Category: General

tell me again i gotta believe

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i know the mets are only down one game. i know it’s only two games to one.

and i know i gotta believe. and i still do, mostly.

but i am worried.

the mets looked bad last night, excpt for darren oliver, who probably should have started the game in the first place. i know that steve trachsel deserved a start and all, but he looked doubtful about his prospects from the first pitch, and he pitched that way. tentative, and not at all commanding.

hey willie. i don’t care how much we pay this guy. leave him off the world series roster, assuming we get there. or immediately yank him at the very first sign of trouble. even though he barely pitched more than an inning last night, willie still left him in too long.

we’d better win tonight, and oliver perez had better pitch the game of his life. if he doesn’t, this thing might not even get back to new york.

tell you what, though. i’m been sportin’ for the tigers all season, and telling everyone i know that they were the team to beat, even with their end-of-season swoon. and the tigers’ league championship clinching win yesterday was a classic game in every respect, from the come-from-behind tying of the game, to the heads-up gutsy play, to the walk-off ninth inning home run. they are the big story of the post-season, the yankees-and-oakland-slaying davids, and they are in my estimation the team to beat this post-season.

in all honesty, i don’t see either st. louis or the mets geting anywhere against them. and i don’t think that many other people will, either.

which puts the mets in an underdog position, both in the league championship and in a possible world series berth.

exactly where they need to be. exactly where the mets always function best.

ok–with a little circular logic, i’ve talked my way through this. here’s my revised prediction: mets in seven for the league championship, and mets in seven thrilling games in the world series.

ya gotta believe!

ya gotta believe, and all

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

ok, i’m breathing a little easier. the mets got it done last night, with a combination of brilliant pitching (from glavine, the one pitcher you expected to get brilliant pitching from) and one timely hit (from beltran, the one guy that you hoped to get a key hit from). it wasn’t an offensive onslaught, but beltran’s home run, the only meaningful hit all night, got the job done.

i’m breathing a little easier. but just a little.

tonight is the test. the mets are battling the cardinals’ chris carpenter, this year’s likely nl cy young winner, with john maine on the mound. maine needs to step up and shut down albert pujols, and especially the hitters in front of him, like glavine and company did last night. pujols never came to bat with anyone on base, and that’s what needs to continue to happen on a regular basis.

if john maine steps up, and the mets can somehow win tonight’s game, then i’ll nearly totally relax, because that means the mets will, barring a historic collapse, go to the world series. with a win tonight, they’d only need to win two out of five against a depleted cardinals team. they could even ice it, and not have to face carpenter again.

which would be wonderful.

and i’m very happy that it appears that detroit is going to the world series as well. i love it when small market teams with miniscule salary totals do well, and detroit’s success is a feel-good triumph, what with their losing 119 games a couple of years ago. coming so close to the mets record of 120 losses in a season, and not that long ago.

detroit is the one team in the playoffs that the mets could lose to, and i’d still be somewhat ok with it. i love jim leyland, from back in the day when he managed the pirates and i was a braves fan. classic playoff games between those teams. he, along with bobby cox and larry bowa, is the prototypical manager-type for me. grumpy, irascible, cranky, demonstrative, and unfraid to throw the book of research away and go with gut instinct. wille randolph, for all of his recent brilliant managerial moves, could be a bit more like that, for me.

and you gotta love detroit’s young pitchers.

anyway, i shouldn’t be looking ahead. first things first.

maine beats carpenter. let’s hope it happens, and this thing gets a bit easier.

mets versus mets

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i don’t think the mets are playing the st. louis cardinals in the national league championship.

i think they are up against themselves, with something to prove. there’s a lot of history to overcome, a lot of conventional wisdom to prove wrong, and a lot of naysayers to be enlightened.

because, truth be told, st. louis really isn’t much competition on paper, other than albert pujols. a lot of their key players are out, or playing hurt. unlike the mets, who are at full strength and completely healthy.

right.

the mets have just as many problems as st. louis, if not more. but i just get the feeling that the world series this year is meant to be detroit vs. new york. it would be the best possible remaining combination for tv ratings, for fan interest, for historical significance, and for great baseball games in october.

but the mets, to live up to their end of the bargain, are going to really have to reach deep. they are winning postseason games through power hitting, and not through good pitching, and that’s a dangerous thing. great pitching trumps great hitting, right? so, to continue to win, the mets are going to have to keep their hitting hot, which won’t be easy, and they are going to have to have some second-line pitchers (john maine? steve trachsel? oliver perez?) really step up with career-defining performances. if this happens, they will mow down st. louis, and detroit as well.

