Month: October 2003

I know that I’m not a Cubs fan, and I’m not rooting for them to win, mainly because I think Cubs fans are weirdos. (The ones outside Chicago or the Midwest, that is.) But I saw something, in the postgame celebration of their Game Five win over the Braves the other night, that I’ve been looking for a picture of and can’t find anywhere. So if anyone can help me out, I’d be grateful.

You know how sports fans at stadiums make clever signs on bedsheets to display? There was one that the fans had decorated with longtime Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray’s face, with the logo “Holy cow!” next to it. Caray was one of those “one of a kind” things in baseball, with his leading of the fans in singing “Take Me Out To the Ballgame” in the seventh-inning stretch, his undying love for his team, and the rather charming way he’d get drunk and be nearly incomprehensible in the late innings (and God help you if the game went to extra frames). I thought it incredibly classy that some Cubs fans thought to put his picture on one of those banners, and I’d love to have a picture of it.

Share This Post

Wouldn’t you know it. I just got done (sort-of) making fun of the marching band kids, and now I spot some choir kids. GET ‘EM!!!

(No, I was never into any sports in school, although I’ve always regretted not trying out for the swim team.)

Share This Post

OK, is it just me, or did every known blogger in the universe eat a big bowl of Wheaties this morning? Just about everyone I read has posted today! And good stuff, too.

(BTW, even though this is gross, I gotta link it because with my iron stomach and non-squeamish nature I found it hysterical: when the desires to prank one’s next-door neighbor and to see what happens when one leaves a plate of meat outside for three weeks intersect. Link filched from Igor to my Dr. Frankenstein.)

Share This Post

Matthew Yglesias has been posting to his own blog sparsely during the week in recent months, since he started his job at The American Prospect. He’s been saving stuff for his own blog for the weekends, since TAP doesn’t operate on weekends, which is actually kind of nice because it keeps something new in Blogistan when everyone else (myself included) is taking a breather. But yesterday and today, he’s on a posting tear. What a devil.

Anyway, he links to an interesting article about Howard Dean and gun control, which is frankly an issue that I really don’t care too much about. I don’t like guns, and I wouldn’t shed a tear if they all went away, but I am about as likely to put my own energy into advocating such a policy as I am to open a diner along I-90 in South Dakota. It just doesn’t seem that big a deal to me, so I didn’t know that Howard Dean was significantly to the right of many Democrats on guns. And it just goes to show what a dysfunctional house we Democrats can be: we’ll cheerfully attack our own people from the left and from the right. Yeesh.

He also discusses the idea of splitting California into two states, a suggestion that comes up because of problems that pretty much exist everywhere. Sometimes I think that New York City, Yonkers and Long Island should be spun off into their own state, but that’s mainly when I’m feeling snarky. There’s no real, compelling reason to do so, even if as a Buffalonian living in an old steel town on the shores of one of the Great Lakes I feel more kinship with cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland than I do with New York City. (I remember working in my telesales job on 9-11-01, having to place my daily allotment of calls, and a few customers expressed sympathy because the victims were my fellow New Yorkers, and in truth, I hadn’t thought of it that way. My personal feelings of allegiance are more local than that, and also wider than that — I consider myself an American and a Buffalonian more than I consider myself a New Yorker.)

Moving on, Matthew also debunks the idea that disapproval of Schwarzenegger’s treatment of women is hypocritical if you opposed the Clinton impeachment. Matthew’s take — that opposing the removal of an already elected and serving officeholder is not the same as opposing the election of a mere candidate for office, when both have done similar things — is right on. I remember once commenting to a friend of mine, during the impeachment affair, that this was why I didn’t like term limits: I no longer had the option of not voting for the guy. (Personally, I don’t much care about the accusations about Schwarzenegger. First, he’s not going to be my governor, so any interest I’d have would merely be a sporting one; second, he’s already demonstrated to me that he’s not worthy by virtue of his refusal to discuss in any way what he plans to do with the office once he has it. My suspicion is that he will push for some token cuts in programs, they’ll get blocked by the overwhelmingly Democratic California legislature; he’ll blame them for the gridlock, and wait for the business cycle to swing around into “boom” mode so the resultant increase of government revenues will erase the current deficits.)

Finally, Matthew points to an article about the fraying allegiance between libertarians and conservative Republicans. I’m reminded of a quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden‘s sidebar: “Just because you are on their side doesn’t mean that they are on your side.”

