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. That is smack in the middle of the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.

More soon. Really.

The Ideal

2010-09-18T16:26:00.003-04:00

As the baseball playoffs approach, the Design Observer reminds us of a slide show of photos by Don Hamerman, a Connecticut photographer, who, "For the past few years, as he's walked his dog at a local park, [has] picked up lost and forgotten baseballs." The post is also accompanied by a 1976 excerpt by Roger Angell, who waxes eloquent and sentimental the way that baseball fans do:

No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance — thrown hard and with precision. Its feel and heft are the beginning of the sport's critical dimension; if it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams heavier or lighter, the game of baseball would be utterly different. Hold a baseball in your hand. As it happens, this one is not brand-new. Here, just to one side of the curved surgical welt of stitches, there is a pale-green grass smudge, darkening on one edge almost to black — the mark of an old infield play, a tough grounder now lost in memory. Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun.

Headline of the Day

2010-09-07T19:13:00.000-04:00

Tylenol-Loaded Mice Dropped from Air to Control Snakes

Imaginary DVDs

2010-09-04T00:30:00.008-04:00

There’s an ongoing trend of people creating fake Criterion DVD covers for their favorite movies. This is my kind of thing. (I often feel like I’m a frustrated graphic designer, even though I’ve never tried my hand at it even a little. Well, since I made fake baseball-card and pro-wrestling magazines when I was 11.) Anyway, a really long list of them is here, though many have been taken down for various reasons probably having to do with guys wearing fierce ties. Cinematical shared a few of its favorites. Paste Magazine (now defunct on the print side of things) did the same. So why not me? Here are three I enjoyed:

Sheep Pong

2010-09-03T15:01:00.002-04:00

How do you know when you have too much time on your hands? It's a tricky question, but I feel pretty confident in saying this: If you're outfitting large numbers of sheep with LCD vests in order to film them looking like a giant game of Pong on a hillside, then, yeah, maybe your basic needs are being too well fulfilled.

(Via Very Short List)

Words Fail

2010-09-03T00:52:00.003-04:00

From my friend Bill, this incredible sequence from an Indian action movie. Sit back and enjoy:

The Bad & the Ugly

2010-09-02T17:20:00.003-04:00

It wasn't just TK who prodded me this week (see below). My old buddy "Dez" also sent along a link that he knew would get me going: a list from Fox Sports of the 14 "dumbest mascots." There are four Olympic mascots on the list, because those things tend to be demented, purposeless creations with names like "Wenlock and Mandeville" that were designed in the visual equivalent of Esperanto and would send any sane person screaming.

I think they're a little hard on Otto the Orange (at left) from Syracuse, writing: "It doesn't get much dumber than a giant orange ball. And to think, Syracuse was also considering a wolf and a lion as its mascot when it picked Otto in 1995." First of all, they are the "Syracuse Orange," and as vague as that is, an orange something would seem to fit the bill. Also, Wikipedia calls Otto a gender-neutral "anthropomorphic orange, wearing a large blue hat and blue pants." And I ask, what is wrong with that?

The site is not too hard, however, on Hip Hop, the Philadelphia 76ers' mascot ("It's a rapping bunny. 'Nuff said.") or on "Q," the truly terrifying mascot of soccer's San Jose Earthquakes:

Party Like It's 2002

2010-09-02T16:59:00.002-04:00

My friend TK, who helms the excellent running (and general life) blog Pigtails Flying, has "tagged" me with a "meme." This seems very 2002. But I clearly need any excuse to kick-start this puppy, so thank you, TK. Here are the rules:

1. Answer this question: if you had the chance to go back and change one thing in your life, would you and what would it be?
2. The second thing you have to do is, pick 6 people and give them this award. You then have to inform the person that they have gotten this award. [I'm going to pick 3 people, because I'm lazy. Also, I'm not sure why this is called an award.]
3. The third and final thing is, thank the person who gave you the award.

So:

1. I don't think I would go back and change anything. That speaks, I suppose, to having led a pretty lucky life, overall, but it's also a philosophical stance of mine -- you never know what changing one thing would change further down the path. Are there decisions about which I wonder, What if? Of course. What if I had gone to college in the northeast instead of in Texas? What if I had stayed in Texas in 2000 instead of moving to New York? What if I had left Texas, but moved to Boston instead of New York? What if I had or hadn't ended certain relationships at certain points in time? What if I had gone to law school? What if I decided to put away childish things? Etc.

2. "Dez," ANCIANT, and Miles, consider yourselves on the hot seat.

3. A heartfelt thanks to TK for giving me this "award." TK is a generous soul, a gifted communicator (as evidenced by her blog and other efforts), and she introduced me (or re-introduced me) to my girlfriend. So I have a lot to thank her for. Even if she won't drink with me anymore.

"We will never officially split up. We'll just die one by one."

2010-08-20T13:25:00.001-04:00

Whitney Matheson interviews the Kids in the Hall about their new mini-series, their favorite young sketch comedy groups, and the age-old question about which of them makes the prettiest woman.

The Movie List: 30-26

2010-08-17T23:59:00.007-04:00

30. “I think we oughta get to the bottom of R. P. McMurphy.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

I haven’t read the Ken Kesey novel on which the movie was based, and I’m sure reading it would affect this ranking one way or another. But as it is, the movie is a classic for a reason (or several), even if it’s not perfect. To this point on my list, it might be the most lauded entry. (Well, no, I guess that would be The Godfather Part II.) Cuckoo’s Nest was the second movie (after It Happened One Night) to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay). The supporting cast around Nicholson and Louise Fletcher (including Danny DeVito in one of his first movies) is very good, and the visual approach is appealingly unscrubbed. A mainstream picture set in a psych ward today would have crippling amounts of Twee Quirk. (See this trailer, for instance, for a bellyful of it.)

29. “You taught me that people will do anything for a potato.”

Empire of the Sun (1987)

Since it’s already taken something like 42 years to get around to this installment of the list, I’ll lean on something I wrote previously about this one: I’ve always thought this was Spielberg’s best work. It’s certainly his most underrated. Just about every scene is flawlessly shot, and while the last 30 minutes come apart a bit as Spielberg breaks out his Book of Morals, that hardly makes it different from any of his other Serious Films. Amazingly, Empire “introduced” Christian Bale, and you could do worse than have your coming-out party directed by Spielberg from a script by Tom Stoppard. Bale is impressive as James Graham, a young Brit in Japan-occupied China during World War II who goes from aristocratic brat to orphaned in an internment camp, where he has to grow up, but quick. Here’s a clip, which is only an average scene for Bale, but the slow-motion shot as he watches his favorite fighter plane glide by is pure genius. There are things to dislike about Spielberg, but when you see a moment like this, it’s hard to deny that the guy is a master of his medium.

28. “It may be wrong of them, but they value their lives.”

The Rules of the Game (1939)

I saw this for the first time not very long ago. Renoir’s mix of farce and tragedy, set on a country estate, ruffled upper-class French feathers when it was first released. Renoir cut it to appease critics, and the film has been slowly restored to its original intentions over the course of many years. Very funny at times, and ultimately heartbreaking, Rules is equally rich for historicist film snobs and audiences just wanting entertainment. It features one of my all-time performances, turned in by Julien Carette, who plays Marceau, a rabbit poacher who is caught and offered a job on the estate. Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, with its similar setting and juxtaposition of aristocrats and servants, is in several ways a direct homage to Rules. I’m not a big Altman fan, but I’m tempted to revisit Gosford Park (which I remember enjoying) after watching Renoir’s masterpiece.

27. “What's a logical explanation for a woman taking a trip with no luggage?”

Rear Window (1954)

I went through a mildly feverish Hitchcock phase when I was younger. Nothing like what a Hitchcock phase could be, but I watched at least half a dozen movies in quick succession and fell for the overall style. I keep threatening (in my mind, which is where I do all of my threatening) to go on a full-blown kick soon. As for this pick: If you need much more than Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, let’s face it, there’s something wrong with you, but there’s also something timelessly fascinating about Rear Window's set of one apartment building looking out onto another. In an interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock said:

It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea. Pudovkin dealt with this, as you know. In one of his books on the art of montage, he describes an experiment by his teacher, Kuleshov. You see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is immediately followed by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.

26. “No going to the dark side!”

Sideways (2004)

This is low, believe it or not, a (temporary?) concession to the wisdom of crowds. The backlash against this movie’s success was pretty severe, and people keep telling me that I overrate it (I saw it five times in the theater), and I’m cautious enough about the effects of time that I’m happy to temper my enthusiasm somewhat, pending a few more years of perspective. But when I left the theater after first seeing Sideways, I felt thrilled. I had laughed -- a lot, and not cheaply -- and I felt like Paul Giamatti’s performance as Miles, a schlubby, snobby, struggling writer, was almost perfect. But more than anything else, I thought the movie achieved a combined state that I think is enjoyable and rare -- the feeling of cinematic real life. Real life can be boring, or at least frustratingly un-narrative in two-hour chunks. Cinema can be too glossy and/or too contrived. But here, real life is approximated in several scenes: Miles and Jack (an ingeniously cast Thomas Haden Church) walk from their hotel to a local restaurant along a highway at dusk; the two friends and their girlfriends share an increasingly inebriated dinner, culminating in Miles’ famous drunk-dialing incident; the four of them retire to a hillside home and share moments both intimate and awkward. There’s something about the characters and the California light and the leisurely-but-still-compelling pace. . . . Oh, heck, it should have been higher. That said, it’s hard to say who it would have bumped -- the next 25 are heavyweights.

