Beggar's Canyon

Greta Garbo

2010-09-27T23:30:00.002-04:00

So I've been viewing the films of Greta Garbo, from the Swedish silents to the Hollywood silents to the talkies, and despairing to find a single truly great picture among them. Garbo, befitting her legend, is always captivating — an almost-too-clever remark, attributed to an English critic, goes, "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober" — but is seldom supported by first rate direction or writing. It would appear that her best collaborators were cinematographers; she is at all times exquisitely lit, even when the sets and locations are not.

One early highlight is The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), both the crown jewel and capstone of Swedish silent cinema. This is romantic realism in service to period drama, shot stunningly on location in the Scandinavian Mts (sort of a bergfilm but without the ardent nationalism), and has several great setpieces including a colossal burning estate and a pack of real wolves pursuing a sleigh across a frozen lake. The latter is an unforgettable thrill. Garbo doesn't have much to do besides collapse from smoke inhalation or clutch her furs in brave resolution as she flees across the ice, but damn if she isn't bravely and beautifully resolute.

Her Hollywood silents are routine melodrama. Louis B Mayer brought her over and made her a star without making any good movies, which was (and is) a Hollywood producer's job. The talkies are only a little better. She's well remembered for Grand Hotel ("I want to be alone..."), a shoddy assembly of top stars without a purpose or script. Her 1935 Anna Karenina (my first exposure to the story) leads me to suspect the novel is a monumental bore. I did have high hopes for her collaboration with George Cukor on Camille, but that turned out to be just a warhorse melodrama lacking the mercy and quaint charm of silence. (I take from the experience that Cukor is nothing without the Algonquin school of 30s writers who penned for him Dinner at Eight and The Philadelphia Story.) Garbo's best role, then, turns out to be Queen Christina: the embodiment of her appeal as a robust and pityingly tender white exotic, tragically unreachable.

But then I saw Ninotchka. As it really turns out, the only director ever to do her justice was Ernst Lubitsch, the same maestro who gave us Pola Negri. Also, it was the only time Garbo was serviced by one of the great writers: Billy Wilder. They made for her an enduring comedy (Oh, Thirties comedy!) that works by playing against her famous gravitas. The movie is flush with verbal wit and persistent satire of a straw man prewar caricature of Soviet Russia (with stereotyping as bald as in a wartime Looney Tunes propaganda short), but the biggest laugh comes from a strategic pratfall. What a delight!

Ken Burns' Baseball, 5th Inning: 1930-1940

2010-05-31T00:00:00.005-04:00

"The idea of community, the idea of coming together. We're still not good at that in this country. We talk about it a lot. In moments of crisis we're magnificent at it — the Depression; Franklin Roosevelt lifting himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees. At those moments we understand community, helping one another. In baseball you do that all the time; you can't win it alone. You can be the best pitcher in baseball but somebody has to get you a run to win the game. It is a community activity. You need all nine people helping one another. I love bunt plays. I love the idea of the bunt. I love the idea of the sacrifice. Even the word is good; giving yourself up for the good of the whole. That's Jeremiah. That's thousands of years of wisdom. You find your own good in the good of the whole. You find your own individual fulfillment in the success of the community. The Bible tried to do that and didn't teach you. Baseball did."
— Mario Cuomo

"The Depression hit the national pastime almost as hard as it hit the nation. Millions of fans could no longer afford even the fifty cents it cost to get into a game. Others, unwilling to give up baseball, made the nickel-ballpark hot dog their only meal of the day. Attendance fell off. The St Louis Browns averaged fewer than 1500 fans a game. The Cincinnati Reds, the Boston Braves, and the Philadelphia Phillies nearly went out of business. Organized baseball tried desperately to fill its stadiums. The Thirties saw the first all-star game, the spread of night baseball, the induction of the first players into the brand new Baseball Hall of Fame. Nothing seemed to work. But in a time when, more than ever, America needed heroes, baseball still provided them." — KB

Great is baseball. The national tonic, the reviver of hope, the restorer of confidence.
— The Sporting News, 1931

Negro league baseball:

"In cities and small towns all across the country there were other teams and other stars that may have been the greatest in the century, but whose deeds would live only in the memories of those who saw them play. Over the years, black baseball stars played white major league stars at least 438 times in off-season exhibition games. The whites won 129 of those postseason games. Blacks won 309. That's when we played the hardest, one black veteran explained, to let them know and to let the public know that we had the same talent they did and probably a little better at times. To the delight of crowds everywhere, barnstorming black teams liked to warm up in pantomime. They threw an invisible ball around the infield so fast, hit and fielded imaginary fly balls so convincingly, and made close plays at first and diving catches in the outfield so dramatically that fans could not believe it was not real. They called it shadow ball. [...]

