Saturday, February 23, 2008
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It's been a while, I know--this cure for St. Vitus' Dance is taking a little longer than I thought it would--but I still haven't given up, not entirely, on this venture. It has moved to a new location, though, and any new content (when it comes) will be appearing
here. I'd say it's worth your while to bookmark it...
Sunday, May 20, 2007
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...
the last of Robert Altman’s four greatest films have made it to DVD. When they came out it was inconceivable the day would come that you wouldn’t have to wait on the vagaries of rep house schedules or some film professor’s whims aligning with your own before you could see them. Now they’re there for all to see, at any time of day or night: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, and California Split. And the world’s a better place for it.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
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I spent this afternoon watching the last half of something I forgot I even had, the 250-minute documentary about Nixon's second term simply called Watergate that BBC and The Discovery Channel put together about 15 years ago. I have about five documentaries and specials about the mess but this one is the mother of them all. That's partly because it isn't fixated on The Washington Post's role the way the others are—Woodward and Bernstein make an appearance alright, but they're onscreen just a tad longer than Tony Ulasewicz, and they get a helluva lot less face-time than Dean or McCord or that bow-tied dandy known as Archibald Cox. Another thing that makes it great is that the filmmakers somehow put all the subjects at their ease, with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in particular showing hitherto hidden human faces. Nixon himself is present only in the form of generous excerpts from the David Frost interview in '77, and when describing the meeting in which he fired Haldeman, Nixon describes his old chief of staff, spitting the words out as they come to him, “not as some Germanic...Nazi...stormtrooper,” which does pretty much nail the public's perception of the guy, but as a “decent public servant.” That last phrase might be stretching a point but Haldeman comes off well. With his hair grown out a tad and wearing a plaid shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of half-glasses, he comes across like an uncle at his favorite fishing lodge. And he's not alone. Ehrlichman, Liddy, Dean, Magruder, Colson, Mardian, Porter—damn near all of them—speak out with a surprising openness and lack of rancor, and the way their interviews are woven together makes us feel for once that everyone's telling the truth.
There are exceptions. John Mitchell, who died years ago, isn't on-hand, of course, but you get the feeling that even if he was he wouldn't have been interested in opening up to a film-crew for a documentary narrated by Dan Schorr. He's the one who bluntly told the Ervin Committee that he considered Nixon's re-election so important because of “what the other side was putting up” that he would've done anything to accomplish it, and he's also the only one who failed to see the humor in his exchange with Sam Dash. When Dash asked Mitchell why he hadn't thrown Liddy out of his office while Liddy was describing one of his hare-brained (and highly illegal) schemes, Mitchell, pipe in hand, evenly replied, “In retrospect, I wish I hadn't just thrown him out of my office, but that I'd thrown him out of the window.” With a professional's timing Dash let the answer hang in the air before prefacing his next question with, "Seeing as how you did neither...” As the caucus room rang out with spontaneous guffaws, the camera zoomed in on Mitchell who, judging by his expression, looked as if he were trying to decide whether it would be more fun to kill Dash by roasting him on a spit or throttling him with his bare hands.
