To this day, people say, “Oh so-and-so’s the new Cary Grant.” Cary Grant was acting in 1930. We’re talking 70 years ago. Almost 80 years ago, and we’re still referring to people as the “new Cary Grant”. Well, guess what, there’s no such thing. If 80 years later, you’re still trying to find someone to be the next so-and-so, there is nobody. It’s only him.
Expect a lot of Rachmaninoff on this site this year, as it’s the great composer’s 150th birth year. Today doesn’t quite see Rachmaninoff directly…but a piece by a teacher of his.
Sergei Taneyev succeeded Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, teaching harmony and counterpoint. Among his students was a young Sergei Rachmaninoff. Even though Taneyev is better known for being a teacher of some of Russia’s great musicians, his music is still interesting in its own right. Taneyev’s approach was apparently more academic and classically-oriented than, say, a Tchaikovsky or a Rimsky-Korsakov would have liked; but his ideas lived on in the works of many of his students.
This work is a cantata that sets a Russian poem by Alexei Tolstoy (cousin to the more famous Leo Tolstoy). Sometimes called The Russian Requiem, Taneyev’s work marries a muted lyricism with a carefully-considered mode of vocal writing, including a fascinating fugue in the last section. The work was written in 1884, when Rachmaninoff himself was just eleven years old. Nevertheless, I have to assume that Rachmaninoff heard this work at some point in his impressionable youth, and that its influence would be reflected in later works of his like Vespers.
I’ve had this ESPN article loaded in a tab for almost a week now, without reading it. I figured a bit of distance would make the article less likely to make me angry.
It didn’t work.
As I write this, the Buffalo Bills are gearing up for a playoff game in a few hours. The Miami Dolphins are in town, but it’s not even so much the opponent as the feel that maybe this is the year the Bills finally make that long-dreamt-of Super Bowl run–the one that ends in the Lombardi Trophy being brought, at long last, to The 716.
The Bills’ season has been a tough one with a lot of peaks and valleys–and one deep, deep dive that ended up being national news that put the NFL in a very uncomfortable spotlight. Before the 1st quarter was even over in the Bills’ game against the Bengals a couple of weeks ago, safety Damar Hamlin made a tackle and then collapsed of cardiac arrest. What unfolded was one of the scariest sequences ever seen on an NFL field, a scene that involved Bills trainers and medical personnel applying CPR to Hamlin, Bills and Bengals players openly weeping, Hamlin being whisked away by ambulance, and then almost a full hour of chaos and indecision as to the status of the game itself.
Historically, the NFL’s approach to catastrophic injuries has always been: Get the player attended to, get them off the field and to proper medical care, and then the remaining players get a few minutes to warm back up and get the game back on. It’s been the approach for every injury, including such awful ones as Mike Utley (who never walked again) and Kevin Everett (whose injury was later learned to be life-threatening). At one point somehow the word got to the players: “Start warming up, play will resume in a few minutes.” Some players did start warming up. Others did not, or could not. The game’s announcers reported that they had received word that the game would resume, but later NFL officials would deny this to the hilt. This strains credulity something fierce, as it’s hard to imagine announcers just making up something like that.
Yes, previous practice has been to eventually resume the game. However, the Hamlin injury was something else entirely. This wasn’t “stabilize the injured player”; there was no Utley-esque “thumbs-up” gesture forthcoming. This was CPR being administered to a player right on the field. This was literally “We do not know if this player is going to survive the next five minutes. We do not know if this player will leave the stadium alive.”
As catastrophic as injuries like the Utley and Everett injuries were, what happened to Damar Hamlin was orders of magnitude worse.
And for the NFL to not have a policy in place for this is, to me, unconscionable.
I’ve had several discussions with other fans about this, some of whom agree with me, others of whom think that this was really an unforeseeable event, a circumstance nobody could see coming. The NFL couldn’t possibly have a plan in place for what to do in the event a player dies on the field.
And no matter how much I hear that sentiment, however earnestly expressed, my opinion remains: Yes, they could; yes, they should; and that they apparently didn’t is dereliction of duty.
The violence of the NFL game is well known. Hell, the violence of the NFL game is one of its selling points. There’s a reason the NFL surrounds itself with the trappings of military service and whatnot (which is partly why Colin Kaepernick’s silent, visual protests were so effective). There’s a reason the NFL drapes itself with war-like terminology. Offensive and defensive linemen are “in the trenches”. The quarterback is the “field general”. Teams are said to be going into battle.
