Who Asked Me?

Squash Hashanah

I make no claim to being a photographer, but my great-grandfather was one by trade. It seems to me there have been two kinds of memorable pictures taken since the invention of picture-taking: those given much thought prior to execution, and those that came about because some guy had a camera. And just about every guy has a camera these days, outside of self-professed Luddites and some prisoners. The second part of the photography equation used to involve darkness and chemicals, but with the advent of limitless digital storage this necessity is gone. Now, whether it’s an old glass plate or an iPhone snap, it comes down to if anyone does anything with it after. In this sense my father has been as responsible for his grandfather’s notoriety as was the man himself, by virtue of getting his images out there. There are no doubt countless examples (now multiplying daily and exponentially) of magnificent photographs that nobody will ever see. But this isn’t unusual, and can be said for a lot of things.

The three snaps above, while not technically impressive, are relevant because they were taken with my new cell phone in late August and early September. Sequentially, they are of California, Nevada (Lake Tahoe), and New York (Brooklyn). If part of who we are can be ascertained from where we’ve been, then this new technology is of some worth even if we’re just flicking through our phone with a finger. Don’t ask me to break down what it’s worth though; I personally think it’s an example of a little too much all moving a little too fast.

God it’s such a drag when you’re living in the past – Petty

I received an email from my buddy Denis Munro last week, commenting on a piece I’d written some time ago. Denis had a long and successful career as head of city planning in Perth, Scotland, and now keeps his feet wet with consulting work several days a week. It was from this office that he’d written, confessing apologetically that he was reading my stuff within the context of downtime googling. He was going through my entire site systematically and comprehensively, reading each post date by date. While I’m not entirely devoid of self-promotional instinct, this seemed an act of penance better suited for the Lockerbie Bomber. He also commented on the pressures that might arise trying to write regularly to “meet reader expectations.” I didn’t bother to explain that those expectations could be easily assuaged with a CC’d email to four; the other part of his point was relevant. I hadn’t felt much like writing lately.

Why write, after all? This question came up yesterday while on the phone with my other buddy Scott (Coleman) Miller, who now lives in Chicago. He’d been out with friends recently, and one woman told him that he needed to write a book. “Your stories are so great,” she reasoned. I asked which stories she was referencing and he mentioned one he’d told her about serving jury duty in San Francisco. One of the attorneys was questioning him as a potential juror and asked if he’d ever been mugged. When Miller answered in the affirmative the guy asked when the incident had taken place. “I’m not sure of the exact date,” he told him, “but it was the night Redd Foxx died.” I had to agree that this was book-worthy material, but it’s so much easier delivered as cocktail party banter, and particularly if you’re a guy like Scott. His ability to interject during tepid conversation and boost the volume from three to eight is unrivaled. Why bother with sitting down at the keyboard and coming up with a clever Sanford and Son intro when you can just spit it out? And, in a nutshell, this covers my frequent aversion to writing – too much pretense and assumption when a conversational volume boost could render it over and done with.

So it was I’d skipped over several writing ideas recently for lack of motivational oomph. I thought of piecing something together about the Tom Petty show I’d seen at Madison Square Garden; how his new CD is better than anything he’s done in years and has been largely misinterpreted. I was going to write something about more “sophisticated” music fans who have dissed Petty over the years because his commercial success and ability to craft intelligent but infectiously catchy singles offends their priggish David Byrne sensibilities. But I refrained, and probably wisely. At another juncture, walking through Manhattan, I saw the large, two-story inflatable rat that NYC labor unions erect in front of non-complying businesses. I considered some opening sentences for a post on when one actually becomes a New Yorker – the subtle psychological shifts and transitions from novel to familiar. But my brain soon tired and I let go of the idea, letting things settle while staring up at the giant, 15-foot rodent balloon.

A few days on I was in my Brooklyn hood getting some keys made for my landlord who is renting her place back from me this month. This was probably my fourth visit to this particular locksmith – the landlord has returned on several occasions and tends to lose the keys after each visit. I joked with the guy that it was good business for him and he corrected me. “Actually, I don’t pay the rent cutting keys.” This led to an extended conversation as he carved away at the blanks about how, exactly, he did pay the rent. His bread and butter is house calls, but it turns out that even his business is being usurped by the digital age and house keys are going the way of car keys and an electronic swipe. The machinery necessary to replace these new devices is licensed at an exorbitant rate and requires a shop owner to buy “tokens” with each use – a practice this guy said would put him out of business. I sympathized, explaining that my family was in the film business and digital technology had greatly affected our customer base and the way we invested.

He finished the last key and told me it would be eight dollars and forty-five cents. “My customer base is largely gone,” he said, making change. “When people lock themselves out now, they use one of these things to find a locksmith ..” He mimed gripping an iPhone and flicking through the Internet choices with his finger. “Guess we’re getting old,” I told him, mostly because it seemed like the kind of thing I was supposed to say at that point in the conversation. He smiled knowingly, apparently pleased, and I left the shop. My own smartphone was arriving Fed Ex that afternoon.