Still, the man who comes off the ugliest isn't named Mitchell or Haig or even Richard Milhouse Nixon. It's E. Howard Hunt, the reputed "spymaster” who did us all a favor by dying and going to Hell just a few short weeks ago. Hunt, it will be recalled, led the planning for the break-in along with his co-mastermind Gordon Liddy, and it was he who began squeezing his former bosses for hush money after his arrest. Hunt, too, appears in contemporary interviews, but where even the likes of Colson, Magruder, and Ehrlichman mellowed with age, and managed to recognize the tawdriness in their own souls somewhere along the way, Hunt gazes into the camera as one might regard a bottle of cyanide as he talks about the "considerations" he felt were due him. It's a disgusting, even disquieting, performance.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
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One of the more knowing—and ticklish—appreciations I’ve seen in a while:
Dylan Hears a Who. “Miss Gertrude McFuzz” especially recommended.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
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In the couple years surrounding our last year of high-school all we did was drive around town every night, getting stoned and talking and finding (usually) innocuous ways of getting into trouble. Since the "getting stoned" part was de rigeur, we wound up frequenting, on a more or less rotating basis, a handful of households that usually had some stash lying around. John and Suzy Littlejohn*, along with their three young kids, made up not just one of the most welcoming of these households, but easily the most comfortable one. They owned a house in Houston's Montrose District, a rambling two-story affair that reeked of comfort and roots, and we wound up there at least once a week. It was my sister, Polly, who introduced me to the Littlejohns (God knows where she met them), but since she was a couple years older than I was chronologically (and a lifetime older than me in terms of maturity) she ran with her own crowd of friends. (There was a period of time where Polly and I ran into each other more at the Littlejohns' than we did in our own home.) But usually it was me and Glenn and Dennis, or some subset thereof, who'd show up unannounced on their doorstep. John and Suzy were in their mid to late 30s, almost a generation away from us, but their open-door policy dictated taking in everyone, both the river of friends that flowed through the place as well as these scrounging little long-haired rats who came to scarf down the remnants of that night's pot of chili and then get high on their pot or hash and zombie out on the livingroom floor while the stereo blared away. Suzy had a frizzed-out mop of hair that tentacled out in every direction, and tended to wear tent-like dresses stamped with African prints that pooled out around her legs when she put her feet up on the couch, while John (who supported the family by working as an architect) looked like George Carlin in his glory days, only with a slow, considered, ruminative way of talking—a trait I initially took as a sign of maturity and wisdom.
The kids were young enough that they were always in bed by 9 or 10, leaving us free to stay up all hours of the night, listening to music and talking, talking, talking. In the early years a lot of it was about the war and Nixon, but in time the conversation revolved more and more around books and movies. John and Suzy could talk about that shit, too, though Suzy was the more knowing and curious one of the two: when Glenn and I came in raving one night about some movie we'd just seen called McCabe & Mrs. Miller, she got up without a word and put on The Songs of Leonard Cohen while we sat there with our mouths open. In high school my bond with Glenn was galvanized by "Howl," Desolation Angels, and some of the other Beat tracts, but eventually we fell under the baleful influence of the Modernists—a development that doubtless elevated the level of our conversation, but which also hardened us, and made us haughty and impatient with lesser work. Sometimes we were making a legitimate point, but more often we were just being a pain in the ass. The only thing is that the air was full of "lesser work" at the time. It was the age of The Eagles and of the disaster-movie cycle and of Jonathan Livingston Seagull; the cultural landscape was so overloaded with crap it was possible to overlook the fact that American cinema was enjoying its last renaissance.
All of this only served to irritate us that much more. I don't even remember what movie it was now, but one night John Littlejohn offered up the earth-shaking opinion that such-and-such a film may not have constituted a crime against humanity, and Glenn and I went to work on him. What-about-this, and What-about-that, we kept asking him, growing a little more unsparing with the adjectives we were throwing out with every swing of our whipsaw. We thought we were just having another conversation, so we were surprised when Suzy suddenly got up, crying, and ran out of the room. Somehow that night ended with Glenn and me sitting up with her in the kitchen while she explained to us, decidedly not in so many words, that John, lovely man that he was, just wasn't very bright. "He tries so hard," Suzy said, and I think now she was asking us not to lean on him like that again. What it all meant was that John's deliberate way of talking wasn't wisdom at all—it was just simple insecurity about saying the wrong damn thing. Listening to Suzy I had the same feeling you get the first time you see your parents fail at something and you realize they're just doofuses, too, a comparison all the more fitting because it was the first chink of any kind I'd ever seen in the armor of their marriage.
A little time passed, both Glenn and Dennis moved away, I got a girlfriend and a life of my own, and I didn't see the Littlejohns anymore. Then came the news from Polly that Suzy and John had separated and were getting divorced—an idea that would've upended the world had it come a couple years earlier—and that John was drinking too much. Suzy kept the Montrose house for a couple more years before moving her brood to Colorado, where Polly, in her peripatetic journeys around the Southwest, would often see her.