Every hard hit gets replayed again and again, all the more if the field microphones happen to pick up the sound of the collisions. Many times you can hear the stadium crowds going “Oooooh!” after particularly violent hits. Football can be a beautiful game to watch, but let’s be honest: its popularity is in large part because football scratches the same itch that the citizens of Rome used to scratch by going to the Coliseum to watch lightly-armed gladiators square off against angry, starving lions. Football is a game whose dangers were quietly swept under the rug for many years, until enough former players were showing symptoms of brain damage that it couldn’t be ignored anymore.
Every fan I’ve known has said, at one point or another, “Sooner or later, someone’s going to get killed playing this game.” That’s not just random thinking by idle fans, either; former referee Ed Hochuli has indicated such fears in the past as well. Yes, what happened to Damar Hamlin is unprecedented, in that we’ve never seen a player stricken on the field to the point they literally required life-saving measures right then and there. But that’s not the same thing as unforeseeable.
The narrative that took shape in the hours and days after the Hamlin injury was that there was indecision and a lack of clarity from the NFL offices for almost an hour, and that the decision to finally suspend the game was not a clear decision made for obvious reasons by the league’s highest officials (according to the NFL rules, it’s the Commissioner’s call and no one else’s), but rather a forcing of the NFL’s hand by the players and coaches who were understandably rattled by what they had seen happen to one of their own, up close and personal. Those players and coaches had a traumatic experience of their own, and the narrative quickly formed that it was those players and coaches, plus officials from the Players’ Union, who forced the NFL into finally shutting the game down.
The ESPN article confirms this narrative. The NFL really was in a state of indecision. Troy Vincent, one of the highest officials in the League, really did screw this up, and he really did try throwing other people under the bus when the League’s hour of clueless indecision became clear.
I refuse to excuse the NFL on this. The language could be so very simple:
In the event that a player suffers an emergency during a game that requires life-saving care up to and including CPR, the game shall be suspended, regardless of how much time of game play has taken place.
What happened to Damar Hamlin that night was awful and scary…but given the nature of the game, the last thing is was was inconceivable. Every NFL observer I know has conceived of an instance of a player losing his life on the field.
The National Football League generates money in the billions. The owners are the richest group of people anywhere. And the NFL runs events year-round that are huge logistical challenges. Crowd control, food concessions, safety and security–all of these are things the NFL does every single day. And when you’re planning for events of the magnitude of an NFL game–think of all the moving parts in making an NFL game happen, and how much planning has to be done for them, and how much policy has to be made to streamline it all–you also have to have plans in place for emergency events that take place during these events.
For this one circumstance to render the NFL clueless as to what to do, even for an hour, strains the imagination, and it would have been so even thirty years ago, before the NFL spent much of the last decade pushing hard on “safety” requirements like concussion protocols, limits on practice time and physical exertion therein, and so on. It should have been clear almost as soon as the ambulance was on the field that the game was done. The players should never have been in the position of wondering or warming back up, and the coaches and refs should never have been playing phone tag in the middle of the field with the NFL offices in New York City.
Obviously a big factor here is money. That game was the NFL’s wet dream: a late-season night game, nationally televised, featuring two of the best teams in the entire NFL with the home QB being a rising star and the visiting QB being virtually a superstar, with playoff position on the line. It was the single biggest Monday Night Football game in years, and before one quarter was up, it was in jeopardy. I’m sure that the NFL was suddenly terrified of losing the ratings money.
And then there was a week of indecision as to what to do with the game itself, now that they had suspended it and sent everybody home. Here, too, there needs to be an actual policy. Not a wish-list, not a “Hey, maybe we can do this!”, but an actual policy of what happens in the event a game is suspended.
NFL seasons are only 17 games long, with games happening once a week. The NFL isn’t like baseball where you can say “OK, Royals-Twins got rained out on May 12, so we’ll squeeze that one in when they meet again in July.” NFL games rarely get postponed, and almost never when they are in progress; usually it takes a natural disaster or major weather event to intercede. Games are more often relocated (this happened to the Bills earlier this very season, when a snowstorm forced a home game to be moved to Detroit) than outright canceled.