Comments Policy

2010-08-12T00:05:00.003-04:00

Actual posts to resume soon. The next installment of the movie list -- remember that? -- will be up soon. So will some truly, astoundingly cheesy video clips that I think everyone will love. Et cetera. For now, though...

I've set it so that I have to moderate comments. I came home to a dozen spambot messages on recent posts, and they're a pain in the rump to delete one by one if they've already been posted. I've learned from working on The Second Pass that spambots are the worst thing in the world. Over there, I delete literally thousands of their comments for every one real one that gets posted. (I can delete in bulk, but only 20 at a time, so it's not that tough, but pretty tedious). And spambots are indefatigable. (That's the "bot" part. Robots don't get tired. It's their greatest strength. We were all taught that in grade-school social studies.)

So, if you leave a comment and it doesn't show up immediately, that's why. I'll get to them as quickly as I can, I'm sure within a few hours or so. And who knows, this might not even help; I've already had a word verification on, so perhaps the spambots have just evolved.

“Sure enough, life is punishment...”

2010-08-10T12:19:00.002-04:00

In October 2008, I posted about a series of animated shorts called Strindberg & Helium, in which "a talking bubble full of helium tries to cheer up the super-dour Swedish playwright August Strindberg." After a long wait, there's a new episode:

Reeling One In

2010-08-04T17:06:00.001-04:00

Celebrating in (goofy) style.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Northern Churches

2010-08-04T09:29:00.004-04:00

At Design Bureau, some incredible photos of wooden churches in northern Russia by Richard Davies, who was inspired to follow up on a series of pictures taken in 1902:

During his travels, the story of the hardships of the last century has been unavoidably felt; a story of Revolution, War, Communism and severe Northern winters. Many churches have been lost: some have been left to rot; some have been destroyed by lightning; countless others by ignorance, spite and neglect. A few years ago, a reversing tractor hit one church—it tumbled like a house of cards. Fortunately, dedicated specialists and enthusiasts have managed to save many of the churches pictured.

Dear Van and Prince: Do This

2010-07-30T16:09:00.003-04:00

Two facts are now resoundingly obvious to me: Van Morrison should cover “Purple Rain.” And Prince should cover “And the Healing Has Begun.” See, this is the reason I would like to be a billionaire. Sure, I would give a lot to charity. And I would build a house somewhere quiet-ish and fill it with books. But I would also get Van and Prince on the horn and make this happen.

The reason I know these dueling covers should happen has nothing to do with Van or Prince, but with the Waterboys, a band I’m not even that familiar with. Through one of those YouTube rabbit holes that's hard to untangle, I found clips of the Waterboys covering both songs. The first, from 1986, features "The Thrill is Gone" (a Waterboys original, not the B.B. King song) and segues into "And the Healing Has Begun" (starting with the lyric, "And we'll walk down the avenues again"). The second is just "Purple Rain." Neither clip has video, just audio, and if you're like me you'll want to just listen rather than watch the photo collages.

Whitney Reincarnated

2010-07-27T11:38:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you -- the universal you, no need to get specific -- are surfing around YouTube. And sometimes you see, on the sidebar of clips, the title "Chinese boy singing like Whitney Houston." And, you know, you're going to click on that.

Not So Dandy

2010-07-27T09:33:00.005-04:00

How did I not know this? Good question. In the late 1970s, the Yankees introduced a mascot named Dandy:

[T]he Yankees agreed to lease Dandy for three years and $30,000 and made plans to unveil him in late July.

Then disaster struck.

Want to know whom to blame for Dandy's premature demise? Look no further than the San Diego Chicken and Lou Piniella.

On July 10, 1979, the Chicken—on sabbatical from the Padres, his regular employer—was working for the Seattle Mariners at the Kingdome, where he threw a hex on Yankees pitcher Ron Guidry as he warmed up. Mr. Piniella, the Yankees' left fielder at the time, considered this to be in poor taste, so he chased the Chicken and, lacking apparent success, fired his glove at him in a fit of rage.

In the wake of that fiasco, Mr. Steinbrenner supported Mr. Piniella by telling reporters that mascots had no place in baseball—this, just two weeks before the Yankees were to introduce their own.

Steinbrenner banished Dandy to the upper deck, where he roamed for a short while before going extinct. It didn't help that Dandy's mustache was meant to resemble that of Thurman Munson, the team's guiding light, who died in a plane crash just a few days after Dandy made his first appearance.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Cardboard Gods)

Voice of the Yankees is Dead

2010-07-11T11:46:00.002-04:00

Bob Sheppard has died. As the P.A. announcer at Yankee Stadium for more than 50 years, his distinct voice introduced everyone from Mickey Mantle to Derek Jeter, and as David Cone says in the video tribute below, he was a memorable part of a lot of people's first live game, including my own.

AP Headline of the Day

2010-07-10T18:08:00.001-04:00

NH Man Set on Fire After Losing Drinking Bet

"I only wanted to be some kind of friend."

2010-07-08T00:50:00.005-04:00

I have no idea how this is happening, because Prince is notoriously tough on copyright/YouTube issues, but there's currently a whole batch of very early clips up on the site. Get 'em while you can. Below, for Wednesday-Thursday, is "Purple Rain" from a 1992 show in London and "When You Were Mine" from a 1983(!) show in the Purple One's hometown of Minneapolis. Enjoy:

2,053 Explosions

2010-07-07T16:20:00.004-04:00

I think one of the many problems I've had with posting lately is that I've idealized what I used to do around here. Because I don't devote as much time to the blog as I used to, I end up thinking that the old posts were all extensive ruminations instead of little bits and pieces of culture, which they more often were. So one way to try to get out of this rut is to start lowering my expectations for what constitutes a post -- and thus probably hit the same level that I had in the past.

Here's a weirdly mesmerizing piece of video art. I'll let Wired (UK) explain:

A Japanese artist named Isao Hashimoto has created a series of works about nuclear weapons. One is titled "1945-1998" and shows a history of the world's nuclear explosions.

Over the course of fourteen and a half minutes, every single one of the 2,053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are plotted on a map.

A metronomic beep every second represents months passing, and a different tone indicates explosions from different countries. It starts out slowly, with the Manhattan Project's single test in the U.S. and the two terrible bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II.

After a couple of minutes or so, however, once the USSR and Britain entered the nuclear club, the tests really start to build up, reaching a peak of nearly 140 in 1962, and remaining well over 40 each year until the mid-80s.

The video is below. It's beautifully designed, and worth your time from start to finish. I'm fascinated by the idea of nuclear tests, and the staggering number there have been. I recently read and reviewed a novel (The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall) that has, as part of its background, tests in the Western U.S. If you know of a good book (preferably narrative) that details that history, I'd love to know.

The Movie List: 35-31

2010-07-02T01:23:00.007-04:00

35. “Why does everything take so long?”

Four Friends (1981)

I haven’t seen this one in quite a while, and it’s not available on Netflix, so I’m going by distant memory. I realize this is awfully high for distant memory. But what can I say, I trust myself. Four Friends was directed by Arthur Penn, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, and was written by Steven Tesich, who also wrote the terrific Breaking Away. (Breaking Away is another movie I saw a long time ago, but could have confidently put on this list nevertheless. Why I put this movie on here and not that one is one of those mysteries of which the list is really made.) Four Friends at least begins true to its title, with three young men in love with the same woman, Georgia (Jodi Thelen), but it soon focuses primarily on Danilo (Craig Wasson), who has a contentious relationship with his hard-working immigrant father. I’ll excerpt Vincent Canby’s original review in the New York Times for the rest, because on December 11, 1981, he surely had a fresher view of the movie than I have now:

Four Friends is the best film yet made about the 60's . . . It's a film that embraces the looks, sounds, speech and public events of the 60's, but not in the way of a documentary. It has the quality of legend, a fable remembered. . . . Danilo is the Yugoslavian-born son of immigrant parents, who arrives in this country in 1948 at the age of 12 and spends the next decade and a half sorting out the reality of America from his dream of it . . . Mr. Tesich sometimes lets his prose become more purple than is easily accepted on the screen -- “When stars collide, it's out of loneliness” -- but this is the film's method. Four Friends is about ordinary people, but not ordinary people who speak a predictable, commonplace vernacular. They take leaps into the unknown and occasionally come up spouting what sounds like rubbish, which is part of the film's extraordinary style and what separates it from a kind of fiction that aspires to do nothing more than reproduce actuality.

34. “I got it, I’m gone.”

Do the Right Thing (1989)

This is a movie that is great to look at and great to argue about, and it’s hard to want a lot more than that. The saturated colors, the true capture of a steamy day in Brooklyn, and the sometimes cartoonish characterizations make the movie’s march toward real violence something special. When I was younger, I thought that Mookie’s actions at the end of the movie were shocking and unforgivable. Now that I’m older, I still think it’s shocking, but obviously complicated. Spike Lee has said, more than once: “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window. Twenty years later, they're still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.” Like other questions of this nature, I think the divide in reaction he describes goes a good way toward defining the problem. The can through the window is the movie’s most blatant provocation, though there are others -- like the scene in which Mookie and Pino talk about bigotry and then a series of actors address the camera spewing their own favored stereotypes. The rest of the movie, always concerned with race, is a joy to watch for the performances, from Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and native Brooklynites Rosie Perez and John Turturro.

