Category: Wilderness Wanderings

Why the NBA is Unwatchable

Published on by D. G. Hart285 Comments

A meeting of a Presbyterian conclave (actually a standing committee of the OPC General Assembly) back the capital of American Presbyterianism (actually a suburb) has afforded (all about) me the opportunity to catch up on the media. The flights from Detroit to Philadelphia were either too expensive or too long so I decided to drive. On the trip East I listened to a discussion of the papacy on On Point that gave voice to Roman Catholics in the U.S. seldom heard at the Callers. On the drive back I listened to a great interview with Scott Manetsch about his new book on the Company of Pastors in Geneva.

The trip tonight placed (all about) me in a town outside Cleveland. The Cavs’ game against the Heat was televised locally. This was a contest that gave the Cleveland franchise a chance to pay back Lebron James if the lowly Cavs could rise up and end the Heat’s winning streak. I don’t watch televised sports much anymore but I warmed up to the idea of watching an upset. When the Cavs went up by 27 in the first half, I thought my joy might be complete.

And then I saw Chris Anderson with all his tats and hair. He is to the NBA what Fawn Knudsen was to the Big Lebowski. He also represents a form of physical exhibitionism that must be comparable to what you — I guess — see at a strip club.

With the Division II season finished, that leaves March Madness with its own hype and all those commercials to fill the void. I am not sure it will ever be full for a guy who grew up with only sixteen teams making it to the tournament and who had to wait for the morning news to find out what happened to the Sweet Sixteen and the Elite Eight since none of the games were televised. This is the same guy who listens to podcasts on a Walkman (which I hear brings me up to date with the Second Iraq War).

Maybe the only remedy is the NIT.

My Week with Lucy

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The start of the semester brought a tsunami of lectures by visiting faculty and other activities, aside from the full-time teaching load, that made watching any movie or television production impossible this week. But while reading a review of Richard Burton’s diaries in The New Republic, I had an idea for a screenplay that could rival My Week with Marilyn, which was a terrific movie in its own right, not simply because it is a behind-the-scenes production but also because we get to see Kenneth Brannaugh play Sir Laurence Oliviet Olivier.

It turns out that in 1970 Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor appeared as guest stars on “Here’s Lucy,” one of those sit-coms of whose appeal I could never really understand.

Here is what Burton wrote of the dreadful week with Lucille Ball:

Those who had told us that Lucille Ball was ‘very wearing’ were not exaggerating. She is a monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour. She is not ‘wearing’ to us because I suppose we refuse to be worn. I am coldly sarcastic with her to the point of outright contempt but she hears only what she wants to hear. She is a tired old woman [Ball was fifty-eight at the time] and lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for 19 years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate up-staging and cutting out other people’s laughs if she can, nervously watching the ‘ratings’ as she does so. A machine of enormous energy, which driven by a stupid driver who has forgotten that a machine runs on oil as well as gasoline and who has neglected the former, is creaking badly towards a final convulsive seize-up. I loathed her the first day. I loathed her the second day and the third. I loathe her today but I also pity her.

If we can have a movie about the making of Psycho, we need a movie about Burton and Liz Taylor encountering Lucy. To see the interaction of the egos involved, to consider the gulf between an actor doing Hamlet and getting laughs on a jejune American show — the possibilities are endless. It is a movie that would be worth the price of two admissions.

Tough Weekend for Charm City

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Yes, I hear the Ravens are going to the Super Bowl (do I need to use a trademark with that?) but they played on the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day even, not one of the days that conclude our weeks.

On Thursday came news that the actor who played Prop Joe in The Wire died:

Robert F. Chew, an actor best known for his roles in gritty HBO dramas like “The Corner” and “The Wire,” died on Thursday at his home in Baltimore. He was 52. The cause was a heart attack, said his sister, Clarice Chew.

Mr. Chew was a well-regarded stage actor when he began appearing in television shows created by or based on the work of David Simon and Edward Burns. He played a shoe salesman on “The Corner” and the drug supplier Wilkie Collins on the NBC drama “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

As Proposition Joe Stewart, the portly, deeply connected and relatively civil drug kingpin on “The Wire,” he preferred to broker deals between rival drug factions rather than resort to violence.