it’s going to be tough. it’s a tall order.

mets vs. mets. 2004-type mets versus 2006-type mets. who will win?

jittery but fine

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it doesn’t take much for a new yorker to get taken back mentally to 9/11.

especially when a plane crashes into a manhattan high rise.

on 10/11.

i know that the human mind puts concidences together, and makes logical sense of them. and the 10/11 date is just that–a coincidence.

still, it was an odd feeling, watching tv and seeing a plane crashed into a building. been there, done that, and have no need to repeat.

that obnoxious chevy trucks ad

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you’ve probably seen it. the one with the john cougar, i mean mellencamp, song, and the pictures of rosa parks and martin luther king, vietnam and nixon.

and 9/11.

fucking chevrolet. using imagery of 9/11 to sell a gas-sucking pickup truck. that’s wrong, wrong, wrong, in so many ways. the first time i saw this commercial, i screamed at the frigging tv. i was in the city when 9/11 happened, i experienced the ensuing chaos firsthand (though, thank god, i was in midtown and not downtown).

and, as i sat on a bus crossing the pulaski bridge from queens to brooklyn, i cried looking at the shafts of light reaching to the sky. the same image that chevrolet is now callously using to merchandise their spectacularly craptastic consumer product.

slate has a longer piece on this subject, a great read and far more coherent than i’ll be on the subject. check it out.

and don’t go buying any chevy trucks, or chevy anything for that matter. chevrolet can try to wrap themselves in faux patriotism all they want, in order to try to sell trucks to the clueless.

but no one is that clueless, and i’m certainly not.

odds and ends

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finally someone actually gets the importance and quality of the movie “shortbus”. the movie had a $21,000+ average per screen in its first weekend, so i have a feeling that the ride on the shortbus is just beginning.

the folks who run the website for grey gardens, the musical were kind enough to link to my original post about the play, when it ran at playwrights horizons. i’ve written a lot subsequently as well–this is a must-see if you are in the city.

i finally get to see “the cave”, steve reich’s piece that

explores the sacred locations of the burial plots of Abraham and Sarah from the perspectives of Arabs, Israelis, and Americans.

kirk worked on this show when it toured jerusalem, and i’ve always wanted to see it. it’s at lincoln center as part of the composer’s 70th birthday celebration. we’re seeing it on saturday, november 4, when there’s a post-show discussion with reich himself. should be fascinating.

i had my very first “i want my apple itv moment when watching the first episode of the new show ugly betty. it’s amazingly good, and i didn’t have the second show on the dvr. if i had an itv, i could just watch it on my tv. as it is, i’ll have to watch on the computer, which isn’t nearly as satisfying. hurry up apple.

kirk and i have booked our flight to paris next january–we’ll be in strasbourg from the 12th to the 14th, and in paris after that until the 21st. and kirk, knowing how i love cheese, found the restaurant with the world’s largest cheeseboard in strasbourg. i am so there. and i’ve posted a list of possible paris dining destinations on egullet. it’s the new post, at the end of the thread. if you have any suggestions, let me know. we have our favorites, but there’s always room for exploration.

shortbus: instant classic

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i saw shortbus last night, and loved it. the times has a great review (registration required).

i’ve written about it earlier–it’s the new movie from john cameron mitchell, the creator of hedwig. he wanted to make a movie that celebrates sex, and depicts it graphically and honestly in the context of story, plot, and art.

and wow, did he succeed.

the characters are all on a journey to reorder their lives for a variety of reasons. and through sex, they embark on a voyage of self-discovery that is honestly and beautifully depicted–more so than in any film in recent memory. it’s the movie that robert altman should have the guts to make, but probably doesn’t.

and the sex is real, human, hysterically funny, tender, shocking, outrageous, and occasionally degrading–just like sex in real life, and most unlike most cinematic sex.

but ultimately, the movie for me wasn’t so much about sex as it was about control. self-control, the difficulty with reclaiming control ceded to others, and the difficulty in knowing when to cede it yourself. sex is the vehicle that’s used to flesh out the concepts (so to speak), but to say this is a movie exclusively about sex is to miss the point entirely, i think.

and, oddly enough, it’s the feel-good date movie of the year, a movie with its heart on its sleeve, with the happiest of happy endings that sends you from the theater on an emotional high, more appreciative than ever of the relationships in your life. after seeing the process that the characters collectively go through, and where they collectively are at movie’s end, you know that, with someone you love at your side, there’s nothing you can’t work out, together, ever.