33. “You guys gotta look menacing!”

American Movie (1999)

Oh, how I love American Movie, a documentary about 30-year-old Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt, who’s desperately trying to finish a low-low-budget horror flick called Coven (which he insists on pronouncing COE-ven). He’s accompanied on the journey by his musician friend Mike Schank. As I wrote in a previous post: “One of the great things about the movie is that you genuinely like Mark and Mike even when you're laughing at them. And yes, you laugh at them. A lot.” Borchardt’s motor-mouth antics, and his complicated mixture of ambition and self-loathing, made the film an instant hit, and made him a regular guest on Late Show with David Letterman. He’s become something of a cult star since, appearing in several horror movies (Zombie Island and The Hagstone Demon, among others). But it’s likely he’ll always be best known for American Movie, where director Chris Smith lovingly captures his Midwestern personality and his Plutonian, if un-filmable visions.

32. “Anyone can cook . . . but only the fearless can be great.”

Ratatouille (2007)

I think this is Pixar’s crowning achievement so far, for a few reasons. First, they managed to make a rat sympathetic. I see rats in New York all the time, and let me tell you, that’s no mean trick. Second, it’s as clever as their other stories, positing a restaurant's perceived greatest villain as its possible savior. Third, it’s gorgeous, with the studio’s animation put to use on some stunning scenes, including Remy’s journey through underground sewers, ending on a panoramic rooftop view of Paris. But lastly, and most importantly, while all of Pixar’s movies have that often-mentioned mixture of moments for children and adults, the last act of Ratatouille, and what it says about both the urge to create and the urge to critique, is particularly sharp. The critic (brilliantly voiced by Peter O’Toole) is reminded of his childhood in a way that it would be impossible for a child to appreciate. (My friend Sarah extrapolated on this thought here.)

31. “I’m glad what I done!”

On the Waterfront (1954)

This should probably be higher. Brando is in other films on my list, but this is the movie on the list most fueled by his presence. It’s not that this is his most searing performance. That’s probably still Streetcar, in my opinion, but this is a better movie. Brando is Terry Malloy, a not-too-bright dock worker whose brother, Charley, is the lawyer for the local mobbed-up union boss. Brando’s performance is an all-time great, and the supporting cast lives up to it: Lee J. Cobb as the corrupt boss, Rod Steiger as Charley, Karl Malden as the waterfront priest, and Eva Marie Saint as Edie, Terry’s love interest. The most famous scene is one of the most famous scenes, when Charley threatens Terry and then Terry builds up to “I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.” But there are plentiful other gems, most notably the scene where Terry strolls with Edie, absentmindedly playing with her glove and issuing great, casual Brando-isms (“I don’t like the country, the crickets make me nervous.”).

Novelist Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay, and according to Wikipedia: “Schulberg later published a novel just called Waterfront that was much closer to his original screenplay than the version that was released on-screen. Among several differences is that, in both the screenplay and the novel, Terry Malloy is brutally murdered.”

Programming Note

2010-07-01T12:42:00.003-04:00

It's good that it's summer, and people are likely out enjoying themselves in the sun or away on vacation. And only about eight people read this blog anymore, anyway. Sometime in the next 24 hours, the next portion of the movie list is going up. Scout's honor. Then I'm leaving for a few glorious days away (the increased heat during New York summers is normally accompanied by a similar increase in general craziness, and this summer is no different). After the 4th, perhaps I can find the key to updating more regularly again.

Hellish

2010-06-25T15:34:00.002-04:00

Quiet week around here, for a specific reason: Heat.

I had a real Michael Douglas-in-Falling Down day yesterday. This happens to me every so often, but hadn't for a while. The air-conditioner in my apartment was broken. Only the fan was working, which meant it was very effectively blowing more hot air into the apartment. Wednesday night was extremely humid, and I barely slept. So yesterday morning, I walked in the heat to P. C. Richards to get a new machine, then waited 45 minutes for a bus to go see a friend, then went back home at 3:45, since I had set up an appointment with the a/c delivery and installation guys for sometime between 4 and 6. They showed up promptly at 8.

Basically, New York for 85% of the year (three seasons, plus about 10% of the summer) has a climate to my liking. For the other 15%, it's one step above hellfire.

More soon.

Headline of the Day

2010-06-24T01:02:00.001-04:00

Found on Twitter. Don't even know where to start on this one:

Pagan Psychic Viking Died After Heart Attack Led to Car Setting Fire to Grass Bank

Image of the Day

2010-06-24T01:01:00.002-04:00

Lightning hits two skyscrapers in Chicago during a storm on Wednesday. Photo by Tom Cruze of the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Movie List: 40-36

2010-06-17T10:19:00.008-04:00

40. “You broke my heart.”

The Godfather II (1974)

Plenty of people prefer this sequel to the original. I don’t, though I obviously like it quite a bit. Among other things, it has maybe the best moment in the two movies. (I say two movies, because even though I haven’t seen the third, I’ve come to accept the conventional wisdom that it was a total disaster and should be kept apart from the first two. I still remember my parents and older sister going to see it in Dallas. When the three of them got back, I could hear them in the garage, still laughing.) I suppose I could save what follows for my analysis of the first movie, but here goes: There are so many obvious strengths to both installments, but the one thing that always bothers me is the transition of Michael from innocent son to Godfather. Pacino is tremendous in both movies, don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming him. But there’s a tendon missing—for me, at least. And while you might think this is more damning of the original movie than the sequel, since the original is when the transition happens, there’s something about Michael being at the top for the whole running time that bugs me in a way the first didn’t. Even I’m not sure if that makes any sense. Let’s revisit it when the time comes, shall we?

39. “It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.”

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Adapted from my post about this movie back when I first saw it, in September 2008:

The most often repeated fact about Kind Hearts and Coronets is that Alec Guinness plays eight parts, and he's amazing. But that gimmick is not what makes the movie so great. In this black comedy from Britain’s legendary Ealing Studios, Dennis Price plays Louis Mazzini, who is in line to be a duke. But it's a long line. In front of him stand eight members of the D'Ascoyne family (all played by Guinness), including Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne. Louis narrates the story of how he methodically picks off family members in order to inherit the dukedom. It's beautifully written, and funny in ways both morbid and goofy. I'm a big critic of voiceover narration in movies, but this is mostly when it's done in the third person—Little Children and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, to name two fairly recent examples. First person can be more successful (see also: recently listed Badlands). In any event, the level of writing here makes the narration more like a novel than a movie. On the commentary for another DVD, Guinness said of Kind Hearts, “I read [the screenplay] on a beach in France, collapsed with laughter on the first page, and didn't even bother to get to the end of the script. I went straight back to the hotel and sent a telegram saying, ‘Why four parts? Why not eight!?’ ”

38. “Ghosts don’t cry.”
“Nothing is simple.”

Volver (2006)
Talk to Her (2002)

I put these two movies by Pedro Almodóvar together because I can remember Volver well and Talk to Her less well, but I loved them both. My cloudy memory of Talk to Her makes it impossible to decide which of these is my favorite of his, but I think they would be the two finalists. They both feature Almodóvar’s typically beautiful compositions and saturated colors and strong ensemble acting. In Talk to Her, two women, one a dancer and one a matador, are comatose in a hospital. The movie follows the men who love them. In Volver, three sisters deal with the death of their mother, one of them believing that her ghost is living with her. The entire cast is terrific, but Penelope Cruz carries the most weight, and as always in Almodóvar’s movies, she’s brilliant and seems even more gorgeous than usual.

37. “We'll be listening to you.”

The Conversation (1974)

Given that this movie and The Godfather Part II both came out in 1974, I’d say it was a pretty impressive year for Francis Ford Coppola. (And for me; I was born.) The Godfather sequel won Best Picture, but I think you could make a case that this is the better movie. Less epic, for sure, but that might be the very reason this tightly crafted story wins out. It’s got a great 1970s flavor and a wonderful ensemble cast, starting with the leading man. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, who specializes in audio surveillance. He becomes obsessed with accurately transcribing one conversation that he taped between a couple in a San Francisco park, and concerned about the couple’s possible fate. In the last scene, one of my favorites in any movie, Harry’s paranoia is turned on himself as he searches/destroys his apartment looking for possible bugs. According to Wikipedia: “On the DVD commentary, Coppola says he was shocked to learn that the film utilized the very same surveillance and wire-tapping equipment that members of the Nixon Administration used to spy on political opponents prior to the Watergate scandal. Coppola has said this is the reason the film gained part of the recognition it has received, but that this is entirely coincidental. Not only was the script for The Conversation completed in the mid-1960s (before the Nixon Administration came to power), but the spying equipment used in the film was discovered through research and the use of technical advisers and not, as many believed, by revelatory newspaper stories about the Watergate break-in.”

36. “Nothing that happens is ever forgotten, even if you can't remember it.”

Spirited Away (2001)

Roger Ebert called this movie “a visual feast,” and that’s an understatement. Another critic, Scott Tobias, very accurately and concisely said, “much of what is great about Spirited Away defies description and simply must be experienced.” The story, by renowned Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, revolves around Chihiro, a young girl whose family is moving. On the way to their new home, they take a wrong turn, go through a tunnel, and end up in a strange, fantastical world. The movie gets compared to Alice in Wonderland for obvious reasons, but aside from that broad similarity Spirited Away is unique. Separated from her parents, Chihiro gets a job working at a bathhouse for spirits. Miyazaki introduces a dizzying progression of wildly imaginative creatures and characters. To try and summarize them (or the movie’s more subtle themes) in a post this size would be ridiculous. If you haven’t seen it, you should.

