Category: Random Linkage

OK, I gotta clean some of this out!

::  Two reviews of the apparently shitty new movie about Ronald Reagan, first off. Now, I haven’t seen the movie and I’ve no intention of doing so, because I make no secret of my loathing for Reagan and for everything he stood for, and my firm conviction that Reagan’s assumption of the Presidency marks an almost perfect inflection point in our nation’s history when everything just started going awry. And my generation, Generation X, grew up firmly steeped in the ongoing mythology of Reagan and his “Morning in America” bullshit, which I see as a huge reason why our nation is still holding itself back.

Anyway, this from Slate:

Like Reagan the actor and Reagan the president, Reagan the new movie has a strained relationship with reality. In director Sean McNamara’s biopic, the Gipper, played by Dennis Quaid, can do no wrong. Charming, principled, and relentlessly optimistic, McNamara’s Reagan single-handedly resuscitates the U.S. economy, brings down the Soviet Union, and returns the nation to glory. Suffice it to say, such a hagiographic treatment requires countless omissions, distortions, and outright fabrications. Worse still, perhaps, Reagan is bloated and tedious—its lack of focus and vision exacerbated only by an insulting 135-minute runtime. This is an affront to both history and cinema, to both reality and fantasy.

And this from Substack writer Nathan Rabin:

This isn’t a movie. It’s right-wing propaganda that crams canned uplift down the audience’s throat for well over two hours. The score goes overboard on soaring strings that never stop reminding us that we are watching the inspirational story of a great Christian, a great Republican, and a great man. 

Only one man possessed the testicular fortitude to take on Marxists eager to use Hollywood as a propaganda arm for the Soviet Union: Ronald Reagan, AKA the greatest human being and Christian ever to bless this planet with his sublime presence. 

Watching Reagan reminded me of a classic, Robert Smigel-written sketch called “Ronald Reagan: Mastermind” about how the Gipper only pretended to be a doddering lightweight happy to while away his days doing photo ops and giving speeches to friendly audiences when he’s really a ferociously driven, hands-on obsessive intimately involved with everything his administration is doing, particularly clandestine endeavors. 

A team of oxen couldn’t drag me to see this movie.

::  Losers Win: Guardians of the Galaxy Turns 10.

One topic that comes up often on social media is “List your favorite Marvel movies!”, and sometimes folks are surprised when I list the first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies in my top two spots. My reason is simple: of all the movies Marvel has made in the “Golden Age” that started with Iron Man and wrapped up with Avengers: Endgame, and for my money there’s not a single bad movie in that run and quite a few really, really good ones, the first two Guardians movies come closest by far to making me feel like I’m back in my room as a kid, on a rainy day, reading comics. (I have not seen the third Guardians film yet.)

It’s a testament to the imagination and tonal control of writer-director James Gunn that impediments that might’ve stopped another trilogy in its tracks become mere speed bumps. Gunn’s as much of a pop music obsessive as a comics obsessive—the films are filled with music video-like montages and action set pieces built around specific tunes. So it makes sense to think of the main characters as a band with an evolving lineup and the three movies as albums with no bad songs on them. There’s enough individual flavor to stand the test of time, even though the trends and fads that originally brought them into existence have faded. 

You could add Gunn’s name to a list of distinctive directors who should’ve made a musical by now, given their creative tendencies, but he already has three times (five if you count “The Suicide Squad” and its spinoff, the Max series “Peacemaker”). The musicality of the movies extends beyond the music-driven sequences. The banter between the characters has a pleasing, teasing rhythm, with delayed punchlines going off at unexpected moments. In each movie, the momentum and goodwill generated by the performances and the filmmaking means that the entire enterprise seems to walk with a spring in its step. Or maybe I should’ve said “power-walk,” which is what Gunn loves to have the Guardians do right before a big action sequence, like band members putting their battle faces on as they move from the wings to the stage and try to forget their egos and become part of a hive-mind.

Also, those first two Guardians movies did something else: They made me feel the way Star Wars did back when George Lucas was still running the show. In the Disney Star Wars era, the only property that has actually come closest to making me feel that way was the teevee series The Book of Boba Fett, which seems to be generally disliked by most fans. Go figure.

::  Here’s a really negative movie review. I don’t know anything about the movie at all, really, I just like to read hilariously negative movie reviews sometimes.

::  Maestro Daniel Barenboim discusses Wagner.

