Skip to content

Double Cross Punica

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

..to an undercover cop who had a sister named Jan
– Lucky Wilbury

Tuesday morning and I’m back from the holidays in California, scaling the steps at Borough Hall just off the 5 from Grand Central and elevating in to the chilled Brooklyn air. A vendor’s cart with stacked pomegranates comes in to distant focus and brings my mom to mind, who placed said fruit in my Christmas stocking. Yes I still get a Christmas stocking and in brief response to the inevitable shit-giving that this will elicit I offer an indisputable fact about my mother: she’s better than yours. She included it because I asked for one many Christmases ago, which was something I’d forgotten. Eating it two nights later it occurs to me that I must have had it going on back then. I also got the complete Larry Sanders box set and running shoes for Christmas, but cool as they are they ain’t no pomegranate.

I pass the stand and pass on my second pomegranate in as many weeks. (Above praise not withstanding, the juice tends to stain your fingertips a dark red-purple.) Further down Court Street I note the “Steak” and “Chops” adverts atop Sam’s restaurant – another old school Brooklyn establishment on my ‘to try’ list – and recall the Spencer rib eye I had at Marin Joe’s the evening before my return flight to New York. For those taking notes, yes I tend to gravitate toward places named Sam’s and Joe’s more than I do those favoring clever French idioms. Joining me for dinner that second-to-last night of 2010 were Tom Myers and Paul Theodoropoulos, former Monaco Labs Glory Days cohorts and generally pleasant company. We covered the conversational gamut from aging to early Matthew Broderick films before calling it an evening three hours later. As the saying goes, you can’t make new old friends, and more specifically two who immediately understand any “Roberta and Abdul” reference without requiring an elaborate set-up. I always anticipated challenges associated with getting older, but never figured that one would be explaining how Martin Hall used to put his pool cue away to psyche you out as you were lining up your winning shot in the Monaco lunch room.

Back in New York there’s a lot of snow talk going around; apparently Bloomberg was out of town for the first airport-closing round of storms and forgot to leave a note for the adjunct plow drivers not to take any supplemental gigs. That shit doesn’t fly here as folks have people to see and things to do. Notes were taken and adjustments made for Seasonal Storm Number Two, and as I stood at my window observing large pre-dawn flakes coming down it seemed nary a handful fell without some kind of public works vehicle scraping them off the pavement. Say what you will about Bloomberg, he rarely gets it wrong the second time around and his matter-of-fact, no bullshit approach fits this city’s mentality like a glove. I capitalize on the maneuverable streets and functioning public transit the following day to take the G Train two stops over to State Street and a small, local guitar repair shop. The young and apparently capable proprietor sizes up my axe, a time-worn Guild D-35 with ample nicks and faded varnish, and tells me that it’s more than fit for a few minor adjustments. I tell him that I was considering a new purchase, but concluded that this one still sounds too good to put down .. and he concurs. Some things, like pomegranates, are worth coming back to.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (4)

Christmas In New York

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Recorded this the other night on my cell phone before heading down to the train platform. I’m not sure why I’ve hung around this city as long as I have, but these forty-four seconds might hold a few clues.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (0)

Wiki Shuffle

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

The Internet? Is that thing still around? – Homer Simpson

I’m kind of fuzzy on this WikiLeaks deal, and suspect that this puts me squarely in the middle of a large section of the population. The website publishes previously unseen documents gathered from anonymous news sources and leaks – some of which, while not disputed as accurate, are deemed volatile and potentially threatening to diplomatic relations and even national security. Like “Wikipedia,” it was initially geared to accept contributions and amendments from readers, but no longer does. Its founder, Julian Assange, is an Australian dude and “Internet activist” who kind of looks like a cross between Johnny Winter and Martha Stewart. He was remanded in custody in London and is facing extradition over some potentially trumped-up sexual assault charges in Sweden.

This is where the aforementioned fuzziness starts to creep in. Possibilities for an ulterior government motive in Assange’s detainment abound. He’s enabled any rube with an Internet connection to tap in to information previously allowed only privy political insiders and provided “anonymous sources” with an immediate, pervasive outlet. None of the revelations are particularly shocking, unless you’ve been under the impression that our military never screws up big-time or that various heads of state don’t share opinions on reputed kooks in positions of world power. But Assange has made some powerful enemies and drawn criticism from Obama himself, all of which can’t be entirely unwelcome for a self-described “combative” personality. It truly is the Golden Age for uppity Internet activists.

