Daily Archives: June 23, 2010

Leeches; Orcs; Johan Santana’s recent talks with the Mets’ PR department; Abe Vigoda’s armpit; C.H.U.D.s; this guy; Newark; the 2010 Orioles; Don Mossi.

What do those things have in common? They’re all prettier than tonight’s steaming pile of an excuse for a ballgame. And yet, in the end… I wasn’t totally sorry I watched. That’s thanks to the go-ahead Curtis Granderson homer in the 10th inning, and Marian River’s ultra-dramatic white-knuckle save to preserve the Yanks’ 6-5 win. But, lord, you did not want to watch them making that sausage.

I began the evening feeling sorry for Dontrelle Willis – a fun, charismatic player who I loved watching in his prime, which feels like it was a long, long time ago now (…but then, the third inning feels like it was a long, long time ago now). An hour or two later I mostly felt bad for myself and anybody else still watching the slow-motion tragicomedy of errors well after 1 AM on the east coast. The fact that the Yankees eventually came back from their self-dug grave and pulled a win out of their caps made it more bearable, of course, but still, all traces of this game should probably be scrubbed from the archives immediately to protect the public.

You will, I hope, forgive me for not giving you a complete blow-by-blow of this game, but it’s late, I’m tired, I had to delete most of the writeup I had ready in the ninth, and this is a family website. Willis went just 2.1 innings, gave up two hits, and walked seven. It was excruciating to watch, and he left, head hanging, after walking Alex Rodriguez to force in a run. The fact that the Diamondbacks got out of that inning with the score tied at 2 is a testament to how sloppy the Yankees were playing all night – numerous outs made on the bases, often dumb ones; swinging at all kinds of things they shouldn’t be swinging at. By the end of the game the Bombers had amassed 10 hits and 13 walks (!) with six runs to show for it; early in the game that ratio looked even worse. Damaso Marte added some nice flourishes in the sixth inning with a balk and a wild pitch. Going into the ninth, the Yankees were down 5-4 and I was not exactly brimming with confidence, despite the reassuring presence of old friend Aaron Heilman on the mound.

“They play 162, and they can’t all be Rembrandts,” someone wrote to me on Twitter while I was bemoaning this festering eyesore. Which is true. But surely there’s plenty of middle ground between a Rembrandt and this, which is really more of a monkey-painting-the-cage-wall-with-its-own-feces sort of a game.

Or at least that’s what I was thinking before the ninth and tenth innings. It wasn’t a Rembrandt but maybe it was, I dunno, a lesser Basquiat or something. In the end, I was glad I’d stayed up for it – it certainly wasn’t dull. That said, as I wrote last night: just because you made it home okay, doesn’t mean it was all right to drive drunk and high on meth, you know?

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Runner-up titles for this post:

This Game’s so ugly, it couldn’t get laid in a prison with a handful of pardons.

This Game’s so ugly, I took it to a haunted house and it came out with a job application.

This Game’s so ugly, even the tide won’t take it out.

It’s Dontrelle Willis v. Jav Vazquez tonight in Arizona as the Yanks look to leave the desert with a series win.

The Score Truck made a late-inning pit-stop last night; here’s hoping it arrives early tonight.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

[Picture by Bags]

Walt Simonson

Just a tremendous match–the longest of all-time–going down at Wimbledon. It was called yesterday because of darkness tied at two. Today, they played the fifth set, and it was called again, 59-59 in the tie-breaker. Hol-ee Cow.

A Giant American vs a French Elf.

From Smitten Kitchen…

I don’t feel tardy…

War Pigs

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

–from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)

Depending on where you want to draw the line, Paths of Glory was either Stanley Kubrick’s fourth feature film or his second. Taking an inclusive view, his first two features were  Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955). However, Kubrick later disowned the former, and both were independent, self-financed films that ran 72 and 67 minutes, respectively, and employed minimal crews comprised largely of family and friends.

Taking the exclusive view, Kubrick’s proper film-making career began with 1956’s The Killing (which Matt will visit later this week). The first of three films (along with Paths of Glory and Lolita) made under the auspices of a production company formed by Kubrick and fellow New Yorker James B. Harris, The Killing was Kubrick’s first experience with a proper crew, an actual budget (though still minimal, it was provided by distributor United Artists), and a real-life movie star, Sterling Hayden (who would later reunite with Kubrick as Brigadier General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove), and it propelled him into the big time.