But here, too, major events sometimes have to be canceled. And the NFL had no idea what to do in that case.
I don’t pretend to know what the policy should be, though my personal opinion would be simply this: In the event of a catastrophic event requiring the suspension of an NFL game in progress, the game shall be entered into the standings as a tie. Who knows, maybe do like MLB does and posit an official length-of-game whereupon the score would simply stand as final. Maybe the NFL’s rule could be this:
In the event of a catastrophic event requiring suspension of a game in progress, the game’s score shall be counted as FINAL if less than 22:30 remains in the second half. If the game is suspended prior to that, the game shall be entered as a TIE in the standings, though all game stats shall still count toward the players.
That’s just a suggestion, but there really should be a simple policy governing these situations. Otherwise, you end up with the NFL taking days to think through various scenarios because this game happened to be important for playoff-seeding purposes. The decision to not make up the game would have come within hours of the game’s suspension if it had been some late-season tilt between two teams vying for high draft position–Texans-Colts, perhaps. The approach should be the same no matter what game it is, and I find objections along the lines of “Oh come on, the NFL has never been in this position before!” deeply unconvincing, because these are billionaires running billion-dollar businesses. If we’re going to accept the existence of billionaires (now there’s a subject for another time) and treat them as the elite of our society–which we absolutely do, let’s be honest–then we should also tailor our expectations of them upward.
My overwhelming impression on the night of Damar Hamlin’s injury was that the NFL was exposing itself as a flat-footed, indecisive mess, and not one thing I’ve learned since has altered that impression. Even now I can feel the NFL heaving a big sigh of relief: Hamlin is recovering well, though his football future is cloudy. The playoffs are here (Jeebus, Chargers, did y’all have a big turkey dinner at halftime or something?!), the Bills play the Dolphins today, the Bengals are still there and ready to make a run of their own, and so on. There might still be some controversy, particularly from Chiefs fans who are pouty that they don’t get to host the AFC Championship Game if it ends up being Chiefs-Bills, but the feeling now from the NFL that I’m seeing is “Wow, we dodged a bullet there!”
I don’t think the NFL should be let off the hook, is all I’m saying. Expect better from your billionaire masters, folks.
And oh yeah, Go Bills.
Yeah, it was me. I left the tabs open. Time to clean house!
:: Is Byron Brown the worst mayor in America?
This piece, in a local site for investigative journalism, came out in the wake of the recent blizzard during which 40 people died and also during which Mayor Brown was pretty much a nonfactor, if not directly MIA.
Problem is, if Brown is the worst mayor in America, whose fault is that?
As Jim Wright often says: If you want a better nation, start by being a better citizen.
:: Cook For Iran: Making Khoresht-e Bademjoon When I’m Homesick
Sarah Gailey is running a feature in which people wrote in with personal stories connected to the recipes to which they return again and again, and this was the first installment. If this is how the series starts, it’s going to be something special to watch unfold.
:: Hubble observes a star being devoured by a black hole.
:: Pizza boxes suck.
A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.
Having spent four years in the 90s putting pizzas in boxes, I can attest that indeed, the pizza box isn’t the best thing in the world. However, a big problem is in the pizza itself; unless you’re the person who never eats more than a single slice, the texture of the pizza is already changing from the time it comes out of the oven. If the texture you encounter in the first slice within minutes of emerging from the hot box is your Platonic ideal, you’d best stop eating after that first slice, because with the second slice, things are cooling and congealing and the crust is absorbing moisture again. The best the box can do is vent steam through those little vent slots, but if you got delivery and the box got shoved into that thermal bag? Fuhgeddaboudit!
I’m not sure what the solution is here, but maybe a part of it lies in Americans getting beyond crispy being the texture they desire in so many foods. (Oh, and the best way to reheat leftover pizza is not in the microwave or the oven. It’s in a pan on the stove. That way you can, yes, crisp up the crust again, and slap a lid on it during the last minute of reheating it to get things good and melty again.)
:: A Brazilian art collector claims that a Van Gogh painting on display in Detroit belongs to him.
The art world is wild, innit? This is a fascinating story and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out:
A painting by Vincent van Gogh on display at the Detroit Institute of Art was stolen, a new lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by Brokerarte Capital Partners and its sole proprietor, Gustavo Soter, a Brazilian art collector. It claims the DIA borrowed the painting from an unnamed party that is not its legal owner.