Share This Post

Lynn Sislo has an interesting post about a phenomenon I don’t know much about: classical composers intentionally destroying their own works, usually for artistic reasons.

Lord knows there are certain early writings of mine that I would just as soon never again see the light of day (but which I know Nefarious Neddie will expose once I became famous published — aieee!!!), but it’s often hard to make that distinction in later years, once one has been practicing for some time. In the case of Paul Dukas, the composer Lynn uses to illustrate this, it’s interesting to think of what might be thought of his work had he allowed more of it to survive.

Two other composers I have discovered more recently are notable with regard to fire (both of whom, incidentally, were introduced to me by a friend I’ve lost touch with — Robert, if you’re out there, drop me a line.). First is an English composer named Gerald Finzi. Finzi wrote a lot of meditative and intimate music for chamber ensembles and for voice. Everything of Finzi’s that I have heard is deeply beautiful, but he purposely allowed little of his music to see light. (I don’t know if he purposely destroyed it, or if it simply sits in some lockbox somewhere.)

The other composer is the Norwegian master Geirr Tveitt. In many ways the Ralph Vaughan Williams of Norwegian classical music, Tveitt’s work focuses very strongly on Norwegian folk material and even Norway’s ethnic musical instruments, such as the Hardanger fiddle (a stringed instrument which can be heard very prominently in the score to The Two Towers — it’s the fiddle that plays the Rohan theme in a number of scenes in and around Edoras). Tveitt was a highly prolific composer — his output was once likened to a waterfall — but in one of music history’s more tragic accidents, Tveitt’s house burned to the ground in the early 1970s, destroying nearly eighty percent of his life’s work. Tveitt’s sound world is remarkable, and to reflect on what was lost in that fire is disheartening. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, it’s a little bit as if we only knew Shakespeare by As You Like It and Coriolanus, had Hamlet or King Lear been consumed in flame.

Tveitt’s case is accidental, but as Lynn notes, many cases of an artist censoring his or her own work are not. There is a real ethical tension here: to what extent does the artist’s work belong to the artist, and to what extent does it belong to the world? It’s a tough question, and it’s not one that’s going away. Witness all the anger directed at George Lucas for his decision to permanently retire the original versions of the first three Star Wars films. The films are unquestionably his, and the decision is unquestionably his to make, but there is a real case to be made that he shouldn’t be doing it.

(And you thought there was no way I could twist that discussion around to Star Wars! Heh!)

Share This Post

Yep, today’s the wonderful recall in California. This whole thing has certainly been entertaining to watch. I have never in my life seen a candidate campaign on less substance that Arnold Schwarzenegger has, and yet be so close to winning. Of course, there’s all the business about sleaze being brought up against him, but I find it hard to feel sorry for him since he’s pretty much refused to discuss anything regarding policy, leaving nothing but the “sleaze factor”. And in general, I think the whole idea of a recall is stupid: you voted this person into office, so as far as I am concerned, you should be stuck with him. Timothy Noah once described the recall as “democracy on steroids”, which seems pretty apt…with the added fact that if the voters had been doing their damned job in the first place, it wouldn’t even be necessary.

Share This Post

I’m glad to see that Blogistan is developing beyond the political stuff and the daily diary, “I got up this morning with a headache and ate Cap’n Crunch with too much milk”-type stuff. Not a week goes by that I don’t find a new blog and say, “Hmmm, that’s not something I’d have thought to blog about.” Case in point: a blog devoted to marching bands in Kentucky.

Not that anyone cares, but while I think marching bands are entertaining to watch, especially the drum-and-bugle corps that operate in the summer time, as a compulsory part of being in band, while in high school, I detested marching. As a musical education device I found it completely worthless; the positives often cited by the marching proponents (discipline, endurance, precision) are musical elements that can equally well be achieved in a concert band setting, with actual attention to musical concerns added in, to boot. I always found that it basically boiled down to “We’re expected to have a band at the football games and the town’s summer parade”.

Pretty much every time I voiced this opinion in the music department in college, the collective gasps around me were similar to that you’d hear if you stepped up to the mike at a Democratic National Convention and claimed that JFK was a bad president. But I have never heard a convincing argument for the idea that marching is an essential part of a musical education. String players and vocalists seem to develop their musical chops just fine without marching in funky formations at football games; how the wind players and percussionists singularly benefit from marching has never really been made clear to me.