"It was a fine idea at the time."

2010-06-09T13:45:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I get stuck on a letter in my iTunes for a few days, and that letter this week has been E: So, some Elton John, some Elvis Presley, and some Elvis Costello. (I guess I'm stuck in "El-," to be more specific.) For Wednesday, this is Costello doing "Brilliant Mistake" in Tokyo in 1987. Enjoy:

14 K, 0 BB

2010-06-08T20:32:00.004-04:00

God, I love baseball. They said they wouldn't let him go past the sixth inning, but he went seven: Nationals phenom Stephen Strasburg, in his big-league debut, struck out 14 and walked none. He left the game with a 4-2 lead. I don't care that it's the Pirates; the build-up to this was ridiculous, and for him to pitch this way is really impressive. Must have been a great, great night to be at the game.

Before the game, people on Twitter were mocking the hype:

Stephen Strasburg has finished his pre-game supper, informing his infield, "One of you will betray me tonight."

Now they're expressing their own comic hype:

Stephen Strasburg's curveball just punched physics in the eye and stole its girlfriend.

Stephen Strasburg's fastball just beat Apollo Creed and Rocky on the beach. It then tenderly hugged his curveball in slow motion.

And some are saying things that even a Yankees fan like me finds disgusting:

I don't want to wait until 20teens to see him in a Yankees uniform, I want him NOW! Come to NY, Stephen! Come to us!

Hey Nats, don't wear out Strasburg's arm. Up here in the Bronx we play through October.

Actions and Reputations

2010-06-08T19:25:00.002-04:00

In an excerpt from his new memoir, Christopher Hitchens writes about drink, a subject that tends to follow him around:

I once paid a visit to the grotesque holding-pen that the United States government maintains at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. There wasn't an unsupervised moment on the whole trip, and the main meal we ate—a heavily calorific affair that was supposed to demonstrate how well-nourished the detainees were—was made even more inedible by the way that water (with the option of a can of Sprite) flowed like wine. Yet a few days later I ran into a friend at the White House who told me half-admiringly: "Way to go at Guantánamo: they say you managed to get your own bottle and open it down on the beach and have a party." This would have been utterly unfeasible in that bizarre Cuban enclave, half-madrassa and half-stockade, but it was still completely and willingly believed. Publicity means that actions are judged by reputations and not the other way about: I never wonder how it happens that mythical figures in religious history come to have fantastic rumors credited to their names.

Oh Mercy Mercy Me

2010-06-08T10:22:00.002-04:00

The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico continues to boggle the mind, for various reasons. First, from a site called FlowingData, some statistics about BP's track record of safety expressed in a striking chart. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has several levels of violation, the worst of which is labeled egregious willful:

Between June 2007 and February 2010, BP received 760 egregious citations across six refineries. The 145 other refineries in the U.S., combined, received only one.

Most of those citations to BP "reflect alleged violations of a rule designed to prevent catastrophic events at refineries."

But while BP's culture (and clear lack of a reasonably effective back-up plan when the risks were so high) is maddening, what's really stunning is the perspective this all grants to levels of oil consumption. My friend Miles sums it up (italics mine):

Based on most estimates, the BP well is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico about 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day, roughly 504,000 or 798,000 gallons every 24 hours. If the leak continues unabated until August, as many experts expect, the total amount of oil leaked will end up somewhere between 1.08 million and 1.7 million total barrels, roughly 45 million to 71 million gallons. That's a hell of a lot of oil. Enough oil, for instance, to threaten the Gulf Coast's fragile ecosystem, while simultaneously kneecapping the region's economy. Not enough oil, though, to meet or exceed even 8.5 percent of our daily consumption of oil, which stands, with or without the Deepwater Horizon explosion, at a shocking 21 million barrels a day.

Movie Mini-List #2: Euro-Horror

2010-06-06T20:14:00.010-04:00

When I first started counting down my 100 favorite movies, in October 1972, the plan was to have occasional posts by guests writing about their favorite movies in particular categories. Alas, I’ve only featured one to date, my friend Dez’s look at De Niro’s best movies not directed by Scorsese. Now, another writer with a pen name, Ranylt Richildis, has been kind enough to contribute. The five movies below are some of her favorite “Euro-horror” flicks, taken from a series she has at her own terrific blog, Roughen.
And Soon the Darkness (1970, dir. Robert Fuest)

Hands down one of Fuest’s best pictures (and an unsung gem of a ’70s chiller), And Soon the Darkness relies on evocative minimalism and clean, uncluttered shots to make both daylight and the wide-open French countryside sinister. When two female tourists get separated near a menacing little town, the breathing space generated by Fuest and director of photography Ian Wilson is cloying rather than comforting — almost agoraphobic by design. There’s too much open field and too much dead air between Jane (Pamela Franklin) and her missing friend (Michele Dotrice), and the only hiding places to shelter in are bushes that probably conceal perverts or ramshackle cafes that attract brutes. The situation is complicated by a too-eager-to-help hep cat (Sandor Elès) who trails the girls on his moped, then force-teams himself with Jane when she finds herself alone on the deserted route. The way Jane is ordered around by men or bossy elders is part of the day’s horror — And Soon the Darkness is a meditation on the dangers of being young and female in an objectifying world, and the tension mounts with every leer or warning, as does Jane’s exasperation. The movie benefits from capable performances and realistic dialogue, but the real star is the production design and how well it lends itself — even and especially in broad daylight — to our growing sense of dread.

The Grapes of Death (1978, dir. Jean Rollin)

If horror movies are merely the kitschy manifestations of humanity’s greatest fears, then a tale about a toxic wine harvest might point to an anxiety particular to the French. Regarded by some as Jean Rollin’s best film, and generally considered a fine entry in the Walking Dead genre, The Grapes of Death plays off French oenophilia and the importance of the industry to the nation. When an experimental pesticide used on a grape harvest winds up poisoning the brains and bodies of all who imbibe this year’s vintage, zombie-like maniacs wander the countryside lusting for the blood of the living. Our unsuspecting heroine (Marie-Georges Pascal) hurtles straight into Romero country by train and must fend for herself in a region where pretty much everyone enjoys their vino (with grave consequences; alcoholics metaphorized into zombies?). The film has a distinctive look with its mossy, misty, stony countryscapes, and the acting is above average for both Rollin and Euro-horror. The pace is rambling, like the ruins that dot many of the film’s exterior shots. Watch for French porn star Brigitte Lahaie and a surprisingly convincing severed head dummy (in a film with both very good and very weak make-up effects). Grapes is a nice eco-horror piece in the vein of Jorge Grau’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and others from the 1960s and 1970s.

To the Devil a Daughter (1976, dir. Peter Sykes)

Many Hammer fans prefer the studio’s earlier films and cold-shoulder the later ones produced as it struggled to keep in step with the times. But some of us appreciate this final entry in the original Hammer pantheon. (I add the word original because Hammer Studios climbed out of its coffin in 2008.) To the Devil a Daughter has naturalistic acting, a bit of edge, and the need for audience deconstruction — all unexpected positives. But it can’t match Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and other popular occult films Sykes was emulating, tasked as he was with making Hammer Studios a guaranteed pound sterling. Dependable Christopher Lee is an excommunicated priest who points his faith in a more sinister direction, towards a satanic god. His church raises Nastassja Kinski, who grows up to become a nun marked to bear the seed of the devil. High jinx ensue when the nun’s father (Denholm Elliott) and an occult writer (Richard Widmark) try to protect her from that destiny. Enjoy some nicely claustrophobic framing shots from very low and very high angles, and a disturbing birth scene wherein a mother’s legs are bound together, sealing off the birth canal. Women will squirm, and some viewers will get a chuckle out of the clerical costumes the Satanists sport, identical to Catholic uniforms.

[Ed. Note: I couldn’t move on to the next movie without sharing this still from To the Devil a Daughter, which Ranylt featured on her blog.]

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971, dir. Robert Fuest)

Fuest’s talent for art direction helps to make this the best of the Phibes movies. He’s crafted a series of dreamlike tableaux and suffused them with sumptuous color, art deco tucks and corners, and the generally peculiar. The story: a grieving theologian/organist (Vincent Price) exacts revenge on the medical team that let his wife die on the operating table. He designs executions around the mythic ten plagues of the Pharaoh and secures the collaboration of one Vulnavia (Virginia North), the Audrey Hepburn of psychedelic assassination. Joseph Cotten rounds out a skilled cast as the corny inspector. There’s no need to argue that this one’s deliberately campy — what with Price in the lead role — but it’s camp with an engaging, unique difference that’s hard to define. Among the unforgettable images: death by frog-mask at a masquerade ball, and Phibes’ surreal operating theatre.