Finally one night around '78 or so, I ran into John in Cactus Records. He looked like he was 65 and he was completely shit-faced, stumbling around the aisles and hanging onto the bins to stay upright. I wasn't in a good place either then—a horrible breakup had left me a dilapidated, weak-willed mess—so I took John up on his offer to have a drink at his house. His "house," I call it—actually it was a dingy one-bedroom apartment, nearly bereft of furniture and a long ways down from the warm paisleys and throw-pillows of his old home. We sat at a bare kitchen table, and he kept pouring so I kept drinking, especially since he was eager to have someone else who'd recently been dumped beside him. He launched into a couple anti-Suzy tirades that he almost immediately took back, but then out of the blue he remembered that night and he turned his guns on me. Whatever sketchy camaraderie we'd developed in the previous hour evaporated as he started telling me what superior sniveling snots Glenn and I had been, and on he went until he was blaming the breakup of his marriage on a couple of pretentious twenty-somethings. I sat and listened to it for a while before I finally bailed, and when he called stone-cold sober a week later to see if I wanted to get together for a drink, I begged off. I never saw him again.
Or Suzy either, for that matter, though Polly's relayed the news about her over the years. Those kids we used to shoo upstairs are pushing 40 now, and Suzy somehow landed on a ranch of her own, and nobody knew for sure where John was. Then, on this last Wednesday, Polly emailed me to say that Suzy had gotten intestinal cancer that jumped down her hip bone and into her leg, before killing her a couple of weeks ago. The news hit with only a distant thud, but I didn't have to think very hard before I remembered all those good nights we had, along with those couple of bad ones. Any lessons I might've learned from knowing the Littlejohns I either learned or didn't learn 30 years ago, and there's nothing else to say about it now except thanks for the weed and the chili, Suzy. For the most part I had a really good time.
* - an alias
Thanks to my friend
Chris Lanier, I wound up appearing on Steve Lambert's show on UC Davis' radio station a couple weeks back. (Chris can also be heard on the program, recounting with Homeric splendor the mighty Battle of the Pine Needles.) Steve's ostensible theme was "Fist Fights and Violence" but that didn't stop me from saddling up some of my pet hobbyhorses—Peckinpah,
The Sopranos, the corruption of feminism—and riding them into the ground, thus boring an audience much wider than my close circle of friends for a change. You can hear the show on
Steve’s website by scrolling down to Episode 10 and clicking on the sound bar. There aren't any earth-shaking insights, but I did I get to tell a couple of my circus stories (though I unconscionably neglected to give shout-outs to the two horses I handled, Pancho and Frosty), and Steve did a really nice job with the editing. That post about Dority's fistfight also got cannibalized for a contribution to
The High Hat a couple of issues ago. That issue was intended (in part) as a tribute to Robert Altman (who died unexpectedly about 24 hours after it came online, making me think that a special issue about Dick Cheney might be in order), and also includes my take on
California Split—still a piece of relevant (and hilarious) filmmaking 30+ years after the fact.
Monday, July 24, 2006
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Anyone who’s ever been in a fight remembers it forever. Those of us who don’t like to fight, who never really learned how to, see the world of violence as a foreign place whose customs we hope we never have to get the hang of. I’d rather—much rather—live in a war-zone than ever get into a serious fight, one where the guy isn’t trying to merely beat me but take me apart with his hands. I spent my seventeenth summer traveling with the Ringling Bros. Circus, and practically all of the guys I worked with (we looked to the livestock) had run out on something—a bail-bond or a family, alimony payments or parole. They were stupid and listless creatures, uneducated, often drunk, and getting old fast. They fought over anything or over nothing at all, in horrific little set-tos that never lasted long before someone was hurt. There were no schoolyard shoves or who-sez-you-sez preliminaries leading up to the violence—it just naturally flowed from the realization that some disagreement hung in the air—and it always ended with someone being overwhelmed both physically and psychologically, which is a crushing thing to see. One fight, fought over a horse's location on the picket line, concluded with the big, naïve farmboy we called “G.I. Joe” splayed across the horseshit and hay, his nose spurting blood, his hands raised in surrender, and screeching for mercy as his opponent towered over him, spitting demeaning obscenities into his face while threatening to wallop him again.
I suppose that’s why movies never get fistfights right—they’re just too ugly, too painful—so we turn them into entertaining little agons where punches sound like a wet washcloth hitting the bathroom floor instead of human bone breaking against itself. And yet violence is all the rage in our movies—without it most films wouldn’t know how to end. It’s so pervasive that even an otherwise likeable movie such as Something Wild has to end with Ray Liotta taking a knife in the guts. And of course Liotta must die from his wound—without that assurance the audience would exit the theater with misfiring synapses, half-consciously alarmed he may somehow escape, recover, and return to finish his bloody mission. All of this formula comes in a Jonathan Demme film about a man losing his conformist ways, a theme that served a dozen Cary Grant comedies without once boiling over into bloodshed. One of the reasons I’ve always admired the Robert De Niro-Charles Grodin buddy-picture Midnight Run is that it foils our expectations of violence after preparing us for the worst: once the heroes, cops, and villains have gathered for a showdown in the Las Vegas airport, the movie ends, not in a hailstorm of exploding squibs, but in a confrontation both comical and, for one moment, intensely suspenseful, providing the kind of perfect catharsis that Hollywood ought to be able to churn out in its sleep.