the movie is clever, honest, beautifully filmed, riotously funny, tender and tragic, and above all, real. really really real. and a poignant love letter to new york city as well–through the content, the characters (the faux ed koch is perhaps the best character in the movie) and through the device mitchell uses for scene transitions (i won’t spoil it for you, but it’s stunningly gorgeous).

in these times where so much is repressed that we no longer have the perspective to determine the extent of our represssion, this movie is the perfect reset button. go see it, get some perspective back, and be reminded of just how wonderful life is.

oh, and how wonderful sex is, too.

a chorus line, and ted’s, and danny’s

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kirk and i saw the new broadway production of a chorus line last night.

and we are impressed.

kirk had seen the original production, with the original cast.

twice. sometimes i just get so jealous of him.

anyway, he thought that it compared favorably with the original. i’d never seen it live (only the movie and the soundtrack), so i was a tabula rasa in regards to my experience. standout performances for me were deidre goodwin (sheila), mara davi (maggie), jessica lee goldyn (val), but especially jason tam (paul) who gave a devastating performance that brought tears to my eyes.

it’s a bit unfair to single out people, though, because everyone in the chorus line gave outstanding performances–some ever so slightly better than others, but no one was weak or ineffective. i’m not so much impressed with michael berresse (zach) who was so great in “light in the piazza” but here is far too sensitive with his character. zach, to my mind, needs to be a svengali-ish dictatorial force of nature. and that’s not conveyed at all. maybe it was a conscious choice, but i didn’t like it. his disembodied voice was not evocative of much emotion at all, let alone the right emotion.

everything else though? magnificent. you know all the songs and most of the dialogue, but it doesn’t matter. the production sweeps you away and effectively takes you back to a specific period of time. i didn’t find the show to be dated in the least, any more than a good production of any period piece would be.

if you’ve never seen the show, it’s a must see. and if you saw the original, you won’t feel that your memory is being trampled on. it stands on its own, i think.

dinner was at the new manhattan outpost of ted’s montana grill. to paraphrase a famous lyric from “a chorus line”:

food? 10. service? 3.

well, maybe in reality it’s food: 8 service: -1. i had a new york strip bison steak, kirk had a delmonico bison steak, and we shared. both were perfectly cooked and flavorful, tender and juicy and hot off the grill. the sides were good as well–i had a squash cassserole that was particularly good.

the problem? in-your-face, overtrained, upsell-happy, corporate-approved servers and workers. i felt like i was in a tgi fridays that was on steroids. the waiter was way way too chatty; kept at us to get a bottle of wine instead of two glasses; kept asking if we wanted appetizers and sides; didn’t give us time to peruse the menu; asked less than halfway through dinner if we wanted dessert, then brought the check immediately saying that “his manager liked it that way”.

i haven’t felt so rushed, discomfited, and unrelaxed in a restaurant in ages. maybe it’s just opening week jitters, but somehow i doubt it. i think that’s just their style–everyone chatted with us constantly, from the waiter to the hostess to the busperson. i don’t care to hear that you had salad for lunch and are jealous of my dinner. i don’t care to hear that you just moved to new york, and how cool is it that you live on a street that’s the same name as the city you came from. and so on.

i want to eat my dinner at my own relaxed pace, in a relaxed atmosphere.

maybe i’ll give it another try–the food was great and the prices weren’t bad. but if that service is endemic, i’m outta there.

the end of the evening, post-theater, was spent at danny’s, our favorite piano bar/watering hole. kirk sang (expressively and beautifully, of course) and we laughed with our friend stephen until the wee hours.

what a great night.

overall.

busy busy week

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kirk and i had a blast camping this past weekend. great meals cooked over a fire built with 30-year-old oak logs, an all-day hike over gorgeous wooded terrain in perfect 60-degree weather, and a tent that didn’t leak [much] during the saturday night rainstorm. who could ask for more?

we’ll probably go camping again soon–kirk’s dad has a truck with a camper that he’s willing to lend us, and it’s fully outfitted for camping. all we need to do is show up with our sleeping bags, and we can sleep in the back of the truck in bad weather. i think we’ll be doing some cold-weather camping, which sounds fun to me.

this week? busy, busy, as the title says. tonight i have a massage scheduled–trying to get my shoulder and back into shape.

tomorrow night, tickets to the new production of a chorus line. i love this show, and i’ve never seen it performed, so i’m really psyched.

wednesday night, tickets to shortbus, which i’ve written about before.

kirk has rehearsal for “taming of the shrew” on thursday. i have the night off.

and we’re responsible for coffee hour at our church on sunday, and we always put a bit of extra effort into that. it’s a nice excuse to do a bit of cooking, which i always enjoy but am sometimes a bit lazy about, day-to-day.