The Virgin Spring (1960, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

Some might consider it a stretch to classify a Bergman film as “Euro-Horror,” but The Virgin Spring is by now so tied to the exploitation flicks it inspired that I can’t help but watch it in this light. The movie’s plot has grown into a lasting horror trope: a daughter is raped and murdered by drifters who make the mistake of sheltering in her family’s house and pay dearly. In Bergman’s version (based on lore, like so much of our horror literature and film), the daughter (Birgitta Pettersson) is attacked by three men as she makes her way to a Sunday sermon. The killers find themselves in her parents’ home later that afternoon, and father Max von Sydow takes his revenge with anguished, oh-so-Scandinavian precision. Sink into Bergman’s pristine medieval aesthetic tinged — like the scene with Max and the tree — with remarkable expressionism. The Virgin Spring is nearly too quiet, too stately, and too pretty for the revenge horror genre, but that revengeploitation seepage can’t be contained by Bergman’s socio-religious frame, nor has it ever been handled so masterfully. Knockoffs include Craven’s The Last House on the Left, Deodato’s The House on the Edge of the Park, Lado’s Night Train Murders, and Hayer’s Revenge. Make a day of them.

Imperfection

2010-06-06T01:05:00.006-04:00

I was thinking about writing a post with various thoughts to mark the one-third point of the baseball season, but I'd rather focus on two recent events: Armando Galarraga’s “perfect game” and the retirement of Ken Griffey Jr. (Post about Griffey to appear sometime in the coming days.)

Unless you’re entirely indifferent to both baseball and all mainstream news organizations, you know that Galarraga got the first 26 Cleveland Indians out last Wednesday night. The 27th batter, Jason Donald, grounded to first baseman Miguel Cabrera, who fielded the ball and tossed it to Galarraga at the bag. Replays showed that Galarraga was there a half-step before Donald, but umpire Jim “I just cost that kid a perfect game” Joyce called the runner safe. Joyce, checking the replay, admitted he blew the call almost as soon as the game was over.

Three things to cover here: What to do about the call, how the participants reacted, and the weirdly amazing pitching so far this baseball season.

The day after the game, on the New York Times’ baseball blog, Tyler Kepner wrote:

[T]he notion that Galarraga should be retroactively awarded a perfect game is misguided. It was not a perfect game. The game continued after Joyce awarded Jason Donald first base. A perfect game is defined as a full game in which nobody on a team reaches base. It’s simple. And it didn’t happen.

The first three comments below Kepner’s post all strongly disagreed with him. I was the sixth reader to leave feedback on the post, and this is the relevant part of what I said:

To the other commenters so far, would this mean going back to other games throughout history and making sure that an umpiring error never resulted in other perfect games being lost? Because this happened on the last play of the game, it stands out, but it seems reasonable to think it's happened before, in the middle of games. Changing it retroactively seems supremely silly.

So, that’s how I feel about the idea, since discarded, that baseball might award the perfect game after the fact.

Another commenter on the post (228 comments followed mine) made an interesting point: “From now on, in any perfect game situation, there will be enormous pressure on umpires on close calls in the final inning to err on the side of the perfect game and avoid a Joyce-like backlash.” Of course, you could say that this pressure has always been there. But this person’s idea of what to do about it, which involves some kind of 24-hour rule change that would allow this result to be altered while keeping most (but not all) future results from such alteration, is ridiculous.

But even more compelling than the incident itself was the way the participants handled it. Are you sitting down? They handled it with dignity. I know! Not only did Joyce immediately accept accountability (which wouldn’t be newsworthy in a perfect, or even much less imperfect world), but Galarraga, who had been unfairly denied a career-defining accomplishment, accepted the outcome with what appeared to be a genuine combination of levelheadedness and good humor. As another Times commenter put it: “I think we got something better than a perfect game -- an example of perfect sportsmanship and stoicism in the face of great disappointment. To me, that's more stunning than a perfect game would have been.” It’s 2010, and I have to agree.

(As for what this all means about instant replay in baseball, etc., I remain a staunch traditionalist. Bruce Weber recently wrote, “Umpires have been ingrained in major-league baseball since the inception of the National League in 1876, somewhere approaching 200,000 games ago, and it’s likely that the umps have botched a call or two in every one of them since then,” and that the sport has survived just fine despite this. I reviewed Weber’s book about umpires here.)

What Joyce’s call kept from happening, astonishingly enough, was the third perfect game in less than a month. There have only been 20 such games in the history of the sport, and two of those came in the 19th century. There has been a trend toward more of them, with seven thrown between 1881 and 1981, and 11 since then. But still: three in a month? This is in addition to several other pitching achievements so far this year. I won’t bore you with all of them, but here’s the most exciting: The Rockies’ 26-year-old Ubaldo Jimenez is 10-1 with an ERA of 0.78. He’s given up one home run in 80+ innings. He’s on pace for 30 wins, which almost certainly won’t happen (if it does, watch out), but he doesn’t have to get that many to hold everyone’s attention through the summer. Of the 552 times a pitcher has won 23 or more games in a season, only six of those have occurred since 1990.

Getting back to perfect games: Who was the worst pitcher to throw one? Charlie Robertson was pretty undistinguished. So was Don Larsen, except for his World Series perfect game, still the only one in postseason history. They’re challenged by Len Barker, but I’d say it comes down to those three.

The most efficient perfect game? The one thrown by Addie Joss, who needed just 74 pitches to finish off the White Sox, 1-0, on October 2, 1908. His opponent in that game, Ed Walsh, wasn’t too shabby either -- nine innings pitched, one run (unearned), one walk, and 15 strikeouts. That’s a pretty great story, throwing 15 K’s and losing that way. Not as great as Galarraga’s story, though -- which will be recounted among fans for far longer, and with more affection, than most perfect games.

"He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could have."

2010-06-03T14:51:00.004-04:00

For this Wednesday-Thursday, the Lemonheads doing "Confetti" at a 1997 show in Germany. Enjoy:

The Movie List: 45-41

2010-06-03T12:05:00.007-04:00

45. "And it's love which is awakened."

Toto the Hero (1991)

This one should either be here, five to 10 slots higher, or 40 slots lower. Or maybe 140 slots lower. I really have no idea, not having seen it for a while. But I obviously remember liking it a great deal. It tells the story of Thomas, who nicknamed himself Toto during a wildly imaginative childhood that has given way to a wildly imaginative adulthood and old age. Even as he nears the end of his life, Thomas retains his faith in a paranoid fantasy that he was switched at birth, during a hospital fire, with a man named Alfred, a rich man whom Thomas both envies and loathes. Part of the reason for this is that Thomas is in love with his sister from an early age, and not being officially related to her would be a help. The movie hops around a lot in time, and there are many flights of fancy, including tulips that sway back and forth while someone sings Charles Trenet's jaunty "Boum." Still, despite the sweet nature of some of the material, as one fan on imdb put it, “This is a tight, mean, well-constructed tale about the feeling that dogs us all -- is this all life is? Could I have been happier as someone else? Are they happier than me? Am I lucky or unlucky? And most importantly, this: Why, when life seems so hard at times, can we find so much joy in small things . . . ?” If memory serves, I agree.

44. “Sure, I lie from time to time.”

The 400 Blows (1959)

Among other things, one of the best full-length directorial debuts in movie history. Truffaut modeled the story of troubled adolescent Antoine Doinel (brilliantly played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) on his own life. In her essay about the movie for the Criterion Collection, Annette Insdorf writes:

Born in Paris in 1932, [Truffaut] spent his first years with a wet nurse and then his grandmother, as his parents had little to do with him. When his grandmother died, he returned home at the age of eight. An only child whose mother insisted that he make himself silent and invisible, he took refuge in reading and later in the cinema.

Like Antoine, Truffaut found a substitute home in the movie theater: He would either sneak in through the exit doors and lavatory windows, or steal money to pay for a seat. In The 400 Blows, Antoine and René reenact the delinquency and cinemania of the young Truffaut and Robert Lachenay (who was an assistant on The 400 Blows). Their touching friendship is captured in René’s unsuccessful attempt to visit Antoine at reform school.

Insdorf also relates the casting of Léaud, and Truffaut’s instructions to him, “not to depict adolescence from the usual viewpoint of sentimental nostalgia, but . . . to show it as the painful experience that it is.” This clip of Léaud (and other kids) auditioning for the movie is one of my favorite things. Truffaut went on to make four more movies starring the character, none of which I’ve seen. I need to remedy that. Also, I just discovered that The Simpsons recreated the movie’s famous last shot, this time with Nelson. Hilarious.

43. “A person doesn't change just because you find out more.”

The Third Man (1949)

Rarely have I seen a movie stolen as brazenly as this one is by Orson Welles once he finally appears as Harry Lime, closer to the end of the picture than the beginning. The theft is especially impressive because the rest of the cast is also terrific. Joseph Cotten plays Holly Martins, an American pulp writer who goes to Vienna in the wake of World War II because his friend Harry has promised him work. Instead, he arrives to learn that Harry has died in a car accident. Or has he? Well, no, he hasn’t. And when he’s first seen, it’s suddenly, lit in a shadowed alcove in one of the great moments in movie history. At one point, Lime, trying to rationalize his crimes, says to Holly:

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

That line got parsed by a lot of people. Welles later said, “When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks.” And writer John McPhee said that at the time of the Borgias in Italy, Switzerland was “the most powerful and feared military force in Europe,” not the Switzerland we know as a punchline to jokes about neutrality.

42. “My years are not advancing as fast as you might think.”

