Who Asked Me?

Not to play the hackneyed “boy am I old” card, (in the words of the immortal Hank Kingsley “fuck it, let’s face it — I am“) but I remember when David Letterman had a morning show on NBC. It spanned the summer of 1980 lasting just four months, but was a precursor to his best work starting two years later on the same network: Late Night With David Letterman. He was just starting to cut his teeth on what would become some of the best improvisational bits on ‘Late Night,’ and the failures were as compelling as the hits. I can recall him taking a camera into the hall at NBC and riffing on the choices in one food vending machine, including a suspicious looking hot soup called “Beefy Mac” That was as much of a set-up as he required. Letterman had a genuine air of danger — hard as that is to imagine today and as much as any gap-toothed Hoosier might. It could have gone either way at the end of those four months. Luckily someone at the network saw fit to giving him another shot. He came on after Carson; well past most of middle America’s bedtime but prime viewing for college kids and other folks inclined to burn the midnight oil. He also ran parallel with the rise of the VCR (‘Video Cassette Recorder’ for those of the Jimmy Fallon set) making it possible to check the show out the following day. This was something Johnny didn’t have for most of his career.

We all fight getting old. One of the more obvious traps is the tendency to believe, or worse yet proclaim, that things were “better in our day.” Age breeds delusion; this is true. Yet I maintain that I have decent perspective on some things. Television, particularly the episodic variety, is better now than it used to be.  HBO and Netflix offer some of the best stuff going, arguably better than mainstream cinema. Movies aren’t bad either and the quality of box office film (despite the very term ‘film’ being mostly a misnomer nowadays) is as good as it was thirty years ago. There’s great live music out there if you’re inclined to find it. The Internet has forced even older musicians to work on their chops because live performance is where their bread is now buttered. Sports are every bit as compelling and, living in New York, it’s evident that plays and stage productions are thriving. Books (or their modern equivalent) are holding their own. Just because words are more easily disseminated doesn’t stop the cream from rising to the top. That culture is circling the drain is largely myth. There’s just more junk clogging the pipes than there used to be.

But Jimmy Fallon is no David Letterman. I mention Fallon because he’s the new king of late night ratings. Meaningless as this might seem in an era where network television is becoming passé, it still says that the bulk of ‘relevant’ TV watchers — those eighteen to thirty-four — find something compelling enough about Fallon to tune in on a regular basis. And this, if you’ll excuse my “get off my lawn” moment, is something I don’t get. I understand his appeal as a high-energy, good looking young guy. But when he stood up on his desk to do his “Oh Captain, my Captain” bit in tribute to Robin Williams, something inside me just said “no.” I have to be fair here .. part of it is that he’s too young, and was only fifteen when “Dead Poet’s Society” (a film I’d never consider a ‘highlight’ of Williams’ career) came out. But he’s not that young. At forty Fallon is now well past Letterman’s age at inception. There’s just something about the guy that’s too earnest, too polished, too glib.

Put another way, Carson was Fallon’s age now when he had his classic “Tonight Show” moment with Ed Ames throwing a tomahawk. I wasn’t even born yet, so claiming it for my generation would be wrong. But watching it as a kid on the anniversary specials, I knew that there was something instinctively cool about Johnny, even if I didn’t get the “I didn’t know you were Jewish” reference. There was something very adult about the show, like the kind of conversations you heard listening through your bedroom wall, emanating from the cocktail party that your parents were throwing in the living room. Fallon, I’m going out on an old guy’s limb to say, has no such mystique. It’s all cuteness, overplayed reverence for his older guests, and hair gel. It’s Youtube clips and Twitter references. And it’s Jimmy and Jennifer Lopez in a “Tight Pants” skit. Yeah, he’s of the correct demographic .. but he sure ain’t Johnny or Dave.

Not to bust exclusively on Jimmy Fallon. He is a talent, and his guitar-playing impersonations of Springsteen and Neil Young are on the money. Letterman could never have pulled this off and wisely never tried. But what Dave could do in spades and in his prime was man on the streets bits, armed only with a camera and microphone. Watching him gently badger the proprietor at an NYC retail outlet called “Just Shades” that sells only lamp shades is vintage Dave. “But seriously ..what, what can you get besides shades here?” This was the slightly less gentle host; the one who was willing to make regular folks, and most particularly pompous celebs and those in positions of power, look almost foolish. He replayed a clip the other night from eighteen years back on tax day, asking how many guys dressed in bunny suits can you get into an H&R Block? It was the kind of bit he shied away from in later years and it resulted in a middle aged office manager getting rather physical with one of the extras. “We later found out that was ‘R’ Block,” he quipped after the replay. “H is fine.”