Then we lost Earl Weaver, the man who managed the Orioles in their glory days:

Weaver piloted the Orioles from 1968 to 1982, and again in 1985-86, earning nicknames like “the little genius” and “the Earl of Baltimore.” His teams won 1,480 games and lost 1,060, and his lifetime winning percentage (.583) ranks seventh all-time and fifth among managers in the modern era who managed 10 years or more. Five times, the Orioles won at least 100 games for Weaver, who was 5-feet-7 but stood taller in his players’ eyes.

“Earl was one of a kind,” said Hank Peters, the Orioles’ president and general manager from 1975 to 1987. “He was little, but he produced mighty results. He had the ability to get so much out of his players. He was the master at giving them the opportunity to do their best. His record attests that he made the right moves.”

One of the game’s great strategists, Weaver was also a visionary and a genius at maximizing a 25-man roster’s potential. In his pocket, he carried index cards with “the minutiae of the American League on them.” He loved players who got on base and hit home runs. He abhorred small-ball strategies that wasted outs. And he trumpeted these theories long before they were brought into Hollywood vogue.

I’m not sure an AFC championship can make up for the loss.

Breaking Implausibly Bad

Published on by D. G. Hart50 Comments

The missus and I continue to persevere with the series but after last night’s two episodes (we are now late in Season Three) any comparison between Breaking Bad and The Wire is baffling. After what happens to Hank, for instance, in the parking lot with the slasher hit-men, do you think the writers would be pleased to know that my wife laughed when Netflix flipped (as it does) to the synopsis of the next episode and revealed that Hank survives? But that reaction is what the writers deserve since they seem to keep writing right up to the edge of having to conclude the series — a character’s death, discovery by the law, abandonment in the dessert — and then find a way to keep the characters in play and the production of meth active. It feels like a Warner Bros. cartoon where Wyle E. Coyote keeps falling off the cliff or blowing himself up, only to survive. What might have been really clever would have been to extend the chemistry theme throughout the story line so that Walt can (like Superman) disentangle himself from almost any dire situation by concocting some chemical combination. If he can do that by creating a battery to start the RV, why not also by creating some mist that will, while he and Jesse are hiding from Hank inside the RV, put Hank to sleep and allow them to escape and destroy the vehicle?

As it is, Breaking Bad does not reveal much about the layers of crystal meth production or even the characters themselves. In Traffic, for instance, what was happening on the Tijuanna border had reverberations in Mexico and in Washington D.C. And of course, what happened in The Wire with Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell wound up unwinding through the layers of Baltimore politics and society. And though some have faulted The Wire for not really developing its characters, Breaking Bad’s Walt and Schuyler seem to be persons who are whom they are mainly to fit what the cartoonish plot demands. Apologies to those who love the series. The wife and I will continue just to see what the writers concoct next. We are hooked in that sense and are glad to know something about the buzz the show has created. But a production akin to The Wire? Not!

Speaking of television series comparisons, over the holidays we watched the BBC production, The Hour (which features the star of The Wire, Dominic West). Some have compared it to Mad Men. It is so much better that it the comparison is actually damning. The Hour is a combination of Good Night and Good Luck and Broadcast News with a measure of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy thrown in. It makes Mad Men look like all style and no substance.

And while I’m in the mood of making recommendations, over the holidays we visited the theaters to see Anna Karenina, Hyde Park on Hudson, and Hitchcock. The latest was arguably the best of the lot, at least if you like behind the scenes portrayals of Hollywood. Performances by Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren sure help. Hyde Park on the Hudson is worth seeing if only because of Bill Murray’s performance (which is good). But it’s also depressing to see (in a theme echoed in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) the formerly great British Empire having to depend on its political and cultural wayward son. Anna Karenina has its moments and anyone who enjoys the work of Tom Stoppard (I do, particularly his play, The Invention of Love) should see how his screenplay comes to life on the big screen. But the story itself, a case of marital and sexual infidelity, looks like just one more account of romantic love gone illegitimate — the Russian equivalent of Madame Bovary or An American Tragedy. Maybe Tolstoy deserves credit for writing about this theme before Dreiser (but after Flaubert). But on this side of 2012, Tolstoy’s narrative, even as rendered by Stoppard and company, does little to separate itself from the adulterous pack.