It’s remarkable to me that after so many years and so many movies that employ violence, I can think of so few American films that do justice to the subject. It only gets worse as time goes by, what with the villains still going up in a fireball that inspires a dryly intoned wisecrack, and the heroes still falling for tricks that were musty before vaudeville died. It makes one almost giddy with gratitude when movie people actually act like people. I felt like throwing a party the first time I saw Key Largo, where Edward G. Robinson, having spent the movie establishing himself as an arch-criminal of nearly Hitlerian malice and cunning, attempts to deke Humphrey Bogart in their endgame. “Okay, Soldier, I’m coming out. I ain't got no gun,” he yells as he slithers out of the fishing boat’s cabin, a pistol hidden by his body. When I saw Bogart peering down through the hatch, I was ready to throw my beer at the TV—I knew he’d ultimately win the showdown but I was positive he’d fall for the old ruse in the meantime—but no. As “Johnny Rocco” hove into view, Bogart simply lifted his gun and fired a shot into him without a moment’s hesitation. And when Robinson, staggered but not downed by the shot, continued to move, Bogart let him have it again, and then again.
Even rarer than the moments that violence is represented realistically are those when it’s rendered with an aesthetic point in mind. After Seven Samurai, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch (still the Rosetta Stone of cinematic violence), and a handful of miscellaneous killings in lesser pictures, it’s hard to think of films or TV shows whose violence was done well enough to make it stick to our ribs—to really affect us. Terrence Malick’s Badlands is rife with brutal killings but nothing in the film touches the moment when Kit, the bored, half-bright sociopath played by Martin Sheen, locks a hapless young couple in a storm shelter, sticks his revolver between two of its boards and blindly lets go a couple of rounds, then asks his girlfriend, “Think I hit ‘em?” Francis Coppola’s instincts as a storyteller were never sharper than in The Godfather Part II when he thought to have the thickheaded thug Don Fanucci touch his chin in bewilderment at an apparent marvel—a darkened lightbulb in his hallway—just before Vito Corleone guns him down.
The Fanucci killing is a keeper because it comes at the end of a sustained sequence that follows Vito as he stalks Fanucci’s leisurely stroll down Mulberry Street through the Feast of San Gennaro. An incredibly suspenseful sequence, suspense isn’t its only point; it’s drawn out so long we feel a welter of emotions as it progresses, culminating in the moment when Vito applies the coup de grâce by shooting Fanucci in the mouth, a moment made horrific by being shown in close-up, but which is split by a feeling of relief because Vito has so much of our sympathy. Hitchcock, of course, was the master of sustained mayhem: in (at the very least) Sabotage, Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Torn Curtain, and Frenzy, he crafted long, incredibly detailed sequences that end in violent deaths whose aftershocks play on our nerves after the movies have ended.
And yet considering the absolutely incredible amount of violence in our movies, so little of it is memorable in the way that, say, William Holden shooting down the German officer to kick off the final bloodbath in The Wild Bunch is. Our filmmakers tend to care only about body counts, without ever following through on their punches or actually affecting us emotionally with their maimings and gorings, which is surely the only legitimate excuse for such bedlam to begin with. In Chinatown we never quite recover from seeing Jack Nicholson’s nostril bisected by Polanski’s switchblade before the movie is barely a quarter old, while in Die Hard and the Bruckheimer movies bodies are stacked up like cordwood, yet no one in the audience thinks of choking on their popcorn. It’s unreal.
So it was with something like gratitude that I took in Dan Dority’s fight with Captain Turner in the fifth episode of this season’s Deadwood. I’ve been meaning to write something about the show here for months, but it seemed there was little to say that hadn’t already been said. (And besides, as you’ve noticed, I haven’t been posting about anything here.) But the Dority scene is the real deal—the realest deal I’ve seen in years. As a piece of cinematic storytelling, for intertwining character with action, for capturing physical exertion and the terror of combat, and then the exhaustion of death, it has few peers. Even for a show so accomplished as Deadwood it’s a tour de force.