Groundhog Day (1993)

Groundhog Day is very funny. The scenes with Ned Ryerson alone make for a comic gem. But there is also a great deal of philosophical depth to the movie, and not just for a Hollywood comedy. As Phil Connors (Bill Murray) relives the same day over and over again (director Harold Ramis has estimated he does this for 30 or 40 years’ worth of days), he perfects both himself and his relationships with other people. His move from frustration (Why is this happening?) to narcissistic fun (I’m gonna sleep with everybody! I’m gonna drive drunk!) to despair (I’m gonna kill myself!) to self-improvement and enlightenment make the movie a natural fit for religious groups of all stripes. Ramis said:

At first I would get mail saying, “Oh, you must be a Christian, because the movie so beautifully expresses Christian belief.” Then rabbis started calling from all over, saying they were preaching the film as their next sermon. And the Buddhists! Well, I knew they loved it, because my mother-in-law has lived in a Buddhist meditation center for 30 years and my wife lived there for 5 years.

Whatever your spiritual persuasion, Groundhog Day has something to make you think about, and it will make you laugh while it does it.

41. “Suppose I shot you. How’d that be?”

Badlands (1973)

The second post in this blog's long, illustrious history was actually about this movie. Here is that post, in slightly altered form:

Terrence Malick wrote and directed Badlands, and released it in 1973, shortly before pulling a Salinger-like disappearing act. He released Days of Heaven in 1978 and then fell off the map for 20 years.

Just like Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), Badlands depends heavily on a slowly gathered sense of dread and a liberal use of voice-over narration by one of its main characters. It's a much smaller, more modest story, though, and it's the better movie because of it. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek play Kit (25) and Holly (15), a pair of disaffected South Dakotan youths (is there any other kind?) in the late 1950s. It's not giving anything away to reveal that someone gets killed and the pair hits the road to outrun the fuzz and then several other people get killed and no one gets any less disaffected. It’s sort of what Natural Born Killers might have looked like if Raymond Carver had written it -- What We Talk About When We Talk About Going on a Killing Spree.

Sheen is extraordinary, and though I've never been a big fan of Spacek, she does a terrific job with the voice-overs, which are often spare but poetic:

He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I'd stopped even paying attention to him. Instead, I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, where nobody could read them.

Despite its brilliance, the movie does have quite a silly tagline, according to imdb: “In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people.” This is nothing, though, compared to my favorite tagline of all time, which is from The Lift, a Dutch horror movie about a demented elevator: “Take the stairs! Take the stairs! For God's sake, take the stairs!”

Captain Burrito

2010-05-28T11:03:00.003-04:00

Via my friend Chris, I found this story, which has a lede that, if it's not the greatest lede ever, is at least a 1 seed:

The Brevard County doctor who was arrested for groping a woman while dressed as Captain America with a burrito in his pants will not go to jail.

Hang Tight, Kittens

2010-05-26T23:34:00.003-04:00

I can't possibly post a song this week after only posting one thing since last week's song. Pathetic. All I can say, as I often do, is that I have a lot of things in the hopper. This time, I'm not lying. The next installment of the movie list is just about ready, I have a movie list from a guest ready to go up, a post about a Pulitzer-nominated play about pro wrestling (for real), a funny clip involving Star Wars, and a few other goodies as well. The problem is, I have had no time this week to actually finish and post any of them. Soon, my kittens, soon.

The Cup Approaches

2010-05-23T21:28:00.003-04:00

Like most Americans, soccer inspires in me a feeling of deep, deep sleepiness. But I also have a theory that soccer is anti-human. After all, to insist that players aren’t allowed to use their hands is particularly perverse when you consider the importance of the opposable thumb in human (and cultural) evolution. To not be allowed to use your hands is to be kept from being fully human.

The one time I let my guard down and gave soccer a fair (or fair-ish) chance was during the 2006 World Cup. I was working at the time for HarperCollins, on the same floor as soccer fanatic and proselytizer David Hirshey. I watched a couple of games in David’s office, and once accompanied him to a pub at lunch time for another. The knowledgeable enthusiasm of someone else helped, as did the level of play. For the first time, I understood why one might be a soccer fan. But soon after, I happily resumed my slumber.

Now, it’s almost World Cup time again. David has co-written a book that serves as both a history of the event and a preview of this year’s tourney. There was a brief moment the other day when I considered studying up a little and then attempting to get involved with the games, maybe going to a series of local international pubs and writing a series of dispatches about the experience. (If the 100 movies list is the only organizing conceit for this blog in the coming weeks, then lord help me.) I’m less high on the idea as of the moment, but we’ll see.

In the meantime, enjoy the video below, which shows part of a recent game that pitted the pro club Athletic Bilbao against a group of 100 kids. The kids’ team was made up of 100 players for the first half, and a different set of 100 kids for the second half. As one news outlet put it: “The 20,000 crowd, and most of the players, struggled to keep track of the ball as the La Liga superstars’ rigid 4-4-2 diamond formation was swamped by the youngsters’ 20-60-17 headless chicken system.” The video is shaky, but very much worth watching. This looks like tremendous fun:

"The party ain't jumpin' like it used to."

2010-05-20T12:40:00.003-04:00

For this Wednesday-Thursday, I'll leave it up to you to determine the amount of guilt in the pleasure. I only know a few of Usher's songs, the biggest radio hits, and this is the only one that ever grabbed me. He seems more talented than silly, but only just. (The spoken intro to the song below, "Burn," is hilariously cheesy.) He seems significantly responsible in some way for the career of Justin Bieber, a flop-haired eunuch currently popular with the nationwide cabal of 8-to-13-year-old girls who completely rule the popular culture. So we have to take some big, big points off for that. OK, enough. Usher doing "Burn." Enjoy:

Bacon Lives

2010-05-19T12:59:00.000-04:00

I don't spend a lot of time going through my own archives, but someone asked me a question today that sent me back to find something. And while I was there, I ran into my good buddy King Curtis. I sometimes go back to find song clips that I've posted, and a maddening amount of the time they've been removed from YouTube and are no longer functional. But I am happy -- thrilled -- to announce that the club remix of "Bacon is Good For Me" is still available for your edification.

At the time I first posted about Curtis, I suggested that he star in a show with the father featured on a very popular Twitter page, which I discovered around the same time. (And which got much less funny very quickly.) Now, CBS is turning that Twitter page into a sitcom called $#*! My Dad Says (that's the real spelling of the title), starring William Shatner. Of course, the show will be terrible. I still say HBO should have paid to put Curtis and the old man in a condo together for a few months. That would have been much more entertaining.

Deepwater Horizon

2010-05-17T12:52:00.003-04:00

More soon, but for now: If you missed Scott Pelley's report on 60 Minutes last night about the Deepwater Horizon explosion (and one survivor's story in particular), it's riveting. Both parts below. (You have to wait through some commercials for the segments, but it's worth it.) And if you're interested in photography of the disaster, you probably can't do better than the Boston Globe's Big Picture.

Ozzy Lets the Dogs Out

2010-05-10T10:23:00.002-04:00

Vanity Fair interviews Hold Steady singer Craig Finn, and here are two brief excerpts. No. 1:

A few years ago, you wrote a piece for The Guardian nominating the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” as one of the worst songs of all time, specifically for the lyrics “There’s a killer on the road/ His brain is squirming like a toad.” Have you written any songs or lyrics that in hindsight you wish you could take back?

There aren’t specific lyrics that bug me, but I do feel like I’ve maybe rhymed “bar” and “car” a few too many times in my life.

No. 2, responding to a question about rock star myths:

I remember some of the wild things I’d hear about Ozzy Osbourne as a kid. I heard that when you went to an Ozzy Osbourne concert, he lets loose all these dogs and the audience has to kill them before he’ll go on stage. Oh, and you know what my favorite myth is? That Gene Simmons died in a car accident and was replaced by a robot. I hope nobody thinks that happened to me, because what can you say? “I’m not a robot!”

The more you deny it...

...the more it’s probably true.

"Part of that’s a girl thing, honey..."

2010-05-09T12:14:00.002-04:00

For Mother's Day, via my buddy Dan Carlson's Facebook page, a funny, touching video in which a conversation between a mother and her son (a 7th-grader who has Asperger's syndrome) is set to animation. It's really great. Enjoy:

Also for today, my friend Alysia reads a moving essay she wrote about her mother (who died when Alysia was just two), being raised by her poet father, and raising her own two beautiful children. The link includes an incredible photo (especially if you know her) of Alysia as a child on the cover of one of her father's books. Enjoy.

The Movie List: 50-46

2010-05-04T16:23:00.008-04:00

Man, that was a long time to have Phil Collins at the top of the page. Sorry about that.

My friend “Dez,” God bless him, is paying close attention to this list, and he has complained (as I knew he would) about the “ties.” A quick note about them: They’re not ties. They’re simply movies that, for one reason or another, go very well together, and they just give me an excuse to add (and discuss) more movies. Of course, they do fall in a similar place in my ranking, but they’re not technically tied. To Dez and anyone else who is bothered by this, there’s only two instances left. Not counting the one below. Counting that one, there’s three.

50. “He’ll flip ya. Flip ya for real.”

The Usual Suspects (1995)

I saw this three times in the theater when it was released during my senior year of college. The Washington Post said, “The Usual Suspects may be too clever for its own good,” and I can see that. Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars out of four, and included it on a “most hated” list, proving that, despite his recent high-quality blogging and Twittering and deserved public sympathy, his taste has never been the most reliable barometer. I enjoyed the complexities of the caper, but it wasn’t the Keyser Soze “reveal” that kept me coming back, it was the ensemble cast, especially Benicio Del Toro (shockingly young-looking) as the marble-mouthed Fenster. Haven’t seen this one in years and years, but the initial impression it made on me is enough to put it this high.