First of all, Wagner had a great understanding of, or intuition for (or perhaps a combination of the two), acoustics. He was the first person to have that, I think, except perhaps Berlioz, and in a certain way Liszt, although Liszt was more limited to the piano. By acoustics I mean the presence of sound in a room, the concept of time and space. Wagner really developed that concept musically. Which means that a lot of his criticism of performances of his own time, conducted by Mendelssohn and other people, was directed at what he considered a very superficial kind of interpretation, namely, an interpretation that took no risks, that didn’t go to the abyss, that tried, in other words, to find a golden path without having the extremes. Of course, this is an impossibility and can inevitably lead to superficiality. This also had an influence on the speed at which the music was performed, because if the content was poor, the speed had to be greater. Therefore Wagner complains bitterly about Mendelssohn’s tempi.

::  Buffalo’s five-term Mayor, Byron Brown, has seemingly finally managed to find a new gig, after spending most of the last few years giving off massive “GET ME THE HELL OUTTA HERE!” vibes in his current one. (The question of “Gee, Byron, why the hell did you insist in running for a fifth term, then?” doesn’t seem to get asked much, for some reason…but come to that, the answer to that is for me far less interesting than interrogating the citizens of Buffalo as to why the hell they insisted on electing five times a bumbling guy whose record as Mayor is nearly 20 years of fiscal incompetence, no problems actually getting solved, and a whole damn lot of ribbon cuttings and “keys to the city” handed out to football players.) Anyway, Alan Bedenko notes something about the political news coverage in this region.

(As for Brown heading up Off Track Betting, whatever. That organization has precisely zero impact on my daily life, so if Brown wants to go be incompetent there, fine.)

::  Anchorman Wouldn’t Have Been Nearly As Great Without Christina Applegate.

This is absolutely true. Applegate’s work in Anchorman (which may be my favorite American comedy film ever, the thing still makes me laugh to this day) is just wonderful, as she captures perfectly her blend of exasperation with, admiration for, and attraction to Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy (and Ferrell reciprocates with his own perfect blend of confusion by, disapproval of, instant lust for, and eventual admiration of Applegate’s Veronica Corningstone). 

Never a prude but absolutely not tolerating Ron’s chauvinistic behavior, Veronica bewitches him from the first moment they meet at that pool party. Feeling studly in his robe and swim trunks, he walks up to her, ready to pounce, only to be disarmed by her scrutinizing stare. She doesn’t know who he is—doesn’t recognize what a big deal (in his own mind) he is—and so Ron starts to sputter, his pickup lines powerless in the face of such poise. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to him. Throughout “Anchorman,” he will try to get the upper hand, but he never succeeds. Veronica is too assured. Dumb guys are funny, but they’re never as funny as when they’re cut down to size by a smart woman. 

Yup, that. Applegate has been famously struggling with MS the last few years, which has sadly put her on the sidelines of what seemed to be her prime as an actress; her work in the Netflix series Dead To Me is some amazing, wonderful work indeed. She is really, really good.

::  Finally, Sheila O’Malley writes about Gena Rowlands, an actress for whom she has expressed special appreciation over the years. 

There will always be a place in Hollywood for beautiful blondes. Rowlands wasn’t a Marilyn-Monroe type. She was one of those “chilly” blondes, the kind Hitchcock loved. Rowlands was not a haughty person, but she often played characters with a whiff of standoffishness. Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitive handling of beautiful talented blondes, but it’s easy to imagine that Gena Rowlands, who loved acting (“I never wanted to do anything else. This was it.”), would have had a respectable career, with or without her husband. Cassavetes didn’t lift her out of obscurity. Nevertheless, she wasn’t being seen the way she needed to be seen. The world didn’t yet know what it was missing. 

::  I will end this with a picture: a nifty Darth Vader window decal I saw on a car last week.

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Time to ditch a few tabs:

::  We watched Smokey and the Bandit not long ago–it’s a comfort food movie–and I found myself wondering, after the scene in which the Sheriff bursts into a diner and orders a “Diablo Sandwich” which he consumes in about four bites, while chatting with another patron and never realizing that it’s the Bandit himself. I always figured the Diablo Sandwich was just one of those kinds of truck-stop things you order when you’re in a hurry, and you’re better off not really knowing what’s in it, because it’s probably tastes amazing but is also going to do terrible things to your insides. Here’s an article on the Diablo Sandwich. I still want one.