That isn’t to say that watching the scene is a pleasure; it’s far from that. It had come to me only earlier in the week how much I’d cottoned to Dority and W. Earl Brown’s work in the role, a realization born of the fact that David Milch and his writers had set Dority on an unavoidable collision course with Turner, an Old West version of Oddjob whose indomitable mien made him seem the inevitable victor in any encounter he might face. Dority, with his paunch and shoulder-length hair, is like your older hippie brother who’s gone bad, but his relative innocence (at least when compared to Al Swearengen or Cy Tolliver) and his sunny drawl take much of the moral stink off of him. Also, as Swearengen has had to evolve, so have his men, even if they didn’t know why or that they’re doing it at all.
But George Hearst’s appearance, and his insane plans, seemingly ripped from the Book of Revelations, to destroy the camp if it won’t succumb to his will, forces Swearengen and his confederates—including that yang to his yin, Seth Bullock—to backslide a little, and maybe a lot. For a villain in a western Hearst’s motives run deep, so deep as to be unfathomable even to Swearengen, who’s carved out his place in the world by correctly divining his opponents’ next move. Hearst understands that what will hurt Swearengen far more than merely killing his right-hand man is to make the killing a protracted and very public one, indelibly stamped by his own hand, and in that sense Dority and Turner each are shadowed by a tragic cloud—both men, defined by their loyalty to their bosses, must go through with the fight just to sustain their identities.
Brown has stated that Milch said he wanted the fight to have three qualities: 1) an absence of fistfight clichés (no roundhouse punches or people thrown through store windows); 2) a rolling rhythm, gaining in intensity just when it seemed to be slowing down; and 3) something he’d never seen before. It’s that second quality which really defines the fight, which in memory seems to occur in a mere handful of set-ups even though it’s nearly five minutes long. The sequence in fact does have several cuts, but none of them are for the sake of flashiness—they simply propel us to a better vantage point of the convulsive action, whether we want to go or not. The fight itself plays just as a fight between practiced, burly, and motivated fighters would, with the deadlier, larger Turner having the advantage from the first second of contact. The men fight in such close quarters that it’s hard for either to land a solid blow, and the first big turning point comes when Turner headbutts Dority, then grabs Dan’s cheek between his teeth. The bite hurts but the headbutt is a true howler; you see how it instantly dazes, and frightens, Dority, and throws all the advantage to Turner’s side. Dority spends most of the rest of the fight just trying to escape with his life, two or three times crawling away, pathetically, like a wounded animal, and each time Turner comes after him, making his life a little worse with each return. At one point Turner hauls Dan to his feet and strangles him from behind, and through the snot and blood Dan spits into the wheeling sky we see Swearengen staring impassively down from his balcony.
The sequence wouldn’t be what it is if not for what comes next. Turner drags Dority to a mud puddle and forces his face down into the water, and holding it there, glances up to where Hearst stands on his “veranda,” and in that moment Swearengen quietly lowers his head, in anguish and in concession, now that it looks that his man has lost, and that his best friend will be killed. When the creative team of The Sopranos killed off Adrianna La Cerva two years ago, out of a delicacy of feeling for us (and perhaps for her), they let her crawl entirely offscreen before Silvio Dante pumped a shot into her head. But Swearengen’s redirection of his gaze seems to confirm that both the worst and the unthinkable are about to happen: the worst being that his power is about to be stripped away in a single stroke, the unthinkable being that a man we care about is about to be dispatched, in conditions so squalid and humiliating as to be grotesque, before our eyes.
It’s that motion of Swearengen’s, that downward tilt of his head without any change in his expression, that got to me. I don’t know fully why, though I’m sure it has to do with how the show’s relationships are made so concrete and believable that we can sense with unusual particularity how all of these people feel about each other. Swearengen’s history with Dority has been doled out to us in dribs and drabs—we know, for instance, that they cut the lumber for The Gem together. When Dority’s face is in that water, Swearengen is at risk of passing with him. From his point of view he’d have no leg to stand on if Dan were killed; Dority’s drowning would only finish what Hearst had begun by cutting off Swearengen’s finger. And Ian McShane has never been finer in the role than in his scenes leading up to the fight, when Swearengen desperately tries, without success, to suss out Hearst’s intentions—“What's in his head, I cannot fucking find in mine”—while pretending to his allies that he’s only working by his own timetable. Al Swearengen may be nothing but a sacred monster, and but for sheer naked circumstance he and Dority would be child-killers, but in this one moment none of that matters. Two men’s lives, and all of their labor, can be seen vanishing into that oily mudhole.