Letterman has a handful of shows left before signing off next week, and the run-up to the finish has been solid. He’s become a better interviewer in his later days and this has offset losing some of his edge. Don Rickles and Howard Stern were on the other night and Rickles, while still sharp at eighty-nine, seemed to fail to realize that he had only one segment. He spent it praising Stern and saying next to nothing about the departing Letterman. (Who knows .. perhaps he did realize it and it was a stroke of brilliance.) None of it seemed to bother Dave, who lately seems like a man comfortable with his body of work — and ‘comfortable’ is not the first word that comes to mind with Letterman. But his discomfort served him well, too, and I wouldn’t mind seeing some of it spread around after he’s gone.

I’ve been watching an NBC show called “The Slap” of late. It’s an adaptation of an Australian TV series which is based upon a novel of the same name. I make no apologies for watching the show, despite its absolutely sucking. This is just the way it is, sometimes.

The series revolves around an incident at a 40th birthday party in Park Slope, Brooklyn for a guy named Hector who is the son of Greek immigrants. One of the attending couples comes with their five year old son, Hugo. Hugo is a problem child. He busts into Hector’s vintage jazz record collection, uproots carefully potted tomato plants, and screams bloody murder at any adult trying to control him. Hugo’s parents dote over him in a permissive fashion that’s both smothering and disinterested. His mother still breast feeds him. When the other kids form a pickup baseball game, Hugo goes ballistic after striking out and starts swinging the bat wildly at everything within reach. Hector’s cousin Harry, observing that his own child is at risk, goes to retrieve the bat. Hugo swings the bat at Harry and kicks him in the leg, prompting Harry to slap him across the face. Thus, a premise and title are born.

I’m not a big fan of hitting children . But the hysteria that ensues after this slap suggests something more suited for Kent State in the early 70s. Harry, it is quickly established, is a prototypical alpha male with prominent brow and dark, challenging eyes. He takes the sole conservative stance in conversation, much to the horror of the others. He’s a ‘self made man,’ owns a vintage car dealership, and is banging his assistant. (Hector, too, is having an affair with a teenage girl, but unlike Harry he wrestles hourly with his conscience.) Harry also hits his wife, for good measure. Hugo’s parents, or more specifically his breast feeding mother, decide to pursue a lawsuit. Police, judges and attorneys become involved. One slap sets a series of events in progress that threatens to dismantle a closely knit family and group of friends.

Though it would never get past network censors, “The Pussies” would have been a more suitable name for this series. Somebody who knew a thing or two about obsessive child rearing must have been involved in choosing Park Slope, Brooklyn, for the setting of this particular adaptation. The neighborhood seems to be the east coast epicenter for indulgent parenting. There was a news item recently about an incident in Park Slope where a six year old kid on a push scooter (the expensive kind that are standard issue items and rites of passage for all area four year olds) ran a middle aged woman off the sidewalk. The woman, understandably shaken, berated the child loudly, suggesting that he watch where the fuck he was going. This prompted the kid’s mother to dress the woman down while threatening to sue and demanding a formal apology. Was this, she wanted to know, any way to address a six year old child? Well, in my opinion .. fuck yes.

I’ve attended musical performances in the neighborhood at Prospect Park where parents bring their kids of all ages, from infancy to early teens. These aren’t, generally speaking, Metallica shows, but more subdued performances with a cultural flare and decibel levels that rarely exceed that of a living room television. Still, these parents make the kids protect their precious ears by donning high tech, noise canceling headsets. What’s the point of taking your child to a musical performance if he can’t hear anything that’s going on? There’s nothing more infuriating or idiotic looking than some one year old kid, still relegated to a safety chair and sporting a pair of headphones like he’s working the runway at JFK or testing jet engines at the Boeing plant in Seattle.

“The Slap” could have been a better show had it chosen to treat its subject matter with levity or even a trace of irony. Instead it forces a kind of earnest solemnity on the viewer which demands that it be taken deathly seriously. There is no humor and its players all struggle to come to grips with some form of imagined modern enlightenment. In the process they become cardboard cutouts. Worse yet they’re boring, ineffective wimps, in need of Chris Farley being air lifted into the occasional scene with a Matt Foleyesque “LA DE FRICKIN’ DA ..” It makes me long for the days of my youth when shows set in Brooklyn were of the “Welcome Back Kotter” or even “Honeymooners” variety. Jackie Gleason provided more soul with one “Baby you’re the greatest” than “The Slap” does in eight episodes .. or at least this is how it seems to me.