::  New York City was all set to inaugurate tolls to combat congestion on its streets, like other cities around the world have done. Then, Governor Kathy Hochul stepped in. I have to be honest here: at this point I really don’t know what I plan to do if Hochul stands for re-election in 2026. I have zero illusion that the Republican Party will have returned to anything resembling sanity by that point, at least to the degree that they might put up a candidate for anything whom I’d be able to vote for without vomiting, but from a policy standpoint, Hochul is terrible.

::  And finally, rocket thrust!

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft aboard launches from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Wednesday, June 5, 2024, in Florida. NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test is the first launch with astronauts of the Boeing CFT-100 spacecraft and United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. The flight test, which launched at 10:52 a.m. EDT, serves as an end-to-end demonstration of Boeing’s crew transportation system and will carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to and from the orbiting laboratory. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

 

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It’s the end of the week, so here’s some linkage that I’ve been sitting on all week (or even longer):

::  Urban explorers of Buffalo. I read this article with great interest, as it combines a bunch of interests of mine: photographers, old buildings, and the sense of adventure in getting the shot. These are people who venture into abandoned buildings, sometimes skirting legality to do so, in order to chronicle the ongoing decay of many buildings in the region. (No, I haven’t done anything quite like this, but…I’m not sure I completely rule it out.)

::  The money is in all the wrong places. This is about the gigantic financial imbalances in creative fields, but that sentence that forms the headline–“The money is in all the wrong places”–really sums up a huge amount of what’s wrong with our economy today. The money is nowhere it needs to be, if we’re going to have more widespread success and general welfare.

The money produced by art has not disappeared. The issue is not that the people of the world value television less than they did in the 1990s. The reality is that the people with the most money have devised, at every turn, new and more bulletproof ways for them to make and keep more money, and for the people who make things to make less. This is the eternal story of labor and management; it just has hot people in it, in this case.

I’ve been waiting for decades for Americans to finally get angry enough about this to do something about it. And no matter how bad it gets, it seems that there is a permanent critical mass of Americans who will still believe that the rich earned every penny they got and nobody should ever do anything at all to force them to part with any of it. It’s a depressing reality.

::  On the “Man or Bear” debate. If you have any presence on social media at all, you’ve seen this whole “Man or Bear” thing cropping up, mainly several weeks ago. It seems pretty obvious to me that the whole thing was an analogy designed to hopefully jolt some men into seeing how wary women have to be in our presence, but boy, did a lot of men react powerfully against that suggestion. And so it goes. Anyway, this is a good article.

I first read about this debate on my phone while camping in a field in my tent. It captivated me in a way that internet debates rarely do. Slowly, I realized why: for me, “Man or Bear” is not hypothetical. I’m literally a woman who left mankind behind to live in nature with bears. This is my actual life. 

::  Have I recommended cartoonist Cassandra Calin yet? I don’t think so. She writes and draws comics drawn from the challenges of her own life as a self-employed young woman, and her work is utterly delightful. She also has a new graphic novel out now. My personal favorite installment of her regular strip thus far is about shopping for clothes. Why do I like this particular installment? Oh, no reason….

::  TrikeLife: the YouTube channel of a local woman and blogger, Val Dunne, who has adopted a tricycle as a way of getting around Buffalo and pursuing her interests while battling multiple sclerosis. Val’s a good egg!

 

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I mean, seriously. Tabs are like rabbits in the way they proliferate across the top of my browser window.

::  Skyline Chili explained by a local.

Skyline Chili is a perfect food and I will tolerate no slander of it. We can agree that sauce-like clove-nutmeg-cinnamon-and-god-knows-what-else-infused Cincinnati chili bears little resemblance to the bean-studded or beef-chunked stews that other regions of this great land might recognize as chili. But that’s no justification for the torrent of bile Cincinnati chili receives from those unaccustomed to its pleasures. (Deadspin notoriously called it “the worst regional foodstuff in America or anywhere else” and “abominable garbage-gravy.” ) But to those of us who grew up in the Greater Cincinnati area, this stuff is mother’s milk — Mama’s Cookies, even; it’s a Cincinnati thing, look it up — and it’s the pride of the Queen City, alongside Graeter’s ice cream, goetta, and LaRosa’s pizza. I specify “Greater Cincinnati area” because I’m technically from across the Ohio River in Northern Kentucky, but in my defense, so is the Cincinnati Airport, and you can take it up with them. I’ll be over here eating my Skyline Chili three-way (I’ll explain) with an oyster cracker and hot sauce chaser.