Still considered an essential film noir, The Killing caught the eye of Kirk Douglas, who lept at the chance to star in Kubrick’s next project, an adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel Paths of Glory. (Three years later, Douglas would tap Kubrick to replace Anthony Mann as the director of his Roman epic Spartacus.) The novel (and film) center on an abuse of power by French officers during World War I supposedly inspired by the Souain corporals affair in which four French soldiers serving under General Géraud Réveilhac were unfairly executed for mutiny.

The film was Kubrick’s first to be set and shot outside of the United States (set in France, it was filmed in Germany, likely due to it’s portrayal of the French officers; the film was banned in France until 1975), and it was by far his most elaborate and high-profile production to that point. Watching it now, the 87-minute film shot in black-and-white in the old, boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio with a mono soundtrack, seems modest and quaint by the director’s later standards, which is part of it’s appeal. Paths of Glory is by far the most direct film in Kubrick’s discography. Lolita was nearly twice as long, and Dr. Strangelove, while similar in many ways in terms of format and theme, was far busier and complex. Even The Killing had a fractured chronology, which would later be a key inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s early films.

Paths of Glory, by comparison, is an exceedingly straight-forward film in terms of plot, theme, and structure. The first two thirds play like a typical court-martial film, one obvious comparison being The Cain Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart, which came out three years earlier. Paths is neatly bifurcated. The first half of the film sets up and executes the key events and the second half of the film unfolds the fallout from those events, but it is not a trial movie. The court martial itself turns out to be little more than a show trial that takes up just ten minutes of screen time, and the verdict is revealed with a third of the film’s running time remaining.

Warning: Spoilers below

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If it pleases you, discuss the World Cup matches here. And keep us blisslessly ignorant desk jockeys informed of what’s going on. It will be a wild morning with probabilties of advancement swinging drastically with each goal scored in either game.

The Desert Foxes of Algeria still have a slim hope to advance. The, whatever the US is called, have a somewhat better chance, but nothing is for certain.

Scenarios for Group C are as follows:

USA Advances With: 1) A win. 2) A draw and an England loss. 3) A draw and an English draw while maintaining a total goals advatage over England. (currently US is up 3 goals to 1)

ALGERIA Advances With: 1) A win and an England tie. 2) A win and an England win and Algeria makes up goal deficit to Slovenia.

England Advances With: 1) A win. 2) A draw and a US loss. 3) A draw and a US draw,but England ends up with more total goals than the US.

Slovenia Advances With: 1) A win. 2) A draw. 3) A loss and a US draw.

Solely  in terms of US advancement, we are rooting for low scoring draw (0-0 or 1-1)  between England and Slovenia. Under that scenario, the US wins the group with a victory over Algeria and advances in second position with any kind of draw. If England wins their match, America has to win to get in.

Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Do you remember what it was like to be ten years old, to grip a bat in your hand and mimic your favorite player’s batting stance as you stared out at the pitcher?  Everything stopped for that moment as you used the bat to gently stir the air behind your head and the pitcher stared in at the target, contemplating his next pitch.  The beautiful thing about baseball is that most of us can relate to that moment.

More importantly, you can relate to the dream.  You can imagine how it would feel to pull on a major league jersey for the first time, to step up to the plate against a major league pitcher and simply do what you’ve done hundreds of thousands of times — put the bat on the ball and run to first base.  When the ball finds the grass you take a professional turn around first and then do your best to look calm and nonchalant as you head back to the bag and casually bump fists with the first base coach, all the while watching out of the corner of your eye to be sure that the ball finds its way into your dugout.  And then if you’re lucky, you look up into the stands and you see your mother and father in the crowd.  They’re easy to spot, because they’re the ones who are jumping and cheering with tears in their eyes, no doubt thinking of all the skinned knees, all the games of catch, all the Little League games, and all the trips to the batting cages that led to this one base hit.  In that moment, it doesn’t matter if any of it happens again, only that it happened once.

There are a lot of reasons why I love baseball, but moments like these are high on the list.  Basketball players don’t care much about their first basket, and I’m guessing that even quarterbacks forget their first touchdowns, but there seems to be something magical about a player’s first hit.  Every once in a while, like Tuesday night in Arizona, we get to share in that moment.

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