Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Baseball and America

The players were only about 20 years old. The stands were half-empty. The ads on the wall were the biggest thing in the place. Still, seeing the class AA Trenton Thunder on a sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-summer was about the most American thing I have done in a long time, and not just because my cousin's four-year-old boy got a real bat from a player at the end of the game.
I know baseball is mythologized to the hilt, but there is something purer about the game than football, our real national pastime. Football represents all things modern American: speed,action, violence and the celebration and deification of all those things. Baseball may be "a picnic for retards," but it is a picnic in its timeless pace and pure enjoyment of environment and company. Especially at the minor league level.
There is something better about the American spirit in that game at that level. No one's rooting for someone to be "killed," as I sometimes say in football games. Instead it is slow strategy, and the ballet of fielding, and the tension and release at the end of the best games.
Bottom of the ninth. Two outs, two strikes and two balls. Game tied 1-1. Trenton batter hits a shot to left, and it falls just before the fielder's glove. Game over, celebration at the plate, and a real Louisville Slugger for my cousin's boy. Pine Tar all over it and everything. Like few things in Digitalized Life, it felt real.

"About Cars and Baseball"

This was possibly the greatest headline for a story I have ever seen. It appeared in a bar-rag newspaper in DC, and was actually the most sexist article I have ever seen; about picking up girls, use-and-abusing them, then throwing them away. The title of the piece was deliberatly intended so that actual females would never read it.
The Onion would later become masters at the non-sequiter school of headlines, but this one might have beat them all. When I started this blog, I used the Onion's inspiration in titleing a piece about nothing (doing laundry, surfing mindless cable) "The Death of All Mankind.". The portetiousness of the title, as you can see, had nothing to do with its contents.
Headline juxtiposition can also be hilarious. In high school, there was a story in the student paper about the Russian play "The Idiot." The same headline about the show ran right over a picture of the math teacher.
I'm waiting for an article skewering men called something like "about fashion (or babies) and weddings." It wasn't too long ago that they called the wedding pages of the NYT "The Women's Sports Section."

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Last Stop for Moynihan Station?

Haven't seen anything in the news (meaning the NYT) about the long-delayed Moynihan Station, conceived of and basically half-financed by my ex-boss, the political and scholarly genius (formerly) Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who's seat Hillary took over when he passed away.
The idea seemed so simple that it might actually get done in post-Robert Moses NY. Convert McKim, Mead, & White's 33rd and Eighth Ave. monumental post office into a replacement for the city's greatest act of civic vandalism, the 1960s criminal destruction of their original Neo-Classical masterpiece, the old Pennsylvania Station, where the already completely dated Madison Square Garden and underground hellhole replacement station are now.
The PO was moving to new quarters. Why not use the space for something beautiful and uplifting for the hundreds of thousands of commuters and others who use the station now (ever been to the LIRR platform? Like Dante's vision of Hell, only more crowded and with less light)?
This was 1996. Anyone see anything recently in the news? I know the Dolan's want to replace MSG (it needs it) but nothing recently.

Moynihan was someone who got into trouble because he told people uncomfortable truths that happened to be, well, true. We know how far that gets you in Washington.
Most famous was his 1965 report on the "Negro Family" that said that black men were abandoning their children at truly alarming rates, leaving behind furious fatherless boys that inevitably came to a bad end. Though this turned out to be unfortunately right on the mark, the left at the time accused him of "blaming the victim."

Even more ridiculous was the brou-ha-ha over what became to be known as "the benign neglect memo," which said that racial rhetoric (this was 1970) could "benifit from a period of benign neglect." This somehow got translated in the press as "Moynihan Says Ignore Black Complaints." Moynihan was working as a special advisor to Nixon (yes, Nixon).

Moynihan was a brilliant scholar who was sometimes regarded, (and he humorously acknowledged this)as not being entirely serious by New York Intellectuals because he was not Jewish. Worse, he was an Irish Catholic, just like the kids that beat them up on the way to Schul.