Cincinnati Chili is one of those food items that lots of folks (a) claim to hate, and (b) act like they don’t understand. I guess I can understand hating it, since everybody hates something food-wise, but not understanding? This, I don’t get at all. But then, people in the US tend to be really bad, in my experience, at understanding local variations on different foods, which is how you get people who think NYC is the only place in America with good pizza (and that Chicago’s pizza scene is a blight upon humanity), that the only good barbecue in the world can be found in Texas (or Kansas City or North Carolina or Georgia or wherever), and even in Buffalo where “wings” means one exact preparation with one exact dipping sauce.

My response to almost all of this is “Yeah, whatevs, I’m down for anything if it tastes good.”

Which is to say, I like Cincinnati Chili just fine, and I even have plans to make some in the hopefully near future. I guess what annoys people is the idea of calling it “chili” when it’s more a sauce that is served atop spaghetti, and I’ve also noticed that people in the US tend to not be big fans of the Middle Eastern approach to spices, where savory and sweet often live next door to one another, and since the seasonings in Cincinnati Chili were invented by cooks of Middle Eastern or Eastern Mediterranean descent, people claim to not like it.

Whatevs. I’m down for anything if it tastes good.

(This is the recipe I’ll be using when I get ’round to this, by the way.)

::  Stanley Whitney Doesn’t Like to Look Back, Even on the Eve of His First-Ever Retrospective

Lists of great artists often begin with rule breakers and revolutionaries—people like Duchamp, Pollock, and, Warhol who changed art by zagging from its traditions. Stanley Whitney belongs among these names, but he’s no revolutionary. The 77-year-old abstractionist has, after all, spent the last two decades of his career painting variations of the same square, gridded image. For all his achievements, Whitney has never been one to reinvent the wheel.

This fact is a central theme of the artist’s first-ever retrospective, “How High the Moon,” which just opened at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Western New York. While many career-spanning surveys measure their subjects’ success on scales weighted toward progress and innovation, this show highlights an artist who prevailed on different terms. A snippet of wall text two-thirds of the way in sums it up nicely: “Whitney has made paintings that are not about getting somewhere but about laboring to find where we are.” 

That’s no small feat.

Ending soon at Buffalo’s AKG Art Gallery is a display of paintings by abstractionist painter Stanley Whitney. The Wife and I saw this exhibit last February, and the works are fascinating.

::  Another recipe I’m going to make at some point: Enchilada lasagna, by Alton Brown.

::  Two articles by the ever-brilliant Matt Zoller Seitz. First: The Problem and the Solution: Why Palpatine from Star Wars is One of the Great Movie Villains.

Many of Palpatine’s most devious plans stem from him planting an idea or emotion in someone’s head and letting them do the rest of their own volition. He activates or amplifies some characteristic that amounts to an Achilles heel (fear of being unable to save a loved one for Anakin; arrogant complacency for the Jedi council; eagerness to end an occupation for Palpatine’s boss Padme, the Queen of Naboo). Then he stands back and watches as somebody else delivers the result he hoped (and planned) for. 

Obviously I’m a big fan of Palpatine–with the exception of his resurrection in The Rise of Skywalker, which annoyed me to no end. But I won’t be writing about that here; I’m saving my rants about that particular movie for my forthcoming (hopefully in 2025!) book of essays about Star Wars in general. Seitz has the right of it throughout this article, and I sometimes wonder if some of the goofy tone George Lucas created in the Prequels is specifically designed to help hide Palpatine in the tall grass. I love how Palpatine doesn’t have one single overarching plan; he has a sequence of plans that he changes and alters to fit the circumstances that arise, each one always designed to get him just a bit more power. He doesn’t just show up and seize control; he instead makes his growing power seem totally reasonable at each step. It’s really quite amazing, in terms of structure.

The other one by Seitz: Dear Tim Cook: Be a Decent Human Being and Delete This Revolting Apple Ad.

I only watched the ad once, and I thought, “My God, what a wasteful and sickening enterprise, to imply that every single tool ever devised by humans to assist with creative work can now be replaced by this one electronic gewgaw.” This sentiment was not alone, and in fact, the backlash against this ad was so swift and sure that Apple has already apologized for it. Well, that’s good news, at least.

::  I don’t recall how I ended up with a tab opened to the official site of artist Juliette Sandleitner, but I did, and her work is good! Check her out.

::  Dear Internet: Please Stop Making Me Think Articles About AI Are About “Weird Al” Yankovic.

On April 20th, the website Consequence of Sound ran an article confusingly titled “Drake Baits Kendrick Lamar with Weird AI Diss.” 