and interspersed in all that are mets playoff games, to which we do not have tickets, but will rabidly follow, somehow.

it’s good to stay busy, and out of trouble.

off to the woods

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this is camping weekend, at french creek state park in pennsylvania.

although i’m sick as a dog, i’m looking forward to sleeping in a tent, in the cold and possibly the rain. for some odd reason.

being outside feels better than being inside, and this weekend, there’ll be lots of outside. a few miles of hiking should set me right.

right?

protecting valuables in checked luggage

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gotta link to this–it’s a great example of playing by the rules, and thus gaming the system to your advantage.

put a firearm in with your valuables, and declare the firearm.

it doesn’t have to be a real firearm–a starter’s pistol will do. the article refers to expensive camera equipment, but it seems to me that this would work for anything valuable in baggage that you are required to check.

from the article:

A “weapons” is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols – those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets – are considered weapons…and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States.

I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare…I’m given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me.

That’s the procedure. The case is extra-tracked…TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.

It’s a great way to travel with camera gear…I’ve been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

their rules. just play by them.

baseball update

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kirk and i get tickets to the last home game at shea every year, and this year is no exception. so we were there last night, although we left after the 4th inning. to be honest, i hate when people leave the game early (it’s one of my biggest baseball pet peeves), but it was cold and i’m coming down with something, i think, and the game was going nowhere (the mets lost), so there you are.

call me a fair weather fan. literally, last night.

i’m not very optimistic about the mets’ post-season chances. the pitching is suspect, and they are on a bit of a losing streak, and as a team they are not hitting very well at all. hopefully they’ll turn it up a notch when the post-season starts. the first series will be five games, and it’s easy to get knocked out of a short series quickly.

we’ll see.

of far greater baseball interest is this story about a 110 year old negro leaguer. the story is in the ny times today.

seems that no one knew he was alive until last summer (who’d have thought that there would be a 110 year old baseball player hanging out somewhere?), but he’s turning out to be a treasure trove of baseball lore and information.

this quote from the story will put things in perspective:

Simmons, known as Si, was born on Oct. 14, 1895 — the same year as Babe Ruth and Rudolph Valentino, and before F. Scott Fitzgerald and Amelia Earhart. He played at the highest level of black baseball while a boy named Satchel Paige was still in grade school.

amazing. his first professional baseball was played in 1912.

the story is well worth the click through.

shortbus in the ny times

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frank bruni did a long piece about “shortbus” in the ny times this weekend.

i’ve written about “shortbus” before–it’s the new movie from john cameron mitchell of hedwig fame.

bruni’s article is not to be missed–it’s a great explanation and a great exploration. very very well done.

and of course, the movie is not to be missed either. it starts october 4 at the landmark sunshine cinema in nyc, rolls out to la and san francisco two days later, and opens wide (so to speak) beginning october 13.

track down a showing of this movie. i have a feeling you won’t regret it.

random ipod thoughts

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i’ve written before on the non-random nature of my ipod shuffle.

i have an 512mb ipod shuffle, and itunes loads songs randomly onto it. the shuffle has a small capacity (about 120 songs) and i have thousands of songs in itunes, so i should get a good variety of music. problem is, i’d swear that my ipod plays favorites, because certain songs get loaded onto the ipod all the time.

and, further, the ipod shuffle itself has a shuffle feature, so that the randomly loaded songs should be played in random order.

it doesn’t though, i swear. certain songs are loaded every time, and those same certain songs are randomly picked every time i switch the damn thing on.

back in july of 2005, when i first wrote about this, the earworm song was “money back guarantee” by the five man electrical band. it got so bad that i deleted the song from my itunes playlist.

my ipod shuffle’s current obsession is “hallelujah” by leonard cohen. a much better obsession, to be sure, but nevertheless one gets tired of a steady diet of mr. cohen.

i’ve taken steps to minimize the damage–i don’t put the ipod shuffle on shuffle. in other words, i don’t randomize the random loading of songs anymore.

all this is prompted by today’s wall street journal article about one man’s quest to get to the bottom of the randomness.

he’s a computer science lecturer and a random numbers expert, and he’s bought an ipod and promises to get to the bottom of all this.

good luck, dude.

i’m betting the ipod wins the battle.

waiting for an iphone

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supposedly apple is working on their version of a cell phone–unofficial name: iphone. i’d love to have one. not just because i’m an apple fanatic, but because i’m sure it would just work.

unlike my current sony ericcson z520a phone, which i’ve quit carrying around because it constantly takes pictures of the inside of my pocket, thanks to the external camera button that you can’t disable. and same said button falls right where your finger naturally does when you hold the phone to talk, so in order to talk to someone and not simultaneously take random photos, i had to retrain myself in how to hold a cell phone.

very usable. thanks sony.

anyway, while i’m waiting on steve jobs to bless me with an iphone and solve my problem, here’s an absolutely hysterical review of an sprint/lg phone with a built-in mp3 player, via daring fireball. evidently sony ericcson fired the designer of my phone, and he went to work for sprint or lg, or maybe both.

here’s a sample, from the article:

Turn on the phone. Go into the MP3 player again. There’s no signal, and, guess what? You can’t get into to the MP3 player unless you can establish a network connection to the Sprint Music Store. Even to play your own MP3s!