49. “I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen.”

Say Anything... (1989)
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
High Fidelity (2000)

John Cusack is the cinematic avatar of my generation, and we could have done a lot worse. If any of your heads are about to explode because this entry contains three movies—hi again, Dez—just be glad it’s not four. I almost added Better Off Dead at the last second. These movies constitute a progression, or a non-progress: Lloyd Dobler holds up that boom box, teaches a generation to yearn for girls out of their league to a Peter Gabriel soundtrack, and then a decade later, Rob in High Fidelity is still trying to figure out him and women (and soundtracks) as he approaches mid-life. In these three movies, Cusack—sorry, the characters he plays—deals (or doesn’t deal) with getting older, something my generation was never going to be very naturally talented at, for a multitude of reasons. Maybe the most appropriate pairing in pop-culture history is Cusack and High Fidelity, since the novel the movie was based on included this passage:

What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

Likewise, no one warned me off John Cusack movies.

48. “You don't look out for yourself, the only helping hand you'll ever get is when they lower the box.”

Hud (1963)

Few phrases in the English language are as appealing as young Paul Newman. In this adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s debut novel, Horseman, Pass By, Newman plays Hud Bannon, the son of a Texas rancher. Hud is a drunken, brawling, womanizing . . . well, tool. (“The only question I ever ask any woman is ‘What time is your husband coming home?’ ”) His father, Homer (Melvyn Douglas), is an upstanding, old-school exemplar of manly decency. The conflict between them is the center of the story. I think I’ve read understandable criticism that says Newman is too cool as Hud, that he makes it too easy to sympathize with and want to be the character who is tragically flawed. I say, who cares? He’s great in the role, and I think the more you can side with Hud, the better and more complicated the story becomes—otherwise, it’s almost too neatly Manichean. Maybe I’m making up that I ever read that criticism, in which case thanks for reading a conversation between me and myself. The black-and-white movie is full of great dialogue, beautiful cinematography, and a stark, incredible scene involving the mass killing of cattle.

47. “You gonna finish that?”

Diner (1982)

OK, so maybe my Cusack-educated generation doesn’t have a monopoly on having trouble growing up. Barry Levinson’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut is set in Baltimore at the end of the 1950s, and follows a group of friends in their 20s reunited for a wedding. The cast is a 1980s potpourri: Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly, and Paul Reiser. There’s something blessedly universal in the American experience about sitting around a diner late at night and bullshitting with friends. The sometimes ad-libbed scenes in Diner capture it as well as almost any other movie (there are a couple of movies still to come on the list that strongly compete in the Male Banter category). One blogger points out that the movie was in a distribution purgatory because the studio heads were mystified by its lack of incident. Then Pauline Kael wrote a rave in The New Yorker that gave the movie life. She called it “wonderful,” and wrote of the men in it: “Conversations may roll on all night, and they can sound worldly and sharp, but when these boys are out with girls, they're nervous, constricted, fraudulent, half crazy.” Kael’s right; this is very much a movie about boy-men trying to wrap their heads around women, and thus life in general. Geoffrey Macnab wrote, “the film expresses perfectly the incomprehension these men have for the women in their lives.” Levinson makes gentle fun of that incomprehension, as when one character devises a football quiz for his fiancee, and makes the wedding dependent on the results.

46. “I wrote a hit play and directed it, so I'm not sweating it either.”

Rushmore (1998)

Having loved Bottle Rocket, loving Rushmore had me figuring that Wes Anderson could do no wrong. Well, you live, you learn. I’d still say everything he’s done is worth seeing, but as I’ve probably already written a hundred times (apologies), it’s been dispiriting to watch his style devolve into a calcified set of tics. (They’re tics that fully survived the transition to stop-motion animation in The Fantastic Mr. Fox.) I’m sure you all know about Rushmore, when the tics were fresh (refreshing, even), so I’ll just close with an excerpt from Anderson’s funny essay about personally screening the movie for Kael, a hero of his:

Finally, the movie ended, and I took Ms. Kael's hand and walked with her out of the theater.

“I don't know what you've got here, Wes.”

I nodded.

“Did the people who gave you the money read the script?”

I frowned. “Yeah. That's kind of their policy.”

We started slowly down the steps. “Just asking,” she said. It was a short walk to the car. “At this point, I would usually tell you not to worry if you have to carry me, since I only weigh 85 pounds. But you look like you don't weigh much more than that, yourself.”

"But to wait for you is all I can do."

2010-04-28T23:58:00.004-04:00

For Wednesday, because his name came up earlier this week, this is Phil Collins doing "Against All Odds" at Live Aid in 1985. (If that being 25 years ago terrifies you, raise your hand.) Enjoy:

Zoom

2010-04-27T20:21:00.005-04:00

The first in what I hope will be a series in which I take photos of ads in the subway from afar, and then zoom in to a detail added by a citizen of New York. Like so:

AP Headline of the Day

2010-04-27T17:06:00.000-04:00

Police Say Man Wrapped in Toilet Paper Robs Store

At the Movies

2010-04-27T14:43:00.004-04:00

I’ve been meaning to write about a movie that I saw earlier this year (the best thing I’ve seen in 2010 so far), but now a couple of others have piled up. So I’ll get to the best at the bottom of this post. But I’ll start with Greenberg.

A big fan of Kicking and Screaming, a lukewarm admirer of The Squid and the Whale, and someone who avoided Margot at the Wedding because of how bad word of mouth was, I was expecting Greenberg to continue Noah Baumbach’s odd trajectory from sentimental wise-guy to curdled misanthrope. In some ways, it does, but I liked it more than I thought I would. It grew on me. I enjoyed the second half more than the first. Still, my two most prominent thoughts about it are both criticisms: First, the lovely Greta Gerwig (at left) is more complicated and interesting as Florence than Ben Stiller is as Roger Greenberg. (Roger is staying at his brother’s family’s house in California while they’re on vacation in Vietnam, and Florence is the brother’s personal assistant, who develops a relationship with Roger while he’s in town.) The opening scenes are of her alone in her car, and in many ways it feels like it should be her movie. With just a small bit of editing, and some different scenes near the end, the movie could have been called Florence, and I think it would have been stronger for it.

The second thing is something not unique to Greenberg, though it’s potently represented by it. It’s a general thought about the depiction of depressed people in movies. Greenberg has recently gotten out of the hospital after a nervous breakdown, and he treats Florence very badly. It’s possible that Greenberg is just a miserable person who anyone with even a modicum of social normalcy would ignore. But if I may, based on both Florence’s reactions to him and my own experience in life with people who are depressive, I would say it’s more likely that Greenberg is a roller coaster. It’s not that there aren’t people in the world who are just black clouds, pure and simple. It’s just more common that people who are depressive compensate for that (naturally, not calculatedly) with any number of other “skills,” like humor or intellect or storytelling. Thus, when the black cloud appears, the memory of those skills gets them some leeway from people that they might not otherwise enjoy. The problem is, Greenberg doesn’t attempt to show the roller coaster. Whatever Roger’s charms might be, they’re well hidden. It’s undoubtedly difficult -- both for a screenwriter and an actor -- to convincingly show highly complicated, dichotomous behavior within the course of two hours or so. But it might be rewarding to see them try more often.

I watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) over the weekend. Directed by Peter Yates (who also did the great Breaking Away), it only occasionally follows Coyle (Robert Mitchum), a small-time crook trying to decide whether to snitch on his clients, focusing instead on a broad range of bank robbers, gun runners, and hit men. The Criterion Collection’s DVD is, as always, terrific. As other people have noted, the movie’s soundtrack (in that cheesy 1970s land between funk and porn) has not aged well, but it’s not that distracting -- and even fits, since you couldn’t mistake the setting for any other time period. Everything else is great. The penultimate and final scenes, in particular, are perfectly done. You can watch a scene at the Criterion site, and see A. O. Scott’s video review of the movie here.

OK, now for the early best of 2010. Fish Tank is the second full-length feature by British director Andrea Arnold, and the acting debut of Katie Jarvis, who plays 15-year-old Mia. Jarvis is 18, and was noticed by a casting director while arguing with her boyfriend at a railway station. That’s a perfect story, because Mia is the angry working-class daughter of a single mother. Passionate about dance but disaffected about everything else, Mia’s life is changed by the appearance of her mother’s new boyfriend. The cast is uniformly excellent, but more importantly Arnold is a supremely assured filmmaker -- the look and feel of the movie make even the most minor moments part of an original whole. Highly recommended.

Chthonic Creatures and Peyote Breakfasts

2010-04-24T12:03:00.004-04:00

Every time I see one of those ads that make me feel like my life is incomplete if I don't have a phone on which I can simultaneously talk to four friends, watch three different sporting events, start a small business, and book hotel rooms, I come that much closer to renting a small house in Saratoga, throwing my laptop in the Hudson on my way up there, and wishing you suckers luck with everything. Technology fetishism is out of control. That said, I'm on Twitter, and there's no denying it. So I figure that while I'm there, I should have some fun. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, we are here to fart around. To that end, along with a good friend I've just started a new Twitter page called Imaginary Cormac, on which we post in our best approximation of the voice of Cormac McCarthy. The first nine entries are below. We hope you'll feel like following along.