Some of the published documents could potentially foster greater government accountability, while others likely place a match that much closer to a fuse nobody wants to see lit. More relevant are transparency issues and the potentially explosive ramifications of these developments in what still amounts to the nascent stages of the Internet. Despite the existence of a generation that’s never known anything but an Internet world, this thing is just getting started. Consider that WikiLeaks contents are banned by the Library of Congress, yet I can pull them up on my Android phone while walking home from yoga class. (OK, I don’t do yoga – but I’m trying to make a point here.) And while the western world may follow China’s lead in restricting access, it isn’t that simple. Assange’s site has skipped domains several times and uses multiple online servers. As soon as a piece of relevant, verified information appears on the Internet, it is picked up and distributed by numerous sources. Simply put, once it’s out there it’s out there.

For those leading the charge for absolute transparency, the question is what comes next. Just because we all have digital proof of a naked emperor doesn’t mean anyone knows how to work a sewing machine. And really, what good would a one week heads-up on the Cuban Missile Crisis have done anybody, besides denying a few more nights of decent sleep? My guess is that the same thing that’s kept me behind the curve on all of these WikiLeaks developments – innate apathy and indifference – will probably be what squeezes a few more quality days of clueless bliss out for the general masses before everything comes crashing down. When or how it all comes crashing down is anybody’s guess. If the biggest calamity thus far is some egotistical Australian doing time in the Stockholm pokey, there’s a good chance bigger injustices are occurring elsewhere.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (0)

Sciopero

Friday, December 3, 2010

Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way. – Homer Simpson

The Italian military – or some branch thereof – is on strike. I garnered this information last night from the BBC News. Sometimes I like to expand my horizons beyond Arnold Diaz and his Shame, Shame, Shame segments on WNYW. Diaz did the Shame On You segments for twenty years on WCBS before switching local stations. I met a kid when I first moved to New York who had gone to school with Diaz’s son. There’s one family counseling session I’d like to sit in on. “I seem to sense a theme here ..”

Back to the Italians. “Military strike” could only mean one thing there, and it has nothing to do with a premeditated attack. I lived in Perugia, the Umbrian capital, when I was twenty-four. If there’s anything they love to do in that country, it’s strike. Sciopero, they call it. During the time I was there, the banks, students, and museum workers all walked out in protest over… something. In the case of the banks, I’m not sure that anyone noticed. The lines were only slightly longer and more disorganized than when there were actual tellers on duty. The striking students were even less identifiable. They sat in the piazza outside the administration building smoking cigarettes and bullshitting, thereby replicating typical behavior when classes were normally in session. Anyone figuring that America has the market cornered on pointless civic uprising need only visit Italy.

But it’s an OK place, provided you don’t need to cash a check or get an education. They’ve mastered the three-hour lunch break over there, followed by the early evening passeggiata. As fundamental as it may seem, there are plenty of Americans who could benefit from setting aside time to both eat and walk. Italians also tend to dress better, which fits in with their concept of bella figura or making a fine public appearance. Some would claim that the effort is largely cosmetic, as evidenced by packs of sharply-dressed young dudes wolf-whistling and cat-calling anything within earshot resembling a female. I was accosted by an inebriated young local in a bar one night, bent on practicing his broken English by slurring through a description of what he’d like to do to my sister. Not having a sister, I didn’t pay the kid much mind, but my buddy Des pointed out what his brother Mick would have done were he there.

Des was an older Australian guy I met while taking an Italian language class. He was a political columnist on sabbatical, and his slant ran somewhere to the right of Mussolini. One day in class, the instructor was attempting to make a delicate and opinionated point about a certain segment of the Italian population whom he deemed less than sophisticated. “Kind of like the Abbos” Des piped up, in slang reference to Australia’s indigenous inhabitants. The remark drew some confusion from the predominantly non English-speaking classroom, but elicited glaring daggers from the two more liberal-minded Australian women sitting in front of us. “Well,” one of them reprimanded Des, “we did steal their land from them, didn’t we?” His response came immediately. “And it’s a good thing we did, too,” he shot back. “Because I’ll tell you what would’ve happened if the Japs had taken over. There would be two of  them left – one in an anthropological museum and another in the zoo.”

