Baseball is back, let us give thanks. The sermon today is from Annie Savoy:

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball and it’s never boring … which make it like sex. There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you gotta relax and concentrate. Besides I’d never sleep with a player hitting under .250 … not unless he had a lot of RBI’s and was a great glove up the middle.

You see, there’s a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I’ve got a ballplayer alone, I’ll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. ‘Course a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay. I make them feel confident and they make me feel safe and pretty. ‘Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime, what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball – now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake? It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ‘em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul is the Church of Baseball.”

A-a-a-men!

I freely admit I am so starved for baseball happenings that I actually did a news search just now for “baseball” –as if I wouldn’t have read about it already, on a blog or Twitter, if anything big went down. Aside from the Matt Garza trade (good news for the Yanks this season, probably, but nothing I can get too excited about) there ain’t nothing going on today. Except Brian Cashman is talking more and more like some kinda internet zealot. Adam LaRoche is finalizing his deal with the Nationals. Okay.

Unfortunately what I did turn up, like some gross bug under a rock, is the story over at Radar Online that a new reality show about baseball groupies is being developed. Baseball Annies are now being cast, with the idea of filming in Arizona during spring training. I’m not much of a reality TV fan — I’m too easily embarrassed on behalf of other people — and doubt I will watch this, unless I have to write about it. Anyone with half a brain realized many, many years ago that the vast majority of baseball players sleep around, and I really couldn’t care less since I am not married to, nor dating, a baseball player; that’s between them and their significant others and as long as everyone’s a consenting adult, hey, not my concern. The entire subculture has always seemed deeply depressing, though, and this newest cringe-inducing exploitation-fest is doing nothing to change that impression:

“The girls will go to any lengths to go to games and practices with the goal of sleeping with and getting material things from athletes as a notch under their belt,” the source told RadarOnline.com exclusively.

Ooh, an EXCLUSIVE about soul-suckingly shallow groupies! Great job, RadarOnline.com. Also:

The show will focus on the women and their ‘cleat-chasing’ lifestyle more than the players and their participation, added the source.

Well, of course. Why deal with the legal and societal repercussions of showcasing popular men behaving badly when you can just vilify the less wealthy and famous women who, inexplicably, are volunteering for this? Not that they won’t deserve vilifying, most likely, and no one can go on a show like “Cleat Chasers” and not expect to come out looking horrible.

I’m not someone who bemoans the decline of humanity, because I think humanity has always been pretty messed up, and even a show as tasteless as this is still better than say burning a bunch of people at the stake every time you get freaked out by an eclipse, but still.

In one of Burt Lancaster’s finest roles he had the misfortune, and then the great fortune, to go head-to-head for the audience’s affection with Susan Sarandon’s lemons.

Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980) traces the decay and rebirth of a city and a man as Lou (Burt Lancaster), an aged one-bit-hood who’s sniffed but never tasted a life of crime, bumbles his way into his beautiful neighbor’s screwed-up life. That neighbor is Sally (Susan Sarandon), and her daily work in a casino oyster bar leads to the ritual cleansing of her bare breasts and arms with lemon juice each night. Watching the painstakingly thorough application of said juice through Sally’s kitchen window, we share a voyeur’s perch with Lou from his darkened room next door. Thus begins our identification with Lou–through our common depravity.

The first fifteen minutes spread out silently, setting the plot and place like a gentle ocean wave lapping the shoreline. Such sustained quiet in a film is striking in its own right, but all the more unlikely when you realize it was written by a playwright. This is John Guare’s only attempt at conceiving a project explicitly for the silver screen, and you wonder if he just got bored with the medium because it came so naturally to him.

Louis Malle has juxtaposed much of the opening action with scenes of demolished and decayed buildings. Old Atlantic City was razed and rebuilt with the legalization of gambling in 1976, a metamorphosis etched in the lines of Lou’s rumpled suits. Gone is the city’s axis of organized crime, replaced by the glitz of the legal jackpot and the free-for-all drug trade. Lou is just another decrepit structure, waiting for the wrecking ball. Watching Lou running numbers through the poverty stricken parts of town, or trying to hock a shamefully stolen cigarette case, he seems outside of time–like a guy selling Christmas trees in May.

As Lou shuffles around town enduring a series of humiliations, Burt Lancaster is not “mugging” in any scene. There’s no winking to the audience, reminding us not to confuse Lou with Burt. This is an actor finding the most pathetic corners of his soul and exposing them for us to judge.

Because Lancaster gives such an honest performance, he takes the audience to wildly unexpected places. Lou descends into his gangster fantasy, enabled by the accidentally successful execution of a drug deal that lines his pockets for a few days, and he takes us along for the ride. As the character Lou becomes more and more deluded, the actor infuses him with a noticeable heft and vigor. He straightens his back. He moves more gracefully and charm starts to ooze in his every utterance. He’s bluffing everybody, including the audience, and we should know better because we know what he’s holding.

His bluff works best on Sally – who’s been blindsided by the unexpected return and violent death of her estranged husband Dave. Actually, estranged doesn’t cover it – he ran off with her kid sister, knocked her up and returned to peddle some stolen dope from her home. What’s the word for that? When Lou extends a knowing, comforting, wealthy-looking hand to her, she’s in no position to question the help. The irony, of course, is that Lou’s holding Dave’s drugs and money, sucking Sally right back into the drama surrounding her dead husband.

Lou has been watching gansters all his life, and now that the time has come to play the part, he grabs it with both hands. He wraps the mist of illusion around them so tightly, we can almost believe their love scene. Maybe for a minute. Which is all Malle and Guare give to them.

Physical violence ends the charade. When thugs push Lou aside to attack Sally, he crumples in the corner. The curve returns to his spine as if crushed by the weight of reality. And we realize what we’ve endorsed thus far is nothing more than a cheap veil covering a rotten dream.

Lou realizes it too, just in the nick of time to salvage what passes for a happy ending. He’s got to extricate Sally from the mess he’s created. And though he’d rather high-tail it on the first bus out of town than face the actual danger he’s stirred up, she drags him into the fight where he’s got to pull the trigger to save them both. All the typical positive outcomes are flipped on their heads. Success would be murder. Happiness would be an appearance on a wanted poster. That’s how it ends in Atlantic City.

***

It’s hard to believe that the Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” was not conceived for, or at least in reference to, this film. It shows how accessible these themes were at this time around this place. Still, they mingle in my mind as one extended meditation. A terrific companion to the movie, whether or not they have any other than the title in common.