A new horizon crackles along the edge of half-dark like the dream of a malevolent God. Twitter you think you are ready. You are not ready.

In the red gloaming a dwarf amanuensis crawls through the sagebrush kindling fire as he goes. Or Herb's kid got ahold of some sparklers.

Polenta sticks to All-Clad pans like the afterbirth of some chthonic creature not yet named.

Impossible to capture the God-rapture of horses and thunder in 140 characters. Maybe 150.

Just finished a creosote and peyote omelette. I’ll be in the shed for a few hours.

The day is beset by a rapacious darkening such that ocular mortals must abdicate mindfulness. Bedtime.

Taking votes for setting of my next novel: Ciudad Juárez before the dawn of time, the inside of a wolf’s mind, day care center.

A murderous androgynous raven flown from some distant sunless moon or moonless sun. Bieber.

Rooster woke me at dawn. Had him for breakfast at dawn:01.

The Movie List: 55-51

2010-04-23T01:22:00.007-04:00

55. “See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you're not missing out on anything.”

Before Sunrise (1995)

I think there’s something like a critical consensus that the sequel, Before Sunset, is a better movie, and that might be true. But this one has a larger claim on me. I was in college when I read Anthony Lane’s enthusiastic review in The New Yorker. Finding the movie in San Antonio wasn’t going to be a cinch, but it did play at what passed for the local art house. I remain a sap, but I was a real sap back then, and the movie’s chatty flirtation knocked me over. It’s also associated with an anecdote I’ve probably shared before here, and that I love: I raved about it to a post-college girlfriend with whom I felt a strong connection. We rented it and watched in silence. I imagined, of course, that her silence was a product of rapt appreciation. As the credits rolled, she turned to me and asked, “Why did you like that?” Ah, love. In the glimpses I’ve seen since, I can imagine age might lessen this movie’s impact on me, but Richard Linklater’s calm touch still makes it a treat.

54. “You have no respect for order, you are arrogant, you’re disruptive, and you celebrate chaos!”

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

I wrote a full post about this movie soon after I saw it, which is here. It begins like this:

Albert Camus famously wrote that the most important philosophical question, the one that must be answered before any others can even be asked, is whether or not to commit suicide. It’s a question that wouldn’t occur to Poppy, the playful, tittering center of Mike Leigh’s terrific Happy-Go-Lucky.

Happiness is something that philosophers and artists alike largely ignore as a subject of study. Torment, tumult, grief, unrequited love, and boredom are more common inspiration. And the ledger shows that this is a good thing. On the one side, you have Anna Karenina, Mozart’s Requiem, David’s The Death of Marat, hell, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. On the other, you have “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

To examine the causes of suffering, and how we react to them, tends to be both more interesting and more edifying than portraying how we surf along on times of joy. But sustained happiness is another thing, and it would be fascinating -- maybe even helpful -- to see it depicted more often.

53. “I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you.”

Manhattan (1979)

This would have been a lot higher if I hadn’t rewatched it recently. It’s not that it’s bad (53 ain’t chopped liver). It’s just that . . . well, OK, parts of it are bad. Allen’s worship of New York is probably stronger when it’s less blatant than it is here, but still, Gershwin on top of black-and-white shots of the city is a good combination any way you can get it. And even though Allen's character's relationship with Muriel Hemingway’s character was stilted and creepy even before, you know, real life unfolded, and even though Diane Keaton’s character takes some time to like . . . OK, I’m going to talk myself out of this choice if I’m not careful. No, no, I’m still a sucker for the New York stuff, and the movie is funny, like when Allen says, “My first wife was a kindergarten teacher. She got into drugs, and she moved to San Francisco; went into est, became a Moonie. She’s with the William Morris Agency now.” Or when he accuses someone of being “the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald Emotional Maturity Award.” I no longer think this is his second-best movie, which is the position it occupies on this list. But I think the world will survive the error.

52. “A minute of silence can be a long time.”

Band of Outsiders (1964)

I’m more of a Truffaut guy than a Godard guy. There, I said it. God, I feel liberated. But I love Band of Outsiders. You can still see its impact on filmmakers all the time. Quentin Tarantino’s production company is called A Band Apart, a play on the film’s French title, and Wes Anderson should be paying royalties to Godard’s estate. (Tarantino was also reportedly influenced enough by the movie’s famous dancing scene that he echoed it in Uma and Travolta’s dance together in Pulp Fiction.) In Outsiders, Odile (Anna Karina) and two new male friends, Franz and Arthur -- who both fall for her, and why not? -- plan to rob the villa where Odile lives with her aunt. The movie only features the kind of suspense that description would imply toward the very end. Until then, it’s all slow charm. The three friends run through the Louvre, trying to see the entire thing in a world-record time. (The previous record was 9:45.) Criminals exist in a distinctly New Wave mode, with their fashionable caps and argyle sweaters and guns under the kitchen sink. Watching it again not long ago, I also remembered it uses soundtrack better than most movies on the list. Only the sag of some early scenes keeps it from being even higher.

51. “I demand to have some booze!”

Withnail & I (1987)

Some cult movies, like Spinal Tap or Rocky Horror, actually outgrow the cult label. I don’t think this one has. Set in London and the English countryside at the end of the 1960s, and based on the experiences of writer-director Bruce Robinson, Withnail & I follows two struggling actors as they run out of money in the city and go to an uncle’s estate for some R & R. Paul McGann is very good as Marwood (the “I” of the title), but Richard Grant as Withnail is just brilliant. (In fairness to McGann, the script favors Grant tenfold.) Withnail is a raging drunk, and Grant, who allegedly never drank in real life, gives perversely entertaining line readings in scenes like the one where he takes to drinking what I'm pretty sure is lighter fluid, or when, biblically hung over, he moans, “I feel like a pig shat in my head.” When the two do get to the country, they realize they’re singularly unsuited for it. (A local rides by, and Withnail frantically tells him, “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”) Almost nothing at all happens in Withnail & I. The sole drama is whether Withnail’s portly uncle, played by Richard Griffiths, will have his way with Marwood. But the script is great, the performances are four stars all-around (leave that to the Brits), and the final scene, in which Withnail recites a soliloquy from Hamlet in the rain, standing at the outskirts of the London Zoo, is profound, revelatory, and on a short list of the very best endings I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen the movie, you really should watch it before seeing the finale. But if you have seen it, and just want to be reminded, it’s here.

"But I didn't see that the joke was on me."

2010-04-22T21:55:00.005-04:00

For Wednesday-Thursday, a strange trio of clips below. Don't ask how all this happened. It's the result of some YouTube browsing yesterday, which obviously got a little out of control. First, a clip from a 1970s TV show in which Olivia Newton-John, ABBA, and Andy Gibb sit in the round and halfheartedly cover a couple of Beach Boys songs. Odd. Second, two Hawaiian sisters (I think) do a pretty cover of "Don't Worry Baby" by the Beach Boys, one of my all-time favorite songs. Lastly, a clip from 1974 of the Bee Gees doing "I Started a Joke" in Melbourne, Australia. Enjoy.

Humanity Update: . . . Still Nuts

2010-04-21T17:20:00.003-04:00

If you've lately convinced yourself that the world is anything but a loosely held together circus of lunatics, please find your way to the Starbucks cafe at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square at your earliest convenience.

Yes, many of the people are studying or talking to friends. But the exceptions are strong. One pair, a balding, scraggly-haired guy in blue jeans and a woman reading a paranoid book about the government, have gotten up and switched tables the last three times that people adjacent to them have left. In the course of about five minutes, total. They seem to be evolutionarily wired to move into freshly unoccupied spaces.

But they are beaten to the crazy-punch bowl by a woman to my left. She is wearing a hoodie and earphones. She looks a bit (just a tiny bit) like Alfre Woodard. She is laughing hysterically with regularity. Like, hand to the mouth, stomp the floor, fight back tears laughing. What is she reading? A guide book to Helsinki. (The guy sharing the table with her -- it's awfully crowded in here -- doesn't seem to mind. He looks as if he wandered in here because OTB closed for the night. He just pulled a vodka bottle out of a plastic grocery bag, surveyed the paltry quarter-inch or so left sloshing around at the bottom, and calmly put it back in the bag with an almost imperceptible look on his face of aw, shucks.)

Blame Eyjafjallajokull

2010-04-21T10:51:00.003-04:00

The volcano did it. The volcano kept me from blogging all this time.

Wait, what?

OK, the volcano didn't do that. It's kind of amazing what it did do, though. You know, shutting down the planet and all. Take that, globalization. (More incredible photos of it here and here.) By the way, how come some crackpot preacher hasn't yet attributed this volcano to God hating gay people? Or have they, and I just missed it? Or maybe the volcano itself hates gay people? Or God hates that gays are allowed to do so much international traveling. Maybe that's it. I'm just saying, there has to be some kind of reasonable explanation for this.

In the meantime, I'm back from a few days of total silence brought on by: employment search, gray moods, and stomach distress. How all those things are related I'll leave up to future generations.

When I recently wondered about the future of this blog, a loyal commenter wrote, "You will be missed." Well, geez, I thought. Bit of a preview of my own funeral, eh? Plus, I haven't closed up shop yet. There might even be a Rumsfeld-ian surge in coming days.