The women sat open-jawed and dumbfounded, amid a lot of curious looks from the other students. This was in the days prior to the coining of the term “politically correct” – but I’m fairly certain that it entered the vernacular sometime the next week. Despite his fascist overtones, Des wasn’t a bad guy. He bought me a lot of beers, related plenty of interesting life experiences, and never once did he go on strike.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (0)

Down By The River

Friday, November 26, 2010

stayed in Mississippi a day too long – Dylan

There’s a mouse in the house again, which is as good a place to jump in as any. I’ve been thinking about writing lately, while reading Deliverance for the first time since college. Watched the film again too, and it poses the interesting dilemma of how successful any artist should hope to be. Great movie, but I’ll never be able to read the book without the instant mental image of Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, Ned Beatty, and Billy Redden. That particular creative realm of possibility is forever gone from James Dickey’s novel and this is directly attributable to his ability to get the job done in the first place. Had he not been so apt with his words they wouldn’t have adapted them to screen. At least Dickey wrote the screenplay, and even nailed a nifty cameo as the small town sheriff at the end of the flick. Scott Fitzgerald never enjoyed either perk, and try reading Gatsby without conjuring Robert Redford or Bruce Dern. But I digress and in fact have been in constant digression for the past few weeks.

All bets are off once the camera starts rolling, and it isn’t entirely unlike putting one’s canoe in a river. You have a general idea of the direction the film will take through the gate, but you never know what you’ll get. Thankfully Deliverance was released in ’72 – decades before the question of whether or not to even use film was relevant. It was even made prior to the invention of faster stocks and camera lenses, making it necessary for Jon Voight’s cliff-scaling sequence to be shot day for night and lending an appropriately surreal air to the frames. It isn’t the technical I’ve been pondering though, but the metaphorical and evolutionary. A guy begins sitting in front of a blank page, creating a story with a river as its central, driving force. A few years later he’s in front of an actual river with a film crew waiting on a director to call for action. If I wanted to get really profound here I’d add something about some more stuff happening, a few more years passing, and him dying, but I won’t.

Deliverance the film makes no mention of its title; it simply comes to embody the production and fits indisputably. But the novel, which is the more impressive work, touches on it. It’s an early morning scene just prior to the canoe trip and the protagonist is home making love to his wife while envisioning the eye of a young model he’s seen during a photo shoot at his suffocating graphic design job:

The girl from the studio threw back her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha’s heaving and expertly working back, the gold eye shone, not with the practicality of sex, so necessary to its survival, but the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.

One criteria I have for proclaiming a book exceptional is that it elicits the unconscious thought “I could never write this.” The mouse is either a return visitor from a few months back or a relative – I’m not sure. He scurried out from behind the fridge, I think, as I was eating some cold pasta for Thanksgiving dinner. I had the building exterminator over the first time, but then pulled up the sticky traps he’d set around my house after giving it some more thought. Didn’t seem like a way I’d want to go, and I can put up with the occasional company every sixty days or so.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (0)

Home

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

We come on the Sloop John B
My grandfather and me ..  – West Indies Traditional

I was going to write something yesterday, after Madison Bumgarner’s pitching gem put the Giants one game away from their first San Francisco championship. I was going to say that, looking back on it, October 31st of my 21st year wasn’t entirely unlike his, except I spent it stuffing my face with miniature Milky Ways while he dominated the fourth game of the World Series. But I held off – we were still one game away and this thing was far from over.

Notice that I say “we” were still one game away. I’m not one of those delusional sports fans who imagines himself somehow connected to elite athletes because he has season tickets and played a few innings of baseball as a kid. My tie to the Giants has been an ongoing rite of passage and something as elemental as a son’s connection to his father. It isn’t about the joy of the game or the shared, treasured moments of a lifetime. I’ve known baseball fans like that and am enviously aware of their existence, enthusiasm, and sustained ebullience. Their appreciation is just as significant as my own, but their approach and interpretation much different. That bullshit never flew with my dad. We talked baseball plenty, but it was almost always about what was wrong with the Giants. It was oddly better when they tanked and didn’t come close to winning their division – less expectation, less to worry about. He said it as recently as October 10th, in an email: “Posey is slow but he is a hell of a player other than that … I am not too optimistic about the rest of the playoffs.” Only in knowing my father could you understand the strange comfort in such sentiment. Had he expressed hope, I’d have known that senility had taken hold.