Leaving the kicker—presumably, the thing Milch has never seen before. Eye-gouging was a fairly frequent turn in frontier fights so it couldn’t have taken much labor to realize that popping out the Captain’s left eye was the right way to decide the fight’s direction once and for all. But before it comes there’s one last crisis: Turner smacking Dority’s skull against a rock, once with a thud, once with a sickening cracking sound, facing us again with witnessing what at that moment is the last thing we’d witness. But if Dan’s body is beaten, the look in his eye as his fingers spider across, and then dig into, Turner’s face is focused and deliberate, and when the Captain rolls off of him, one eye now dancing at the end of its nerves and his arms convulsing so rapidly that it seems for a second they’ve increased the film speed, Dan, like Bogart looking down on Edward G. Robinson, knows it’s neither the time nor the place for self-destructive pity.
Technically the scene’s a bloody marvel. For one thing, whatever Brown’s makeup artist makes on the show, it can’t be nearly enough: by the end of the fight, his mouth dripping ropes of saliva, his face split and bruised, his hair and clothing slathered in blood and grease and mud, Dan looks like a caveman who’s been blindsided by lightning. The sound design, too, is a thing of beauty. Except for a wagon rolling past at the beginning and the heavy thuds of the men’s blows, there’s barely a sound in the entire five minutes—only a grunt here, a murmur there from the townspeople watching or strolling past. The glaring absence of mood music gives the fight a fluid but fully shaped form—we can clearly retrace the action in all its vigor the second it ends. And in the end we're left with the sound of Allan Graf’s indescribably ghastly howls after the gouging, at least until Dority takes his cudgel-like fire log to the back of Turner’s skull. We don’t see that last bit of violence, and barely even hear it, coming to us as it does from Al’s distanced perspective on the balcony, just before he flips his toothpick over the railing and goes back inside. After everything that's come before, it’s a blessing to have things end with a whimper.
Friday, February 24, 2006
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Dave G., a friend from the bar, went camping with five friends north of Reno last weekend despite some (seriously) inclement weather. On Sunday four of the friends were off somewhere, and Dave and Matt were alone shooting target practice when all of a sudden a large white dog stumbled over the ridge. It was a male springer spaniel, and he was skinny as a rail and his muzzle was all scabbed and bloodied like something big had been biting down into it, and he had a wild look in his eye as he came tramping into the campsite as if he couldn’t believe he’d actually found some people after all this time. He slobbered down the water that Dave and Matt gave him, but when they tried to feed him the only food they had, which was a bag of salted pretzels, he couldn’t even get them down—Dave said they just slid back out the sides of his mouth. He spent the next 24 hours curled up like a donut, with his nose tucked entirely up between his hind legs, but on the second day he sat up and started looking around. By then he’d gotten something to eat and the guys had scrubbed the blood off his nose and checked out the cuts on his face, and by two days later when the trip was over, he was acting like a normal dog.
He had tags on him that included a phone number, but Dave and his buddies hadn’t been able to call because they couldn’t get a signal for their cell phones from the campsite. When they got out of the mountains, though, they called the number and sure enough got the mutt’s owner. The guy and his girlfriend had lost the dog two weeks earlier in the mountains, and had had to turn around and give him up for lost after he’d run away. Two full weeks, that’s how long this dog had been wandering around the foothills of the eastern Sierras in early February, and in that time he’d wandered either two hundred yards or twenty miles—who knows?—before he came over a rise and saw a couple of sympathetic human beings staring up at him. The owner had to work or something so his girlfriend came to retrieve him, and when she showed up the dog immediately recognized her and started barking his ass off in her direction. (I can only imagine what he had to say to his actual master.) Anyway, it was beautiful the way Dave told this story to me. He did it just step by step, drawing me off-guard by talking about the target practice and so on before describing the sight of this horrible looking mutt materializing on the hilltop, and only very gradually did he make it clear that the dog not only would survive his ordeal but would be reunited with his grieving owners who couldn’t believe they were getting a second chance with him, and would finally get to go home to the place which the whole time must've been just simmering like a mirage on the back-burner of his brain.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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A couple days ago a local big-time criminal defense attorney found his wife
’s body in their home
– she had the ol
’ multiple blunt trauma to the head thing going
– and the TV media here, smelling another O.J./Laci epic in the offing, have gone absolutely
nuts. They lead off every newscast with the story (what Iraqi referendum? what fascistic special election?), refer to the victim exclusively as
“Pam,
” keep reminding us of the money factor by endlessly re-running chopper footage of the Xanaduesque hilltop mansion that the couple was building, bring on FBI profilers whom they then machine-gun with leading, lurid questions (
“Does the fact that Pam was in her T-shirt and panties indicate that she knew her attacker
well?