Share This Post

Morat takes a break from politics to list some Fat Fantasy books he likes. I’ve only read a couple of the series that he recommends, but I’m very glad that he doesn’t attempt to recommend Robert Jordan or Terry Brooks! The term “Fat Fantasy” refers to that subset of Fantasy books which most people, being either lit-snobs or just plain doofuses, think comprises all fantasy: series, once usually trilogies but now commonly more than three books, consisting of nice, thick books, hence the “Fat” appellation.

I’ve written here before about George R. R. Martin’s series, A Song of Ice and Fire, the fourth book of which is now criminally overdue. (Harumph.) This series, as Morat notes, sets up expectations that experienced readers of fantasy will peg almost immediately — and then he trashes them by killing off characters unexpectedly, taking his plots in different directions, setting up unforeseen alliances, and generally ratchetting up the “unpredictability” to levels which, by the time of A Storm of Swords, are simply amazing. This series isn’t for the squeamish, with many scenes that are the literary equivalent of the battle scenes in Braveheart, but if you like characters who are so three-dimensional that you can’t even really be certain just who the good guys are, then this series is for you. (Morat only cites the first book in the series, so he hasn’t even come to what I consider to be Martin’s greatest achievement, when he conditions the reader to hate a certain character and then has us feeling sympathetic toward that character by the third book.

The other of Morat’s series that I’ve read is the Tad Williams trilogy, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. This is also a good one, although it really is quite bloated, with hundreds of pages of subplots that occasionally seem to go nowhere. Much of it does end up going somewhere, but the going gets really tough because Williams tends to withhold his payoffs until as late a moment as humanly possible. I bounced off the first volume, The Dragonbone Chair, because it starts off with about 150 pages in which nothing happens while Williams lays in his backstory. Once things finally get moving, though, it’s a decent read, even if it does take too long to get where Williams wants to go.

Morat also solicits some recommendations along this line. I’m an admirer of Stephen R. Donaldson’s work, both the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (both trilogies, although the second isn’t as good as the first) and the duology Mordant’s Need. The Covenant books famously involve an “antihero”: Thomas Covenant is not a sympathetic protagonist, and early on he commits an act that may have the reader toss the book against the wall. In my experience, the Covenant books are “love them or hate them” affairs.

And of course, there is Guy Gavriel Kay, who in my literary universe is second only to Tolkien. If traditional fantasy is your thing, GGK’s trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry is wondrous (although, being GGK’s first published work, a little hard to get into — give it a couple of hundred pages). After that trilogy, GGK tracked away from traditional fantasy for stand-alone books (except for his most recent work, a duology called The Sarantine Mosaic) that blend fantasy with historical fiction, with the magical elements becoming more muted with each successive work.

I also view T.H. White’s The Once and Future King as required reading for any lover of fantasy. Also excellent in the Arthurian vein is Stephen Lawhead’s trilogy consisting of Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur (although, to be honest, the ending of this series is one of the most disappointing endings I’ve ever read). Even better is Mary Stewart’s Arthurian trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment) to which a fourth volume, The Wicked Day, was later added. Gillian Bradshaw wrote an Arthurian trilogy years ago, that I am certain is out of print and hard to find, but it’s very well written and very emotional. I believe the first volume is Hawk of May, but I don’t recall the other titles.

Feel free to toss some titles my way, and Morat’s as well!

Share This Post

I’m not much for “apocalyptic” thinking — I haven’t even read any of those Left Behind books — but with war in the Middle East and with the Cubs and Red Sox closing in on pennants in the same year, well, call me slightly concerned.

Anyway, last night was a hell of a sports night. You had the Sox advancing in heart-stopping fashion (I didn’t care who won, really, since I rather like both the A’s and the Sox), loading the bases before finally notching that last out. And apparently you had the A’s getting mad at the Sox’ closer for some obscene gesture he made in their direction, although quite frankly I didn’t see it — it just looked like garden-variety fist pumping to me, nothing worse than Dennis Eckersley used to do when celebrating a final out in a big game. I will say that those constant cut-aways Fox did to some bar in Boston got a little annoying. Not that it matters, but my predictions are Yankees and Cubs, both in six, and then the Yankees again in five.