OK, so this is an MP3 player that doesn’t really work on the subway and won’t work on a plane, the two places I’m most likely to listen to MP3s. Not very appealing.

A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.

I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.

great piece of writing. and the funniest part is that sprint gave the guy the phone for free, so he’d use it and blog about it.

i have no idea how any of these companies stay in business.

not exactly the mile high club

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chilling story about two affectionate men on an airplane, who are confronted by a homophobic flight attendant.

evidently she took exception to their “behavior”, and when deservedly challenged by the pair, escalated the episode to terrorist-level to cover her ass, complete with a pilot’s threat to divert the flight.

one man had rested his head on his partner’s shoulder. and had blown him an air kiss.

shocking.

and of course, if you are in that situation, there’s nothing you can say or do. if the personnel on the plane say that you are a threat, even if they are incorrect and doing so only to legally protect themselves, then you truly have no recourse. who’s going to believe you when you protest that you were only air-kissing?

on planes, i’ve seen straight people fucking in their seats under a blanket. in tiny adjoining coach seats, no less. i’ve seen straight people go into the bathroom together and reemerge flushed a few minutes later.

i don’t condone that. i’m not much for pda. but you just know that if two straight people air-kissed, or even really kissed, or even tongued each other for a while, nothing would have been said. and i saw flight attendants actively ignoring the aforementioned fornicators.

this is the danger we face when we allow our freedoms to erode as we have over the past few years. this is exactly what’s wrong with the patriot act, and the like. rules that skirt the edge of what’s legal and appropriate and sensible may just barely pass muster if applied correctly.

but those same rules, if applied capriciously, ensure that people will be falsely accused, and maliciously prosecuted, and inappropriately sentenced.

and you can’t ever count on the rules being uniformly applied by always-reasonable people. some people will always use the rules to further their agenda, or to introduce their prejudices.

and this happened on american airlines, my carrier of choice, who has an excellent record when it comes to these issues.

i’ll have to see how this turns out.

tickets, i get tickets

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new york is a great place to live, because there are nearly no limits to the fun and cool things you can do.

new york is a horrible place to live, because there are nearly no limits to the fun and cool things you can do.

both are true, of course. i usually resist the temptation to do everything i want to do in this city, because you would go seriously broke doing so.

but today i broke down and got two pairs of tickets to upcoming events.

the first is tomorrow night–the charles aznavour concert at radio city music hall. the guy’s 82, so this will undoubtedly be the last chance anyone ever has to see him, and who could pass that up? i went to get a pair of the cheapest tickets i could find, and the very helpful woman in the ticket booth clued me in to a pair of obstructed view tickets–front row, second mezzanine. very nice tickets, and the only obstruction is that you are next to the sound board, so you can’t see the people on the other side of the sound board.

big deal–i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t have liked those people anyway. thanks, cool ticket booth woman, for hooking me up.

the second set of tickets was for grey gardens, which i’ve written about many times before. i saw it off broadway and didn’t want to miss it when it moved to broadway–it was my favorite musical last year, and christine ebersole gives one of the most amazing performances you will ever see.

i’d gotten ticket offers but neglected to follow up, and then they expired and i thought i would have to (shudder) pay full price. i would have, though.

and then today the ny times had an article about the nederlanders’ new venture, audiencerewards.com, which is supposed to be a ticket buying hub that gives you points for buying tickets, much like frequent flyer miles or whatever. and since i’m a big fan of double and triple dipping my points/miles, i checked it out.

and lo and behold, they had an exclusive deal on grey gardens tickets.

sold. nice seats, center orchestra row h, nearly half price. good for them, and good for me. except that the website was a bit balky, and there’s no mention anywhere of any points that i got for buying tickets, and the whole thing ended up being a front end for telecharge.

oh well. at least i got my tickets.

i’ll let you know how charles aznavour (tickets: tomorrow night) was.

i know how grey gardens (tickets: end of october) is going to be.