Even the Cats Are Surfing the Net for Showtimes

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

The next installment of the Up Series is showing in the theaters (but I can’t find any place in the old Northwest Territory that is screening it). Here is how Randall Stephens describes the documentary:

. . . it’s time for another installment of the perennial favorite UP Series, which has followed the lives of over a dozen English men and women since they were 7. (The latest is running on PBS this month.) Granada Television first aired the program in 1964. Other updates came in 1970, 1977, 1984, 1991, 1998, 2005, 2012. The brainchild of Michael Apted, the series has tracked the participants hopes, fears, interests, successes, failures, and more. It ranks as one of the best, most original documentaries of the 20th century.

Fifty years ago Apted hoped to shine light on the deep class divisions in England and to see how that would shape the lives of these individuals as the grew into adulthood.

He adds this description from the Guardian:

What couldn’t have been predicted was that a programme devised with the modest intention of giving viewers “a glimpse of England in the year 2000” would grow, over the years, into a candidate for the most affecting piece of television ever made. Births, deaths, marriages, divorces; mental illness; thwarted and realised ambitions; infidelity and its accommodation. That nothing extraordinary happened to the participants only made the series more profound, a dizzying and, at times, existentially terrifying examination of what it is to be alive, unfolding in a kind of emotional time-lapse photography.

People who have not had to wait every seven years for another edition of these British lives will have a different experience (just as the making of the documentary itself has has a Heisenberg-like affect on the lives of the subjects). But I can think of no other production that captures this well how our lives are works in progress (or regress). This is highly recommended for anyone (pastors, elders, parents, teachers) who believe and may be discouraged that a person’s current attitude, disposition, and circumstances will abide. Life goes on. People grow up. They (generally) remain resilient.

When the World is Breaking Bad

Published on by D. G. Hart183 Comments

Mrs. Hart and I finally had the chance to watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and generally enjoyed it, though as is the case with most spy flicks, you don’t pay enough attention the first time through to figure out the villain (and once you know the villain in a second viewing the mystery that energizes a spy flick is gone). What continues to intrigue (all about) me about the genre of espionage movies is how indifferent Americans (and Europeans?) appear are to be to the morality of spying.

Most spy flicks take place in the context of the Cold War and presume that the United States (or the UK) is in a moral and political contest with the Soviets and the evils of Communism. Even if agents lie, kidnap, kill, and steal, agents of the CIA and MI6 are on the side of good, and the preservation of liberty and the American way requires intentionally breaking eggs. Broken shells and wasted yokes are the price of doing business.

Parenthetically, one of the curious features of debates over the Obama Administration’s handling of incident at the embassy in Libya is to see folks who grew up distrusting the CIA and calling cops “pigs” now having to rely on those very same intelligence agents to justify their decisions, actions, and authority. Boomers once envisioned a world where intelligence would be unnecessary and its immoral associations eliminated. A funny thing happened on the way to running a superpower — the realization that espionage and intelligence gathering are par for the superpower course. In which case, when it comes to international affairs, Obama depends upon secretive and duplicitous spies as much as tricky Richard Nixon and Slick Bill Clinton.

As I say, most Americans (aside from the pacifists) are immune to the moral compromises involved in living in a superpower. Our global hegemony depends in some way on a lot of craftiness and worse. Whether our security requires it is another matter. (Do we need to fear Mexico or Canada?) No politicized preacher of the Religious Right or neo-Calvinist persuasion I know has taken on the military-industrial complex or the ethics of agencies like the CIA. And yet, w-w advocates would have us think that the great instances of defective thinking and spiritual decline in the United States are policies and laws regulating human sexual desires. In point of fact, the United States likely lost her innocence well before the sexual revolution, that is, she lost it at least when she decided to wage an international war against the spread of Communism. Europeans like the Brits have never seemed to be as troubled by the ethical compromises involved in ruling and protecting a nation’s global footprint. Americans, by contrast, prefer thinking of their nation as one innocent of European decadence and intrigue. That preference may be a condition for demonizing those who break some of the Ten Commandments and not other parts of God’s law.

But on the upside, the new character in Breaking Bad (formerly Larry Sanders’s agent) is welcome a welcome development even if the series continues to depend on Dooms Day scenarios like divorce, girlfriends’ deaths, RV battery failures in the desert, suicide turtles, and airline crashes. Those extraordinary moments of Walt’s and Hank’s life make me think experimental Calvinists would prefer Breaking Bad more than confessional Protestants since the latter know the value of the ordinary and routine over excitement and glitz.