Pessimism should never be confused with the absence of caring, or for that matter with the inability to enjoy life. When my brother was born, my dad brought a small baseball glove with him to the hospital – much to the chagrin of his own, more intellectually-minded father. I’ve heard the story many times about a distracted, first date with my mother in July of 1960, when my dad couldn’t pull himself away from the radio. Juan Marichal, in his rookie debut, took a no-hitter into the eighth and finished with a one-hit shutout. I wasn’t there in ’51 when Bobby Thomson hit his Shot Heard ‘Round The World, and yet I have a distinct image etched in my mind of Dad swinging from the light fixture in my uncle’s house. There were many seasonal peaks in my lifetime, too – league championships in ’89 and ’02, Mike Ivie’s grand slam against the Dodgers, Will Clark vs Mitch Williams .. too many to list, really. But win it all? That, like the Yankees, wasn’t what life was all about.

I’d said it long before Ken Burns did in his eloquent soliloquy set to a dramatic backdrop just prior to Game One of this World Series – baseball is about coming home. The quote is neither Burns’ nor my own, but is idiosyncratically relevant to anyone who’s ever followed and understood the game. I was watching Burns’ pregame monologue on a small screen attached to the seat in front me on a much-delayed JetBlue flight from San Francisco to New York just one week ago; an ironically appropriate circumstance on several levels. The Giants were opening the World Series back home, my brother and his son were at the park a few rows behind the first base dugout, and I was traveling in the opposite direction of the team’s 1958 move from the east to west coast. I’ve made the trip countless times over the last seven years, but this time was different. Sitting in the seat to my left was Dad.

We’d headed back to Brooklyn together to look at an apartment I was considering buying. It wasn’t an easy trip out; the old man isn’t exactly a care-free traveler and upon learning of a two-hour delay at SFO he let out an expletive so jarring that it elevated the airport threat-level from orange to red. His stay was brief but enjoyable, and though the Giants lost the third game while he was flying back Saturday night, by late Sunday they held a three games to one advantage over the Texas Rangers. At one point Dad had even made an uncharacteristically hopeful prediction: “if they take one of the games in Texas, I think they’ll do it.”

Neither I nor my father has ever met Tim Lincecum, the Giants’ 26 year-old, two-time Cy Young winning, right handed pitcher. He renewed my consistent interest in the team three seasons ago and I started paying attention to daily box scores again in Brooklyn. There was something invigorating about this goofy-looking kid who led the league in strikeouts but was often mistaken for a bat boy. But to imagine that he’d do what he did last night wasn’t within the realm of realistic imagination. I called my father after the last out and said “they did it .. the Giants won the World Series.” What had just happened defied clever phrasing. “They did?” he said – my dad, the biggest baseball fan I’ve ever known. “Oh shit, that’s great. I was recording it .. I was too nervous .. I’ve got to go watch.”

Oh yeah – I passed on the apartment.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (3)

Dancing With Myself

Sunday, October 24, 2010

There was this woman, Barbara. I’ve mentioned her before, somewhere in the vast archives of this blog. Tough old broad, veterinarian, didn’t talk much, sat next to me for several full Giants seasons back in the 80s. During a brief lull in the ’87 playoffs, sometime after Mike Krukow pitched a gem and before the Giants lost the series, she leaned over to speak. “You know,” she began, “I have friends who say they don’t like baseball .. they say it moves too slowly and they don’t understand the appeal.” She paused for a moment as the players took the field before finishing her thought. “I just think to myself  ‘well, that’s too bad for you.’  ”

I was watching Billy Idol when the Giants clinched a World Series berth in Philly Saturday night. I’d arrived in San Francisco a week before for my parents’ fiftieth anniversary, caught their party and attended a home win in between, and headed down to Mountain View for Neil Young’s always worthwhile Bridge School Benefit. It’s one of those only in Northern California, once a year, all-acoustic events and this year’s lineup was stellar – Buffalo Springfield, Elvis Costello, Pearl Jam and a lot more. But I was understandably distracted for the first few hours, with game six playing out three thousand miles away.

I’m not sure if I feel sorry for people who don’t follow baseball. Any real fan will tell you that there are two ways to take in a money road game when your team is involved. One is to face the music directly, own up and watch or listen to every pitch. The other is to simply acknowledge that it’s going on, and pick up any of dozens of clues around you. There were a lot of Giants hats at the concert – folks following the game on their cell phones and BlackBerries, fielding queries of “score?” from those not plugged in. There were odd pockets of cheers on the lawn where I was, high above the seats and stage. I of course knew exactly what was going on – they’d fallen behind by two, come back quickly to tie, took their starter out of the game, and locked into a nail-biter until the late innings. Then Juan Uribe hit a home run.