At the same time, he was misunderstood by the civil rights era black leadership because he was so blunt and seemingly unapologetic and unsympathetic to the plight of blacks. This couldn't have been more off the mark, as he often sympathetically compared them to the unwanted and often vilified Irish immigrants of the 19th Century.

He is buried in an unremarkable grave in Arlington Cemetery. Like my father, he barely missed WWII. When I collected his military medals for him (I was putting together an-all inclusive biographical resume for him, the job I was hired for), he said, with characteristic humor, "Oh, they gave you those for just showing up."

Monday, July 13, 2009

I can't stand it anymore

What's real?
What's new?
I ain't turning my back on you
It might be simple it might be true
I might be overwhelmed by you
You might be empty
In spite of everything you do
It's such a mess now anyway
Wish fulfillment everyday
I don't believe you
Don't you know you know it's true?

"Wish Fulfillment," Sonic Youth

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Kreisberg - Our Dead Homie Found

Found Kreisberg's tree in Lafayette Park in DC the other day. It is in the corner closest to Quesada and Broadbranch. It is a sapling, with a little rectangular plate that says "In memory of Robin Kreisberg."

Me, Keith and Karin(his German girlfriend)made it with a pack of Milwaukee's Best. We drank to his spirit and poured Best on the tree (and probably killed it). Karin was a good sport, being attacked by mosquitoes as she took photos. Hint to Lux: this is the one.

We felt kind of ridiculous in this neighborhood of little children and small animals to be hanging and drinking at pale evening in Lafayette Park. We thought of how funny it would be if the DC cops told "us kids" to get moving, then seeing our rapidly graying hair and being confused.

I can remember when I came down from NJ with Tony Rotelli. We were driving down to New Orleans for fall semester. We stopped at DC and went to a party that backed onto the park. I asked Tony later if he liked my friends.

"How could anyone not like those guys?" he said. He had been given the Brewski Brothers reception, which was essentially brewski brotherhood for all, almost all the time.

I also remember one stupid time drinking up there where there were a group of younger guys there as well. We traded insults until I heard a voice I knew. It was Christian Therouex, brother of the now film-actor Justin Theroeux.

The Boog had somehow got the idea that he was a tough guy in the face of totally peaceful, overeducated Upper Northwest youth. After I left, he apparently egged them on in his weird and completely unfounded and manifestly absurd belief (try Foxhall Road next time).

Not that it matters now. So long as he treats Erin right.

Back to the present. We came down the hill and into the alley between Quesada and Patterson to show Karina the wonders of Supercanning. We ran right into Scott McLeod's mother. Keith and her bantered a bit. Kreisberg's mother's light was on, but we were being eaten alive by mosquitoes and so split.

Karin asked how the neighborhood produced so many writers, actors, musicians, and designers. Keith said we were just too stupid to know that investment banking was the ticket.

But it was a good question. I lived just over the Western Ave. border where everyone did go into investment banking. In just a few blocks, everything changed to Chevy Chase, DC liberalism.

Interesting question. Maybe the foundation for an article.

Dissendent Part II

I don't care what the news says: this country is more deeply in trouble than it has been since WWII.
We have an acceptance of a criminal culture that sends 13-year-olds to death. We have another quote "inner city" country within us that we won't or can't acknowledge. We have a government that will gladly bail out Wall St., but will argue on and on about "choice" in any government health plan, which are so obviously better than the private insurers it is unreal.
Here's the choice: we either accept higher taxation specifically tailored to health care or people die in emergency rooms. Every other westernized nation has accepted this; it takes Bob Dole in arguing that GM would be competitive in the world market if it does not have to pay enormous health care and pension bills to make it almost hit home here.
As for "a nameless bureaucrat" deciding who gets to decide who gets which care, well, how is that different from a Humana Health Care drone deciding the same thing? Stop being babies and face up to health care as part of your cost of living. Even if it means higher taxes (an NYT poll concluded that people would, or at least they might.)
My father says that the US has been arguing about universal health care since the 1940s. Are we ready yet?