The painting in question is an 1888 oil called Une Liseuse De Romans, or The Novel Reader, which shows a young, dark-haired woman reading a yellow book. It is on show as part of the Van Gogh in America exhibition, which features 74 works by the Dutch post-impressionist, borrowed from 50 sources.
According to the lawsuit, Soter purchased the painting in 2017 for $3.7m, whereupon “a third-party immediately took possession of the painting”.
The suit says Soter “never transferred title to or any interest in the painting to this third party. Since the third party took possession of the painting in May 2017, plaintiff has not known the painting’s location.”
Hat tip to Nerdishly, who actually saw the painting in question before this story broke.
:: Should I divorce my husband after the insane stunt he pulled at our wedding?
The stunt? This:
My only hard-and-fast rule was that he would not rub cake in my face at the reception.
Being a reasonable man who knows me well, he didn’t. Instead, he grabbed me by the back of the head and shoved my head down into it. It was planned since the cake was DESTROYED, and he had a bunch of cupcakes as backup.
The advice columnist advises:
I think what he did was a red flag about not respecting you and your wishes—to say nothing of the physical aggression—but even if it wasn’t, the fact that you really didn’t like it is enough. Make a mental note about which of your loved ones don’t seem to value your happiness, and continue with your divorce.
And maybe this is surprising coming from a fan of the pie-in-the-face, but I couldn’t agree more. What this guy did was shitty and disrespectful, and it was aggressively so, right in front of everyone. There is nothing lovable about violating someone’s wishes in so brazen and humiliating a way.
(If anyone’s wondering, no, The Wife and I did not do that cake-smashing bullshit at our wedding. I honestly think it’s stupid and tacky and I’ve hated it at every wedding I’ve seen it happen at.)
OK, that’s all my open tabs! Yay! Time to open more tabs!
I posted a version of this on Facebook earlier and then deleted it when it annoyed someone over there, but it’s stuck in my head, so here it is.
Food is a major topic in my reading and teevee watching. We watch a lot of cooking shows, and I read a lot of books about food, going beyond cookbooks. Reading about food is often a great backdoor way to learn about other cultures, about history, about people, and more. Everybody eats, right?
But I do have one big pet-peeve that annoys me every time I see it in food writing or in food commentary. That peeve is use of the word inedible to mean “I don’t like this food.”
The most recent example of this, which I saw online earlier, is a chef/restaurateur named David Chang, who is apparently the guy behind the Momofuku chain of restaurants. I’ve heard of Momofuku, and I’ve likely seen Chef Chang at some point on teevee–he has to have shown up on the Food Network or as a guest judge on MasterChef, I would assume. Aside from that, I know nothing about the man, but I saw a link on Facebook to an article where he apparently voiced his negative opinion of the rotisserie chickens at Costco.
Now, I do not have a specific dog in that fight. As admitted, I know nothing about Chef Chang, and I have never tasted a Costco chicken. (As of this writing the Buffalo area still doesn’t even have a Costco, and while one is coming, it will be in the terrible stretch of Niagara Falls Blvd. in Amherst to which we never go.) I have no idea if the chickens are great or not. That’s not the point.
What bugged me is that apparently Chef Chang couldn’t just talk about them being not to his liking, or why he thinks their preparation is lacking, or what errors he thinks Costco makes with the seasoning. Apparently he had to refer to the chickens as inedible.
I have to be honest here: I find that use of inedible really lazy and annoying. There is nothing about those chickens that is “inedible”, unless Chef Chang has some allergy. Whenever a “foodie” uses the word inedible in this way, what I hear is, “My personal palate is so advanced that I cannot bring myself to even swallow this food, and if you can, there is something wrong with you.”
This use of inedible reminds me of an old schtick from the early seasons of Hell’s Kitchen. We still watch this show, even as it’s become really repetitive to the point of being paint-by-numbers. Each season begins with the contestants all being tasked with cooking their “signature dish” for Gordon Ramsay to taste, and he goes through the batch judging each dish and assigning points to the two teams. He’ll say something like “That filet is very well-done, good seasoning, nice job”, or, on the flip side, “The fish is well-cooked, but the puree is bland, too bad.”