Ultimately it was a middle aged couple next to me with a good old-fashioned transistor radio. I leaned in close enough to hear until Giants closer Brian Wilson went to 2-2 on Ryan Howard with two outs in the ninth and the tying and winning runs on base. Then I backed off a few feet, let the music from the stage drown out the game, and kept my eye on the woman. She was holding up fingers to let me know the count. Full … three-two … foul ball … an eternity passed before it happened. She screamed and threw her arms up. I ran over and hugged her and slapped her husband on the back. Within ten or fifteen seconds the rest of the crowd was catching on and a steady, loud cheer erupted as Billy Idol looked out defiantly, singing Dancing With Myself.  “With the record selection and the mirror’s reflection” … certain that it was the best damn version of the song he’d ever played. And he was right.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (1)

Four For Five

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Ask any long-time Giants or Cubs fan and they’ll tell you that it indeed ain’t over ’til it’s over.  They won’t be using the quote in its original Yogi Berra “we’ve got a lot of fight left in us” sense, though. It will instead be uttered with memories of the likes of Bobby Richardson and Steve Bartman – obscure names having come and gone and meaning little to anyone other than those who truly cared and dared to entertain the thought “maybe this year ..” In Bartman’s case the association isn’t even deserved. He’s merely a marker, a guy who was there at a particular time in Cubs history to signal the inevitable changing of the postseason tide in the wrong direction. Richardson caught a Willie McCovey line drive in ’62 – I wasn’t around, but those who were are occasionally said to make it out as a more spectacular play than it really was. No matter; whether it was a leaping grab or an act of self-preservation, like Bartman it simply had to be. It represented the original moment in which the Giants confirmed that moving west negated all possibility for going all the way. Historical and sobering perspective was conveniently provided a day or two later with the Cuban Missile Crisis and impending end of the world.

Why then, would I be bothering to write anything with the Giants up three games to one in the 2010 National League Championship Series? I don’t know – it might have something to do with age and perspective; with realizing that I only tend to write about baseball, television, and depressive insight anyway. Really, though, it has to do with three separate pieces that I wrote in recent weeks, concerning loudmouths, living in the moment, and one hell of a rookie catcher.

Buster Posey is the antithesis of a loudmouth. After going four for five last night, including a sublime ninth inning at-bat against veteran Roy Oswalt to put the winning run at third base, he remained characteristically subdued and focused. His comments centered mostly on the task in front of him – to win another game in this series and get to the Big Show. It’s almost as if he was there in ’62 and again in ’02, and knows instinctively what can happen. It’s like he was there in ’87 against the Cardinals – the same year he was born. The feeling one gets watching and listening to this kid is that he’ll be there again, if only because at an unusually young age he already knows something about living in the moment, and playing each game as though none have come before and there are no more to follow. As a gifted athlete, his is an integral role in the process; as a fan, mine is simply to appreciate and learn. And as cliched as it may be, you can learn something from this game.

Pressed by the post-game media to comment on a night that included executing a supremely difficult tag-out at home plate, and becoming only the second rookie in franchise history to have a four-hit game in the postseason, Posey was characteristically level-headed. One writer tried to lend a little perspective by asking  if he realized he’d had an epic night not just for a rookie, but for any player. “Well,” Posey responded, pausing momentarily to consider the question, “thank you.”

Filed in Posting | | Comments (0)

The Kid Gets It Done

Friday, October 8, 2010

I splurged on Thursday night in reverence of the Giants being in the playoffs, and ponied up ten bucks for a subscription to MLB Network’s post season Internet package. These games are already being televised on TBS, but it’s good to have a distraction from Dick Stockton’s head in high def, looking like some kind of Just For Men experiment gone terribly awry. Stockton is quite possibly the only individual in America next to whom Bob Brenly’s hair color can be described as “natural.” Brenly bore a strong resemblance to porn star Harry Reems back in his playing days catching for the Giants. But a career spent taking foul balls off the shins apparently wears a guy out faster than one being serviced by Linda Lovelace. Regardless, he and Stockton could both take a hint from Reems and allow their remaining locks to go gray, as the result is far more flattering.

Aesthetics aside, I bought the MLB package so I could watch the Giants’ dugout on my laptop during the broadcast. They let you choose from all camera angles available to TBS, so it’s kind of like having a personal spy cam at your disposal. I tried it out with the Yankee dugout in the early game, but quickly grew tired of Joe Girardi’s square-jawed profile and brown, tobacco-stained chiclets. When the Giants broadcast started the first thing I noticed was that their dugout looked a lot less professional than the Yankees’, with a couple of dopey looking, helmet-headed bat boys roaming the foreground at all times. But after the game got under way the cameraman was obviously under strict instruction to stay focused on Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum for the bottom of every inning.