Based on a novel by a man named Lear – McCartney

Cheap is small, and not too steep
But best of all, cheap is cheap – Davies

Now that America has bowed somewhat gracefully out of the World Cup, we can all move on to more pressing matters at hand. It’s difficult to hold a grudge against a Ghanaian. The life expectancy for males is only 59 years, so they’re due every international victory that they have coming . If soccer and the occasional Bob Geldoff visit were all that America had to hang on to, we’d likely struggle to keep our proverbial chins held high. And I’ve certainly done enough dead horse beating with my poorly-constructed anti-soccer rants. Although this phenomenon of loss-recovery and why we hate certain opponents more than others might be worth a few more lines. How is it that some Giants fans would suffer a crisis of identity in the absence of their long-despised So Cal rivals? What inspires packs of shorn, shit-faced English lads to descend upon a neighboring village in Third Reich fashion even when the inciting football match is of little consequence? My uneducated guess is that it is due, in large part, to the suffocating and life-numbing lack of motivation that persists in the absence of somebody’s ass to kick. Sure, we’ll sacrifice ourselves beyond all measure in the name of love, but if you really want to get something done you’d better have somebody to hate. And make no mistake – this instinct is not reserved exclusively for the male half of the species. As Elaine Benes remarked on ‘Seinfeld’, commenting on the female version of getting even, “we just tease someone until they develop an eating disorder.” Ask any woman and they’ll likely tell you a broken pint glass to the face is a preferred alternative.

Maybe this explains why I’ve never been a Beatles fan. I don’t typically go public with this admission, because it generally draws a lot of criticism and the response that I’m just trying to be different. But I genuinely don’t care for the group, and despite having listened to a plethora of music in my increasingly long-toothed existence, I’ve never owned a CD, LP, cassette, or even eight-track by the Fab Four. Sure, there’s a select song or two among their vast catalog that I favor – I always dug Paperback Writer, for instance, and felt that it had as good a riff as Day Tripper with better lyrics. Maybe it was McCartney’s somewhat inane but catchy influence on that song that attracted me, and Lennon’s more pervasive but generally toothless All You Need Is Love vibe that pushed me away. I do understand that John was the thinking man’s member of the group, and that it was his cynicism and sardonic “it couldn’t get much worse” contribution to Paul’s “it’s getting better all the time” that kept things in check. But try as I might, I couldn’t get Dear Prudence or I Am The Walrus to fly for me. I much prefer most anything by the Stones, Who, or most consummate of English acts, The Kinks. It’s a shame that some Catcher In The Rye-obsessed kook had to take Lennon out prematurely, but give me Ray Davies lamenting a big, fat mama trying to break him any day. Then again, who asked me?

It’s official – I’ve got World Cup Fever. Rampant, rabid, rousing, rampaging World Cup Fever. After America’s stunning upset tie with England yesterday, I’ve re-thought my stubborn, quasi-xenophobic aversion to what the rest of the civilized world calls The Beautiful Game. I’ve reconsidered my country’s immature obsession with winning, and learned to relish coming up even against a superior opponent. Never would I have imagined that a West Ham goalkeeper’s Bill Buckner impersonation could deliver the same shot of adrenaline as Montana to Clark, or Will Clark taking the Cubs and Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams up the middle to win the NL Pennant. After decades of watching the occasional Telemundo game with peaked curiosity or passing a British pub on vacation and noting dozens of red faced, pint-swilling enthusiasts glued to the telly, it’s finally all come together. This is what I’ve been missing all these years.

Or maybe not.

I did watch the game, still in my underwear and sipping a Coors Light in my Brooklyn apartment at 3:30 in the afternoon. I wanted to care – I really did. This patronizing “they’re really coming along” attitude that the Europeans take toward America is admittedly annoying. Listening to the English football commentator Martin Taylor repeatedly point out that his team had given away “one of the softest goals you’ll ever see at this level of play” and calling Clint Dempsey, the American who scored, “the lucky man” should have been enough to raise my ire. But it wasn’t. I, like millions of my oblivious countrymen, simply don’t give a shit. It was obvious in the remote television shots of the two teams’ respective fans – the English packed hundreds deep in some public square cheering the big screen enthusiastically at every touch. The Americans watched with stools to spare at Dempsey’s Pub in NYC’s East Village, some wearing goofy over-sized Uncle Sam top hats, but most wondering whether the Yankee game would still be on when this thing was over. What’s with us, anyway? Perhaps I can be of mild service in offering a few possible explanations.

First off, we have far too many choices to start embracing soccer. Maybe if our only diversion from televised darts, snooker, and an increasing cloud cover was this game, then we’d get riled up enough to go marauding three towns over to a rival watering hole and glass up some unsuspecting old lady for wearing the wrong colors. But our thugs carry guns over here, so most of us are inclined to save the bus fare. As for international play, how could we possibly get as worked up as England or France does facing Germany? We’ve either kicked or saved the ass of most places over there and in the process adopted indifference as a defining character trait. Besides, outside of about twelve minutes of post 9-11 good will, everybody hates us. Even the British, who applauded our ‘maturity’ in electing Obama after eight years of Bush now hate the guy for targeting BP and threatening their economy in the process. We have no friends and are happily oblivious.

More to the point, the game just doesn’t work for us. Besides the aforementioned commonplace tie score outcome, there’s the practice of settling things with a “shootout” when it really matters. No self-respecting American sport (outside of the much maligned ice hockey) would consider such an unsatisfying conclusion. It would be as if baseball went without extra innings and had a home run contest instead. It reduces a skillful match played on a wide open field to a game of pinball and, outside of the lineup of guys covering their nuts just in front of the goalie, removes the team element entirely. Then there’s the phantom fouls and faked injury. How many times can you watch some Frenchman hold his leg writhing in feigned agony before getting the overwhelming urge to see Ronnie Lott ring him up like it was 1940 and the Germans were calling? It’s an athletic sport, it’s a hell of a cardio-intensive sport, but it isn’t a rough sport. Just reference Zinedene Zidane’s “head butt” to the chest of an Italian player in the ’06 Cup if you need proof. Even the inciting insult – something to do with the Italian calling Zidane’s mother an Algerian whore raised by poorly mannered wolves – would only draw raised eyebrows over here. But really, if you want to know the simple answer to this ongoing confusion over why America doesn’t embrace soccer, it can be explained in one sentence. It doesn’t lend itself to commercial television.