”), and otherwise openly flirt with the line between showing proper sympathy for a grieving husband and accusing the bastard of outright murder. I
’ll probably never mention this case again, but just know that for the next year or so I
’ll be banging my head against the wall whenever I stumble across the 10:00 news.
I actually wrote the following at about this time last year, but anyone who follows these things knows this morning how relevant it still is, even in its sorry unfinished state:
Ten years from now I doubt I’ll remember exactly how it was that I managed to miss practically all of the Red Sox’s clinching victory and a full lunar eclipse on the same night—I just hope I remember that it was for a very good reason. As it was, the Red Sox’s four-game sweep of the Series came as an anticlimax after all the years of haplessness, so much so that the fourth game was barely over before the announcers were asking, “Which is the next cursed team?”
I wish I could claim something so redolent with mystery as a curse for my Astros. Everyone seemed happy that by dispatching the Braves in five games they finally managed to win a postseason series for the first time in the franchise’s 43-year history. The Astros’ problem, though, isn’t just winning any series, but the LCS in particular. They’ve been there twice, in ’80 against the Phillies and in ’86 against the Mets, and both times they were mercilessly mangled and ridiculed before being rejected by the mirthless gods of baseball. It doesn’t matter that in both cases their opponents went on to win the World Series; nor does it matter that both series (still in the old five-game format) were memorable for their high-anxiety theatrics. Game Four of the ’80 NLCS was a baseball anti-gravity house, rife with slapstick adventures on the basepaths, a momentum-turning play which, although it could only have been a single out or a triple-play, was instead deemed a double-play by the umps after they huddled for a 15-minute strange interlude, and a play in which the Astros leftfielder, rearing back to throw the ball, had it roll through his fingers behind his head before completing his full-armed throw to the infield, like a Little Leaguer faking out his teammates. (It was at this point that my buddy threw up his hands and yelled, “Do these jokers even want to win this game?”) Despite their own miscues and the calls against them, the Astros held a two-run, eighth inning lead with Nolan Ryan on the mound in Game Five, and still found a way to lose.
Against all odds, 1986 was even more painful. The Mets, a team just bursting with talent, had squashed their opponents all year long as they rolled toward what seemed like a predestined coronation. I was living in San Francisco by then and had become entranced by the young Giants, now under the tutelage of Roger Craig. The Giants had lost exactly 100 games in ’85 (I was there for Loss #100 on the last day of the season, when they’d gone down flailing at Dwight Goodin’s fastballs); Craig, sensing nothing to lose, loaded his lineup with rookies from the minor leagues, including Will Clark, who in his first major league at-bat lived up to his nickname “The Natural” by redirecting a Ryan fastball over the Astrodome’s centerfield fence. As it turned out the Astros and Giants, neither of whom anyone had picked in the preseason, battled it out for NL West title until a late September meeting between the teams at the Dome. Ryan threw a one-hitter to put the Astros within a game of clinching, leaving it to Mike Scott to finish things for the hometeam. Scott had been a journeyman pitcher until joining the Astros, where none other than Roger Craig, then the Houston pitching coach, had taught him the split-fingered fastball, and practically overnight the splitter turned Scott into a 20-game winner and the league’s most imposing pitcher. There was only one way Scott could top Ryan’s one-hitter, but by God he did it, throwing a completely dominating no-hitter that clinched the division. Suddenly it looked like the Mets had met their match...
[Insert sound of gunshot here.]