And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor – Bowie

The Mother of All Snow Events was scheduled to hit New York Monday night, but by Tuesday morning it more resembled a brother in law who borrows your power drill then loses the bit. Ever since 2005 and W’s less than spectacular response to Katrina (“Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job..”) politicians have treated weather events with the kind of reverence formerly reserved for limb-missing veterans and winning Super Bowl coaches. Bloomberg fell short on a snow day a few years back, failing to get the necessary street-clearing equipment up and running. But he only made that mistake once and there were two plows for every block at the first sign of the next flurry. By the time Hurricane Sandy rolled along — an admittedly big event — he was logging more air time than the Weather Channel, forever repeating the same rote advice. Any Einstein needing a heads-up to not go wind sailing in a hurricane probably has it coming to him. And so it was with this most recent storm that De Blasio and Cuomo queued for the podium, grave warnings in fist. The mayor predicted an event of historic proportion, packing an almost immeasurable wallop. Subways were shut down, flights canceled, and cars forbidden from roadways. Then it came and went with all the impact of a Tony Randall dance interlude.

DeBlasio handled the subsequent razzing with self-effacing confidence and aplomb, reminding all that it was better to be safe than sorry. This is probably true, although when shutting down a city the size of New York dollar-costs are always an inconvenient caveat. You can’t win, as mayor, and Bloomberg might have told De Blasio as much. At the end of the day you’re at the mercy of the prognosticators and, historically speaking, weathermen have proven as trustworthy as the uncle who shows an unhealthy interest in your G.I. Joe collection at Christmas. They’re reliable as the high school senior who tells you as a sophomore that attending the upcoming ‘Yes’ concert is “guaranteed to blow your mind.” The morning after they’ll offer a brief excuse before getting on to the next forecast. This was what folks saw yesterday, watching TV at home on a mandatory off-day: some guy with the standard Sam Champion haircut, repeating the old better safe than sorry adage and that predicting four feet and getting one is better than the reverse. “It ended up missing us by fifty miles,” we were told, as though disaster were averted by the length of an eyelash. I don’t know — ‘fifty miles’ in this computer-savvy era of instant answers sounds like a fair distance to me. It’s akin to a sportscaster predicting a Mets World Series or business insider telling you to stockpile G.E. If we can genetically engineer pigs and order food or a car service with the push of a button, why is it so impossible to predict, within reasonable accuracy, what some big cloud is going to do?

***

I saw Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” over the weekend. Its appeal registered somewhere between Citizen Kane and Winter Storm Juno. At 84, you have to admire Eastwood’s spunk, just making it over to Morocco and getting something like this done. As Woody Allen famously put it “80% of success is just showing up” .. and Clint’s been showing up for 84 years. He’s also honed his craft with economical instincts that have served him well. In a cinematic world that values volume and flash over substance, he’s developed a lean and athletic approach to film making influenced by mentors like Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. His films vary in scope; not all are on scale with ‘Sniper’ or pack the subtext of ‘Unforgiven.’ He’s made his share of small films too and, along the way, the inevitable clunkers. Considering his career I’m reminded of the liner notes for Volume 8 of Bob Dylan’s ‘Bootleg’ series, “Tell Tale Signs.” Author Doug Daller writes of being invited to some studio sessions in ’83 for Dylan’s “Infidels” and being incensed to learn that his favorite cut — a tribute to blues legend Blind Willie McTell — is being left off the album. “Aww, Ratso, don’t get so excited,” Dylan tells him. “It’s just an album .. I’ve made thirty of ’em.” And so it seems, to me anyway, with Eastwood. His pace is steady and unrelenting and even at 84 he never seems overly anxious to “get everything in.” A few years back I was talking movies with a couple I know and mentioned that I intended to see “Trouble With The Curve” — a relatively small baseball flick Eastwood had done along the way. “I could never go to anything he’s done after that speech at the Republican Convention” the male half asserted, and yet another topic on my increasingly small list of conversational fodder was crossed off. While I agreed that the empty-chair speech was ill-advised, boycotting Eastwood, to me, is akin to never listening to Dylan again.