Breaking Bad Is Peaking Early

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

The cats have been sleeping through a lot lately, especially the little hellion (Cordelia) who now that the wood burning stove is running cooks until she almost turns soggy. We have watched, for instance, Margin Call (a well done movie about Wall Street on the eve of the 2008 meltdown), Newlyweds (pretty good movie about modern romance even if borrowing too much from Woody Allen as Edward Burns is wont), Whistle Blower (a decent English movie about intelligence and the Cold War that pines for an England innocent of espionage and mightier than the U.S.), and Republic of Love (a lame movie about modern romance unless you like seeing Bruce Greenwood’s naked chest — I am not that metrosexual). But the subject of discussion between the missus and me of late is the television series, Breaking Bad. Having spared Mrs. Hart of the ghoulish opening episodes and the indelicate elimination of bodies (I believe in eschatological discontinuity but I hope the resurrection won’t be so radical), we are now into the second season and the era of Walt’s shaved head.

The early returns are that the series has transgressed the line of suspension of disbelief. The reason for the trespass may be the writer’s sense of needing to keep viewers’ attention with a fairly minimal set of characters. Compared to The Wire which had all of the resources of Baltimore at the creator’s disposal, this is supposed to be the story of one man’s struggle to survive.

Whatever the reason, the episodes with Tucco, while entertaining and dramatic, are simply implausible and make the prospects for another three seasons after this one even more unbelievable. How is Walt going to keep this a small operation? Or will he need to become an Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in order to pay his medical bills? But to come as close to being killed (by Tucco) and discovered (by his DEA brother-in-law, Hank) and live to see a return to cooking seems just too much. These tensions would have been more appropriate at the end of Walt’s tenure as meth dealer, not as the beginning of a new stage in his evolution.

The most unbelievable part was Tucco’s father failure to ring the bell on Jesse while being interrogated by Hank. If this had been a stand alone instance of remarkable providence, maybe it would have been plausible. But it was part of too many other very strange circumstances that had to break not bad but right for Walt and Jesse to live to see another batch. And the problem with cutting it so close to being discovered — can we really believe that Hank doesn’t know what’s going on — is that the writers don’t have the backup that David Simon did in The Wire. If Walt goes to jail, the series ends. When Avon went to jail, The Wire became even more interesting.

This doesn’t mean that Breaking Bad is bad. It only means that so far the Harts are not hooked. After season one, episode five of The Wire, we were all in.

What the Cats Missed

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Although the posts about movies have been less frequent, I continue to see a number of good movies. I won’t say much about two documentaries — Weather Underground and Arguing the World — since I wrote about them elsewhere. But the Mrs. and I did enjoy these a great deal and have continued to discuss them on different occasions.

In the theater a couple weeks ago — while in Chattanooga — I went out to a late night showing the The Master. I know McMark didn’t like this and I can understand why. P. T. Anderson has made another under-narrated movie that has the feel of There Will Be Blood — a story of unclear progression and ambiguous import — which is a reason to like Anderson’s defiance of Hollywood conventions. Plus, since I am a fan of both Anderson and one of the movie’s stars, Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master gets at least three stogies from Old Life.

This past weekend the Mrs. and I went to see Argo, Ben Afflick’s latest (in which he bears his chest to the female viewers’ delight). It is very good and works on a variety of levels. The inside Hollywood dimension, which features great performances by John Goodman and Alan Arkin, could carry the movie by itself. But the story about the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis is well handled and evokes for this middle-aged boomer some painful memories of a terrible period in U.S. history. And how often does Hollywood make a pro-CIA movie? (My wife and I thought Argo could be well paired with Three Days of the Condor and Burn After Reading.) An additional benefit is the way Argo movie indirectly highlights Turkey’s remarkable success as a Muslim society that embraced secularity and republican government and managed to hold on. Obviously, Iran did not follow a similar trajectory.

Finally, the Harts said a painful so-long to Dr. Paul Weston, the therapist featured in In Treatment. It looks like the series concludes with the third season. This is understandable in some ways because the pattern of weekly sessions with patients is hard to sustain as a recognizable narrative. The natural sequel would be a series that simply follows the life of Weston, played well by Gabriel Byrne. But to see Weston struggle through his vocation with another set of clients in a fourth season would have diminishing returns. Even so, it was a very good series and once again confirms the superiority of HBO in producing first-rate television.