Watching Lincecum on the bench is different from watching Lincecum on the mound. He sat alone for the entire game, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to describe his appearance as “sickly.” He was pale, gaunt, his knee bounced nervously until the later innings, and he coughed, spat, twitched, filed his nails, and retreated frequently to the clubhouse. Combined with his kid-like appearance, the effect wasn’t unlike watching an ad for pediatric Theraflu. This ongoing reminder of Lincecum’s dugout mortality was enough to distract me temporarily from the immortal effort he was delivering between the lines. Nine innings, fourteen strikeouts and no runs later, he completed a 1-0 playoff win that some would judge superior to Roy Halladay’s no-hitter the night before.

The next morning I was again on my laptop, listening to the Giants’ home radio station KNBR in San Francisco. (It’s difficult to imagine how transplanted sports fans survived prior to the Internet age.) The two hosts were discussing the game, and baseball in general, with ex Journey front man Steve Perry. I’ve never been a huge Journey fan, but in describing how he became a Giants follower in 2002, Perry caught my attention. “I’d been through a bad personal breakup and grown sick of music,” Perry explained. “I didn’t like the way anyone could use a program like ‘Pro Tools’ to make a record, even if they couldn’t play or sing.” He then described going to a ballgame and being overwhelmed with the fact that, no matter how much the game is hyped, in the end players still have to play. I liked the analogy, and it made me think of Tim Lincecum the night before, looking like a frail kid on the bench in between heading out to the hill and throwing nine lights-out innings of nasty, untouchable stuff. As off-track as it sometimes gets, there’s still a lot to like about this game.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (0)

Tall Dark Rookie Catcher Network

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

The Giants bounced into the playoffs on Sunday on the strength of some solid pitching, a little bit of here-and-there hitting, and one big fly from a rookie catcher who plays as though he’s had some kind of Cal Ripken Jr poise-transplant. To call Buster Posey “old school” is a misnomer; there weren’t many 23 year-olds like this back then, either. I wouldn’t say that faith is my strong suit as a baseball fan, and my early sense in both of the first two San Diego games was that the Giants would lose. But the final game had a different feeling, and despite a largely average offense, when their pitching has been on it’s really been on. I called Posey’s home run, despite his 0 for 12 mark to that point in the series. “Right here Buster – take him deep,” I said aloud and to myself, watching my small computer screen. Outside of a few profanities, it had been the only thing I’d muttered in three days. I make no predictions moving forward to the playoffs, and those hung up on such things obviously don’t get it. This was the culmination of a 162 game season and the Giants won the West. If you can’t wrap your head around that, then you’re a Yankee fan, and one who misses the point that even their most stirring recent season came in 2001 when they came up short in the World Series.

In a less competitive realm, I took in two movies in recent weeks – Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and David Fincher’s The Social Network.  The decision to see both was based largely on positive reviews – specifically David Denby’s for the Allen film. I’ll generally take a chance on most things Woody does, and have no real problem with his tireless insistence on life’s meaninglessness. But I failed to channel Denby’s experience of the film and can’t bring myself to proclaim it “perverse and fascinating.” Much of Allen’s late-life work is reminiscent of George Carlin’s final routines, minus the overt bitterness and served in a slightly more urbane manner. Still, it’s always inspiring to see Josh Brolin portray a dumpy, middle-aged, has-been novelist who can seduce the stunningly beautiful and engaged young woman across the courtyard by explaining that he’s been spying on her through the window.

Social Network was a different deal entirely, and despite my initial resistance to the subject matter I found it to be a quick-moving two hours. While by no means a flattering portrayal of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, I wouldn’t call it a hit piece, either. As the credits rolled, the well put-together dude sitting next to me with his girlfriend remarked “that movie did its job – I wanted to punch that guy in the face.” Curiously, my experience was quite the opposite, and while assuming that much of the content was highly fictionalized, my post-viewing impression of the Zuckerberg character was more favorable than what little I’ve pieced together about the real-life kid billionaire. Maybe if Zuckerberg had the West Wing writer feeding him the same snappy, condescending dialogue, he’d come off as equally unlikable but a bit more defined. In any case, The Social Network’s message that life is unfair is still marginally more palatable if no more reasonable than Woody Allen’s that it has no point at all.

Filed in Posting | | Comments (0)