American Sniper has caused quite a storm, due in no little part to its solid numbers at the box office. The film was first advertised in November but held back two months for wide release. Whoever suggested employing this strategy has likely been promoted to a corner office, as the timing could not have been better. It arrived on the heels of the Charile Hedbo automatic weapons attack in Paris and 800,000-strong “Death to Cartoonists” marches in Syria. Not that any of this relates, specifically, to Eastwood’s film, but people have a way of lopping things together. As is typical, rash response has come from opposite poles of the political spectrum. The far left have dubbed it irresponsible propaganda and suggested, like those folks in Syria, that it should be banned from theaters. The far right, in practiced rock-head fashion, have embraced it as a rallying call for the patriotism of picking off bad guys (and girls) from a safe distance. Strictly speaking, I didn’t find it blindly patriotic. It is, of course, a Clint Eastwood film — and this has to factor in to one’s decision to buy a ticket, just as it would with Oliver Stone or Spike Lee. But this isn’t Clint playing Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway in “Heartbreak Ridge,” either. Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of sniper Chris Kyle is sympathetic but not glamorizing. He’s shown as a patriot, but in the sense that anyone could be, lining up women and children in his cross-hairs. Some cursory research on the real Kyle suggests that, among other unflattering things, he may have been prone to exaggeration. The movie is likely worthy of the same criticism, but again, it’s a movie. I found its biggest fault to be its glossing over of his recovery from PTSD, but I did think Eastwood made a good choice in not showing his eventual, untimely death, stateside and at the hands of another shell-shocked vet. Bottom line, provided you’re capable of reasoned digestion and nuanced viewing .. it’s worth checking out.

Saw Bob Dylan at the Beacon on Saturday night. I’ve written about him here before, several times. This probably should have been a Bob Dylan blog — exclusively — from the start. Could have avoided a lot of pretentious rambling in favor of more select pretentious rambling. Like Allen Ginsberg in the Dylan doc “Long Way Home”: “I heard ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, I think, and I wept .. because it seemed the torch had been passed to another generation.” It’s his emphatic pause on “wept” that’s really cringe-worthy. Not that there’s anything wrong with music evoking strong reaction; it’s just that nobody’s slant, least of all mine, is necessary when it comes to Dylan. So I’ll skip to Jon Pareles’ take on Bob in the present, observing it’s no nostalgic oldies show and that he concentrates on his stuff from the late 90s forward:

Mr. Dylan has every right to not look back. The songs he has released since his mid-50s are powerful, mysterious, down-home jeremiads with bitter bravado and backhanded humor. Mortality, social collapse, disaster, betrayal and the wreckage of love are sketched over Chicago blues, old-timey picking and honky-tonk country. Mr. Dylan has replaced the fluidity and arrogance of youth with a more genuine, lived-in sense that he has nothing to lose and no one but himself to please. He doesn’t soften what he sees; he inhabits it, baleful and acute.

In case the “Mr Dylan” stuff or superior prose isn’t a giveaway, Pareles writes for the New York Times. I’d use my own words but it would only be a less eloquent transcription. This is the Bob Dylan I’ve followed, and saw on Saturday night, nailing ‘Love Sick’ just before the intermission. “I’m sick of love / but I’m in the thick of it” .. spare, pointed, and unflinching. Economically whimsical with “Soon After Midnight”: “I’m searching for phrases / to sing your praises.” Early Roman kings, in their “sharkskin suits, bow ties and buttons, high top boots .. drivin’ the spikes in, blazin’ the rails, nailed in their coffins in top hats and tails.” How’s that sit with you, Allen Ginsberg? He stands center stage most of the show in a cream colored suit with dark stripes down each pant leg and a wide-brimmed  hat. The only words besides lyrics came at the intermission: “Why thank you .. we’ll be back shortly.” The other point of note is that his voice sounded better than I’d ever heard it; rasped and barking on some of the ‘Tempest’ tunes but downright melodic, by Bob standards, on “Forgetful Heart.”

Nothing that Mr Pareles didn’t write better in his review. I’ve included the link above, so give it a read.