The Man who Made John Facenda and Frozen Tundra Famous

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I don’t know how the news of Steve Sabol’s death is traveling outside Philadelphia where chatter on sports-talk radio this morning was all about Sabol’s work in taking the National Football League from a sport like professional hockey into the prime-time attraction that it is today. But word of his death did register with me since Sabol was one of my few brushes with greatness.

Back in my junior year at Woodrow Wilson High, one of my history teachers, obviously looking for a day off without having to call in sick, had Sabol come to campus and speak to various classes. At the time NFL Films was still a relatively new venture, but it was largely responsible for that collection of highlight footage that ESPN would take over. It is an indication of how small-time the effort was that Sabol would mix with ne’er do well youths in Lower Bucks County. But by mythologizing the sport — Sabol played football at Colorado State while majoring in art history — he helped turn the NFL into the corporate behemoth it now is. I wonder if he had regrets.

Fast forward five years. During my junior and senior years at Temple, while studying film — does “the cinema” sound less dilettantish? — I worked for Steve Sabol. At their center city facility in Philadelphia, I mixed chemicals for the film processors between midnight and 8:00 so that the writers and editors could prepare those highlight reels that Howard Cosell announced. Of course, the real voice of NFL Films was John Facenda, the television news anchor for Channel 10 in Philadelphia. Later Sabol would use other Philadelphia voices, like Harry Kalas.

Segments from old soundtracks prompted me to buy one of the cd’s with the remarkably good music that turned football into art. (If readers want proof that my better half doesn’t read Old Life, admission of on-line purchases has to be it.) Folks born after 1970 can likely not imagine a time when professional football was almost as beautiful as it was modest. The irony is that Steve Sabol may have been so accomplished at his craft that he helped turn the NFL into something almost unwatchable (not to mention those vexing violations of the Lord’s Day).

Mencken Day 2012

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Every man, whatever his actual qualities, is credited with and judged by certain general qualities that are supposed to appertain to his sex, particularly by women. Thus man the individual is related to Man the species, often to his damage and dismay. Consider my own case. I am by nature one of the most orderly of mortals. I have a placed for every article of my personal property, whether a Bible or a cocktail-shaker, an undershirt or an eye-dropper, and I always keep it where it belongs. I never drop cigar-ashes on the floor. I never upset a waste-basket. I am never late for trains. I never run short of collars. I never go out with a purple necktie on a blue shirt. I never fail to appear in time for dinner without telephoning or telegraphing. Yet the women who are cursed by God with the care of me maintain and cherish the fiction that I am an extremely careless and even hoggish fellow — that I have to be elaborately nursed, supervised and policed — that the slightest relaxation of vigilance over my everyday conduct would reduce me to a state of helplessness and chaos, with all my clothes mislaid, half my books in the ash-can, my mail unanswered, my face unshaven, and my office not unlike an I.W.W. headquarters after a raid by the Polizei. It is their firm theory that, unainded by superior suggestion, I’d wear one shirt six week, and a straw hat until Christmas. . . .

I note that many other men lie under the same benign espionage and misrepresentation — in fact, nearly all men. But it is my firm belief that very few men are really disorderly. The business of the world is managed by getting order into it, and the feeling for discipline thus engendered is carried over into domestic life. I know of very few men who ever drop ashes on the dining-room rug, or store their collars in their cigar-box, or put on brown socks with their dress-clothes, or forget to turn off the water after they have bathed, or neglect to keep dinner engagements — and most of these few, I am firmly convinced, do it because their women-folk expect it of them, because it would cause astonishment and dismay if they refrained. I myself, more than once, have deliberately hung my hat on an electrolier, or clomped over the parquetry with muddy shoes, or gone out in a snowstorm without an overcoat, or come down to dinner in a ragged collar, or filled my shirt-box with old copies of the Congressional Record, or upset a bottle of green ink, or used Old Dutch Cleanser for shaving, or put olives into Jack Rose cocktails, or gone without a haircut for three or four weeks, or dropped an expensive beer Seidel upon the hard concrete of my cellar floor in order to give a certain necessary color to the superstition of my oafishness. If I failed to do such things now and then I’d become unpopular, and very justly so, for nothing is more obnoxious than a human being who is always challenging and correcting the prevailing view of him. (“The Man and His Shadow,” Prejudices: Fourth Series)