The internet collectively responded, “Huh?” This was followed shortly by, “Wait, what?” 

Because I am a forty-eight-year-old man who grew up with Weird Al Yankovic’s music and had the honor of collaborating with him on multiple books as an adult, I read that headline and wondered why Drake would bait Kendrick Lamar by dissing national treasure “Weird Al” Yankovic. 

What could that possibly accomplish? Why was Drake mad at “Weird Al” Yankovic? What did Al do to the Jewish Canadian former child star that made him want to attack him in his lyrics? 

Heh!

(Note to self: Watch the “Weird Al” biopic movie one of these days.)

::  By the way, an aside here: I have no idea who Drake or Kendrick Lamar are and since they have been massively being discussed on social media of late, I’m feeling like I’ve landed on a strange planet.

::  One final recipe I’ve had open for a while, which I’ll probably attempt next fall when I make chili: Jalapeno cornbread with a lime-honey glaze.

And that’s all for now! Finally, my browser is more manageable again. Time to open up some more tabs!

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Time to clear out the open tabs! Yay!

::  Yes, changing the clocks is bad for you.

::  If you’re like me, you see all the reports of business closing locations and locking down security measures due to massive increases of theft through a rather skeptical lens. There is always theft, but the discussion always takes on a kind of racial tone, especially when it becomes the “suburban stores” dealing with “thieves from the city“. That’s particularly interesting when you read about the woman who might have spearheaded one particular shoplifting ring.

::  Trickle-down was always bullshit. This is not news, but many Americans still hold strong to the notion that the tax cuts on the rich will work in their favor just any day now….

::  How the Finger Lakes were named. I’m always up for some Finger Lakes content!

::  Kodak Instamatic review. I dug this up when I was trying to figure out what kind of camera we had when I was a kid. We weren’t much of a picture-taking family, which makes it almost surprising to me that I’ve taken photography as a decades-long pastime that has recently exploded into a passion. I’m 98 percent sure that our family camera was a Kodak Instamatic. I do wish, in retrospect, that we’d done more picture-taking as a family. Not the whole “Family Portraits” thing, which I’ve never really understood, but just more photographic documentation of the memories made along the way.

::  I’m not actually going to close this tab any time soon, but it might be a useful reference out there: One librarian’s 15 Essential New York City books. I love NYC as a setting, and I look forward to reading some of these. (We’re coming dangerously close to not getting back to NYC for ten years after the last time….)

::  Finally, a podcast called “Stuff You Should Know” did an episode about the pie in the face! I would have linked it on Pi Day but I hadn’t listened by that point.

More links to come soon, once I again look at my browser and realize Wow, have I got a lot of tabs open!

 

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Clearing out some thoughts from the increasingly convoluted and cobwebbed corners of my crainum….

:: The other day I saw one of those prompts on social media: “The title of your memoir is the last text message you sent.” I saw this at the end of my day of shoveling snow to get to work to shovel snow at work and then come home to shovel more snow so I could get into my driveway. At that point, I had been texting a friend about how I had no mental energy to make dinner, and that text turned out to be my answer to this prompt…and honestly, as a memoir for my life, this title could very well be the best option:

“Today Was a Day That Cried Out For Fried Chicken”.

Yeah, make a note of that. When I write my autobiography, that’s going to be the title. I’m calling it now. Coming someday to bookstores everywhere, Today Was A Day That Cried Out For Fried Chicken: The Kelly Sedinger Story, As Told By Himself.

:: Here’s a cool article about a series of books that I read the living HELL out of when I was a kid: the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I loved these. My first one was, appropriately enough, Your Code Name Is Jonah, in which “you” are a secret agent investigating some strange Soviet activity involving whalesongs. The combination of fun adventure stories with a kind of gameplay was oddly intoxicating. I do admit that I would often backtrack in a book if my choices led to “my” demise (each book is written in second person!), and I wondered for years if there was a secret game-play way in the UFO 54-40 book to reach the secret paradise planet.

Also, there was a fun callback to those books in Rian Johnson’s movie Knives Out, the murder mystery in which Christopher Plummer plays rich patriarch Harlan Thrombey, the movie’s murder victim. As soon as I heard his name, I thought back to a Choose Your Own Adventure murder mystery book, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey. Rian Johnson would later admit the allusion, and I recognized it on the spot!