Baseball, according to those who favor the game, is the sport most like life. This is one of those platitudes that typically goes unchallenged, provided you’re in a room filled with other baseball nuts. Some lives are undoubtedly more like an early-October 49er’s game, complete with being assaulted by a neanderthal fan in a Frank Gore jersey while you wait for a stall in the men’s room. But that’s another matter. Let’s assume for a moment that baseball is life. It’s seasonal and long, with pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training in February and the World Series occasionally extending into November. It’s both forgiving and unforgiving; some errors lead to disaster while others go all but unnoticed. It challenges; a batter who succeeds in three of ten attempts is said to be exceptional. It evolves slowly and is reluctant to accept change. It tends to romanticize its past; cheaters of yesterday are revered as scrappy characters who had what it took, while those today are merely corrupt and a reflection of an ugly, modern era. It’s both pastoral and citified with parks offering lush, green fields placed in the center of urban life. And it’s uniquely American .. you’d be hard pressed to find a Parisian making baseball-life analogies.

So here I sit, in the middle of my life, making awkward transitions and reaching futilely for inspiration, with baseball always there. I’m in between big games today, having experienced an exceptional run over the past five years. My team – the San Francisco Giants – has reached the playoffs three times and claimed two World Series titles since the 2010 season. They’ve been stellar thus far this post season, traveling to Pittsburgh to win a one-game elimination wildcard match, and then to Washington D.C. where they took two in a row from the Nationals on their home field. And yet I can only focus on yesterday’s game — a loss at home in San Francisco that turned bad on an errant throw by their pitching ace, Madison Bumgarner. Baseball, it would seem, is a lot like my life: an embarrassment of riches bestowed upon one who can only ever round third base with a worried look on his face.

I probably got all the baseball I needed on Saturday when the Giants took the second of the two aforementioned wins in the nation’s capital. It was a cold night in D.C. and the ballgame stretched out over six-plus hours and eighteen innings. I’d watched all of the two previous games but something about this one felt off kilter to me. Perhaps it was the middle eastern fare I’d ordered for delivery around the fourth inning; a salty overload of doughy pita, couscous, and lentil soup. I was thirsty and uncomfortable and my team, down by a single run, wasn’t doing much on offense. So I retreated to the bedroom and napped for a bit, waking to a buzzing phone and friend’s text message: “Crazy game.” I checked up on things and saw that it was a tie, heading to extra innings. So I set out to take a walk, figuring that I’d keep going until the match was resolved. I walked and walked and walked, all the while staring at the red, green and blue dots of Major League Baseball’s “Gameday” application on my cell phone. (Red for balls, green for strikes, and blue for balls in play.) By the seventeenth I’d covered six miles of Brooklyn pavement and an equal number of shut-out innings from Giant’s reliever Yusmeiro Petit. My feet were tired and much as I was still too nervous to watch, I went inside. Then, in the top of the eighteenth, Brandon Belt happened.

The truth is, baseball isn’t life. Life is messy and incomplete and taking place instantaneously in a million different forms. Life can include Brandon Belt’s home run, but it isn’t defined by it. People pay good money to take yoga classes or learn to meditate in order to achieve mindfulness. Mindfulness, according to Wikipedia, is “a term derived from the Pali-term ‘sati‘, which is an essential element of Buddhist practice, including vippasana, satipathhana, and anapanasati.” I’m not sure what any of that is, although I think I may have eaten some of the latter once, before a meal at an Italian restaurant. What it all boils down to is this idea of being present; of living in the present. If one can accept the present moment and be at peace with it, then he can be free from the pain of past regret and future worry. It’s said to be an effective technique for relieving anxiety and aiding in the prevention of drug and depression relapse.

I’m not sure where I am on this scale of Nirvanic aspiration. I’ve probably considered it more than some and done far less in reaching for it than many others. Sometimes, in the middle of a long run or immediately thereafter, it can seem within my grasp. But such moments are elusive. The moments on either side of Brandon Belt’s home run swing in the top of the eighteenth inning Saturday night — those interminable moments that stretch out and on forever — those are the ones I still have trouble with. But in that moment, at the risk of sounding sickeningly pretentious, I may have caught glimpse of the indefinable. It didn’t last long and peaked with a graceful, looped swing and bat discarded in relieved possibility of the game’s greatest promise: coming home. I can’t be certain, but for those seconds that the baseball traveled, I think I was more or less present .. just as I am now, of course, but somehow better able to appreciate it. And then he was back in the dugout basking in the congratulations of his teammates, likely already thinking about fielding first base in the bottom half of the inning, about getting three more outs. Three days later, following a tough game three loss, the home run is all but a distant memory. The task of winning one more game is still at hand. Life goes on.