(And if you’re not reading Mike’s Baseball Rants, you’re missing out on Blogistan’s best baseball commentary. Not only does he know his subject well — he’ll collate stats like any fine baseball fanatic should — but his pop-culture knowledge is so good that he can actually remember not just that there was a movie called The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, but he can remember the characters well enough to draw parallels to the 2003 Braves squad! So go read that blog, now that the LCS’s are about to start.)

(Grammatical question: What’s the possessive of “Sox”? Above, should I refer to the “Sox’s closer”, or the “Sox’ closer”? Or should I avoid the entire thing by saying “Boston’s closer”?)

After the baseball game ended, I watched a bit of Letterman — a bit of an off night for Dave, but he’s still worth catching for the current nightly regimen of George W. Bush speech tics — and then a bit of Leno, whose “Headlines” bit still tends to crack me up. (Last night’s gem was a story about two would-be bank robbers who thought that if they rubbed their faces with lemon juice, the security cameras’ pictures of them would be blurry. Oh, and the headline about Congress’s pasing of legislation for the “Do Not Kill List”. As Jay said, “You might want to get on that list.”) Then, I just flipped over to watch the last three minutes or so of the Buccaneers’ thrashing of the Indianapolis Colts, who had been down 28-7 last time I had checked. They were still down, 35-21. Then they were down 35-28. Then they tied the thing. I didn’t stay up for overtime, but I saw this morning that the Colts eventually prevailed, apparently as a result of a weird rule that I’ve never heard of.

Two observations from that game:

1. On the Colt’s second-to-last touchdown, how on Earth could the Bucs’ cornerback let the Colts’ receiver just race by him like that, right from the line of scrimmage? Don’t they play bump-and-run anymore?

2. In a weird bit of symmetry, the Colts’ first and last touchdowns in the fourth quarter were identical: one yard runs, right up the middle, with both plays being marked by the Bucs being off-sides. The second time, I thought I was watching a replay of the first one. Very odd.

I’m kind of wondering, now, if Tampa Bay’s defense might be slightly overrated. Yeah, it was a one-game aberration, but still — they coughed up 35 points at home, and they only managed one sack against a team that had to rely on the passing game because they were missing their starting running back. And I’m starting to like the combination of Al Michaels and John Madden, especially since Madden seems to have lost his fascination with that horrible “Coach’s Clicker” thing. (I’m the only person I know who can stand Madden’s voice, for some reason.) Their best exchange came when the Colts’ comeback was well in progress. Madden pointed out that Bucs’ coach Jon Gruden is one of those coaches who gets up incredibly early and gets almost no sleep during the football season; he said “Gruden’s been up since 3:30 this morning,” and Michaels quipped, “And after watching this one, he’ll be up until 3:30 Wednesday morning.”

Share This Post

Man, oh man. In all the fun of watching sports, we often forget that there is inherent danger in the games we play.

I watched quite a bit of football this weekend, and I just watched some of the Monday Night Football game between Tampa Bay and Indianapolis, a game which features two of the more physical defenses in the NFL….and the biggest, ugliest hit I saw in all the sports I’ve watched in the last couple of days just happened in the Red Sox/A’s game. Two Boston players, Johnny Damon and Damian Jackson, went for the same deep fly and collided in such a way that the back of Jackson’s skull smashed, with some force, into the front of Damon’s. The two guys literally bounced off one another and ended up prone on the grass. Jackson got up and returned to the dugout, but Damon was just driven off the field in an ambulance.

Baseball is stereotyped sometimes as the least physical of the major sports — after all, it’s sufficiently unphysical that they play 162 games a year — but let it not be forgotten that these guys are athletes, the game is physical, and they do it wearing a minimum of contact gear.

(And I just had a football-related thought. “Former” Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett is suing the NFL because he wants to enter the NFL draft, but he’s too young by NFL rules. The NFL’s position is that the age requirement is necessary because the game is so physical that they have to make sure that their players are of sufficient physical maturity to play it; a 19-year old football player, no matter how gifted, simply isn’t physically able to match up with the athletes in the NFL. Well, I remember hearing a year ago, on one of the Syracuse radio stations, some guy opine that it was only a matter of time until some player actually dies from an NFL injury. I kind-of scoffed at that, but if we see 19-year olds entering the NFL, I think it may just happen.)

Share This Post