Back when the show started, though, Ramsay would have, shall we say, much more dramatic reaction if he didn’t like the dish: He’d take a bite, chew it, then he’d fake gagging, grab a trash can, and do a dramatic rendition of someone vomiting. It was always pretty obvious that he wasn’t actually sickened by the food, and this act has vanished from the show.
That, to me, is the equivalent what calling food inedible just because you don’t like it.
Pizza Hut Pan Pizza is inedible to The Wife, because she’s celiac and it would make her sick. Hemlock is inedible to me and chocolate is inedible to Carla, because those things are poisonous to humans and dogs, respectively. But as much as I hate the stuff, broccoli is not inedible to me.
So, foodies of the world, stop referring to food you dislike as inedible. There are lots of words you can use instead. Yes, maybe this annoys me more than it should, but that’s what a pet-peeve is, right?
Credit: Variety.com
Sad news from the music world yesterday: guitarist Jeff Beck has died. He had a long and unconventional career, which led to some amazing music-making. This song was my introduction to his guitar work, and it quickly became one of my favorite songs of the 80s, and then of all time. Yes, it’s a cover; the original is by the great Curtis Mayfield, whose own versions are well worth seeking out…but this rendition stood in stark contrast to the Van Halen-esque guitar fireworks that were the main role of the guitar at that time (at least, in terms of the guitar-centric music that I was listening to at at the time). Now, I loved hair metal and I yield to no one in my conviction that Eddie Van Halen is one of the all-time greats, but Jeff Beck was something else. He showed me that the guitar could sing, and his playing here doesn’t merely back up Rod Stewart’s vocals; Beck’s playing here is a full partner with Mr. Stewart.
I didn’t realize until quite a few years after I heard this song that Jeff Beck’s career had been as long as it had been. He was apparently difficult to work with at times, but also he was one of those musicians who follows his own instincts and thoughts, with the result being decades of great music-making.
Thank you for the music, Jeff Beck. I hope your guitar is sounding on that very train.
Here is “People Get Ready”.
Two Christmases in a row, I petitioned The Wife for a white cable-knit sweater rather like the one Chris Evans wore in Knives Out. I didn’t petition her for this sweater because Chris Evans wore one in Knives Out, but I won’t say that his wearing one in Knives Out had nothing to do with me petitioning her for just such a sweater. I mean, come on:
Credit: https://bamfstyle.com/2020/11/25/knives-out-sweater/
That’s some iconic sweater wearing, is all I’m saying. And you know what? There’s nothing at all wrong with seeing a look in a movie and thinking, “Huh, I kinda like that.”
I asked too late in the game last year for one of these, but this year, The Wife came through! Of course, unlike Mr. Evans, I am most likely to pair the sweater with a pair of overalls. This is an outfit for cozy winter days…a hot beverage and a good book, while the elements do their icy thing outside.
Note the coffee mug! That was a gift from The Daughter.
Dogs remain the best fashion accessories.
Detail. This is the only scenario when I do the one-strap-undone thing.
Morning coffee and a book. Simple pleasures!
The sweater is by Land’s End. We’ve had a lot of success with that brand over the years; everything they make is of high enough quality that the clothes last, and they just make good, solid staples, like sweaters. This sweater is soft and pleasant, and if there’s one thing my life can always use in greater supply, it’s “soft and pleasant”!
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was one of the major names in twentieth-century music. HIs work is always brightly modern, but also accessible in a way that much of the avant garde music of that century was not; Messiaen’s work both rewards repeated listening and the first hearing.
I haven’t found much information about this particular piece, beyond the fact that the score was lost during World War II, prompting Messiaen to reconstruct it from memory. The result is a work of unflinching spirituality and modernism, an orchestral kaleidoscope of color and texture. It’s a fascinating listen, as Messiaen tends to be. Here is Hymne (Hymn to the Blessed Sacrament), by Olivier Messiaen.
If I’ve timed this post right, those of you who are subscribed to my newsletter, Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars, should have the latest issue in your inboxes right now. And those of you who have not subscribed are doubtless feeling somewhat sad…and empty…and left out. But there’s an easy solution to that! Go subscribe now! You’ll be happy you did!
(Well, I hope you’ll be happy you did. I’m not trying to make anyone unhappy, as it is.)
MLK
Via Roger Green.