:: “Watching a movie on the big screen can be absorbing, even thrilling. But it’s not a religious experience.” This article has been a big thing over on Threads the last day or two. It’s a reaction to the usual type of thing: Director Martin Scorsese is again insisting that movies really must be seen on the big screen in the cinema, and that no home set-up, no matter how good, can cut it as far as presenting a movie goes. There was a time when I would have agreed with Mr. Scorsese on this point, but as someone else pointed out, Scorsese is hardly trying to get to the suburban multiplex on busy weekends and trying to budget the ever-increasing expense of movie-going alongside the ever-increasing time component required, what with each film being preceded by almost half an hour of trailers and advertising material. I used to adore seeing movies in the theater; back in the 90s, we would probably average a movie a week, and there were even a few times when we went to an early movie, did other stuff, and then on a spur-of-the-moment went to another movie at night. Also, if we really liked a movie, we might even see it twice! Those days are in the past, though. It’s simply too expensive and too great a time commitment, and I no longer think the movie-going experience is sufficiently better than watching the movie at home to bother with, much of the time. And it appears that a lot of people agree with me. I love the movies, not the theater.

:: Finally, as the Bills get ready to host the Chiefs later on tonight (they’re hosting the Chiefs! I was starting to think that the NFL had an official rule stating that all BUF-KC games are required to be played in Arrowhead Stadium), here’s how the stadium looked the other night, while the lake-effect was still going on. I was stopped at a nearby red light on my way home from picking up some fried chicken. (See above!)

Go Bills!

 

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Here’s some stuff that’s been lingering in open tabs that I’d like to clear out!

::  I love this video. It’s a history of burgers. I love a good burger, and looking at all of these…in honesty, I would eat and enjoy every single one, regardless of the opinions shared by the tasters here. Especially that Oklahoma one that’s nothing but onions and a beef patty, or even that first one, which is a beef patty on toast. (I’ve come to a more minimalist position on my burgers; I don’t need a giant pile of stuff on one to be delicious.)

::  The Surprisingly Radical Roots of the Renaissance Faire.

Every year, the roughly 200 Renaissance fairs and festivals held across the United States and abroad attract several million visitors. United by their raucous entertainment, elaborate costumes and setting in the distant past, these outdoor events boast a surprising backstory.

The country’s first Renaissance Pleasure Faire, staged in Los Angeles in May 1963, was inextricably linked to the Red Scare, a Cold War-era mass hysteria prompted by the specter of communism. It was the brainchild of Phyllis Patterson, a history, English, speech and drama teacher who’d balked at having to sign a political loyalty oath to work in California public schools. Though Phyllis later told the press she’d left teaching in 1960 to become a stay-at-home mom, her son Kevin Patterson says this was only “part of the story.” In truth, he adds, “she felt strongly about the harms and unconstitutionality of the HUAC”—the House Un-American Activities Committee—and McCarthyism overall, “and was therefore uncomfortable taking a loyalty oath.”

We’ve been attending Renaissance Faires for years, and I never knew that this is how they got their start.

::  An interview with a local pizza maker. Because pizza!

::  I’m thinking about writing a series of newsletters about baseball movies, once we get closer to either pitchers and catchers reporting or Opening Day, depending on how and when I can get the lead out and rewatch some stuff. But I definitely want to write about Moneyball, a movie about which I have thoughts. This article about the movie’s depiction of then-Oakland A’s Manager Art Howe will definitely be cited then, but I want to get it on record now because it’s interesting. The article’s take is that Moneyball makes Howe look like a complete jerk, but for reasons I’ll get into later on, I’m not totally sure that it does. There is a complete jerk in the movie, but it’s not who we might think it is.

It’s the cardboard villain demeanor in Howe’s portrayal that really is unnecessary and simply untrue according to five different California journalists I’ve spoken with, all of whom had regular contact with him as A’s manager. On Sunday, I called Mark Purdy, now retired as The San Jose Mercury News columnist. He was around the A’s clubhouse and Howe’s office constantly during their 100-win seasons in 2001-02. Purdy said he understood how a movie needs an antagonist or bad guy for plot purposes:

“But I don’t know why they made that character Art. Because Art was 180 degrees from that. He’s a really good guy. Always a gentleman.

“It’s true that he didn’t agree with everything Billy Beane wanted to do. But he was always professional about it.

“That’s why [the portrayal] must’ve really hurt him.”

::  The Ithaca Voice has run a couple of photo galleries from local photographers, featuring their best work from 2023. Check them both out, here and here. Is it possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never lived?

(All three images from the first gallery linked above.)

All for now! Stay tuned for all-new fresh tabs next year!

 

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