"While most of organized white baseball faltered in the midst of the Depression, black baseball flourished as never before. Black entertainers sponsored their own teams. Louis Armstrong had his New Orleans Secret Nine. Cab Calloway played on his own team of all-stars. Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson was part-owner of the New York Black Yankees, and sometimes tap danced on the dugout roof. Teams were points of pride in black communities all over the country, boosting local economies, making life a little easier in Southern towns and in Northern ghettos, stitching black America together. In the 1930s, Rube Foster's old dream of a separate but athletically equal league finally came true. [...]

"Black players excelled under conditions big leaguers never had to face. Their season was longer. Their pay, far less. And to keep their teams afloat during hard times they were always on the road. The brand of baseball they played wherever they stopped was faster, more daring than that in the majors. And just as competitive."
— KB

We were worked like the mule that plows the fields all week and then drives the carriage to church on Sunday.
— Satchel Paige

"Back in those days we rode all night in the buses. Sometimes we played four games in one day. Nobody ever heard of that before. We'd play nine forty-five in the morning, one o'clock a double header, then go fifty, sixty miles at night and play a game. And traveling all night in those buses. That's the thing: I traveled in those buses 31 years, was turned over four times and you know what? Somebody upstairs liked me 'cause I never got a scratch."
— Double Duty Radcliffe

"We played in a rough league. When I say a rough league... I notice nowadays every time a youngster get a sprain: 15 days on the disabled list, and all this. Uhh, we didn't go on the disabled list. Unless we were broken and in a wheelchair and on two crutches. If we get hurt, we played. We don't have no relief pitcher. You go out there, you go for nine. That's it. You were paid for nine and that's the way they wanted you to pitch. Nine innings."
— Riley Stewart, Chicago American Giants

Spitballs, shine balls, emory balls... I never knew what the ball would do once it left the pitcher's hand.
— Roy Campanella, catcher

"Some pitchers used a bottle cap hidden in their gloves to scuff up the ball to make it break more sharply. As a result, Negro league batters learned how to hit everything. For years major leagues had scorned the bunt, but black players turned it into an art.

"As the Depression deepened black teams were forced to innovate. Some clubs expanded their schedules still further, to play for white fans in small towns starved for baseball." — KB

"They had a sizable following, especially among their fellow blacks, but also white people used to turn out to watch them. They were always sort of scrappy affairs. Seldom had a grandstand or anything else. And they were not often offered the use of the stadium, you see, so they had to play in all kinds of sandlot situations. I really don't see how they played baseball traveling the way they did in those ramshackle buses without any sleep and bone-jarring trips over those bad roads."
— Shelby Foote

"It's a trade-off. I think that the Negro leagues were a wonderful institution in American life, but they had the stigma of reminding black people that they were separated from and not a part of American life. That was a problem with all segregated institutions that we had: they were important in enriching the black community's life on one level, but they were stigmatized in telling us that we could not be a part of everything else that was going on. So you're talking about a very limited kind of life, on the whole."
— Gerald Early

Depression era:

1926; Joe McCarthy becomes manager of the Chicago Cubs.

1926; Mel Ott debuts with the New York Giants, right field. "He was so feared at the plate that he was once intentionally walked with the bases loaded."

1926; Babe Herman debuts with the Brooklyn Dodgers, then nicknamed the "Robins" after manager Wilbert Robinson.

"The Thirties were a time of clowning in baseball, particularly in the National League. You had two forms of the clown: On one end you had the St. Louis Cardinals. On the other, more inept level you had the Brooklyn Dodgers — the Daffiness Boys, led by Wilbert Robinson."
— Daniel Okrent

"Brooklyn had last won a pennant in 1920, but the Dodgers had never won a World Series, and with players like Pea Ridge Day and Hot Potato Hamlin, they were best known for what one of their own managers called bonehead plays. The most celebrated Dodger star was Babe Herman, who hit .393 in 1930, an all-time Dodger record. But he was famously inept in the field, carried lit cigars in his pockets, and once boasted that if a fly ball ever hit him on the head, he'd quit." — KB

It was an even bet that Babe would either catch it or get killed by it. His general practice was to run up when the ball was hit, and then turn and run back, and then circle about uncertainly. All this time the ball was descending, the spectators were petrified with fear, and Mr Herman was chewing gum, unconcerned. At the proper moment he stuck out his glove. If he found the ball there he was greatly surprised and very happy.
— Collier's magazine

"The Dodgers' best pitcher was Dazzy Vance [debuted 1922], a hefty righthander with an 83 inch reach, who had been the dominant strikeout pitcher of the 1920s. He literally had a trick up his sleeve..."

You couldn't hit him on a Monday. He cut the sleeve of his undershirt to the elbow, and on that part of it he'd use lye to make it white, and the rest he didn't care how dirty it was. Then he'd pitch overhand out of the apartment houses in the background of Ebbets Field; between the bleached sleeve of his undershirt waving and the Monday wash hanging out to dry — the diapers and undies and sheets flapping on the clothesline — you lost the ball entirely. He threw balls by me I never even saw.
— Rube Bressler

"Brooklyn rarely rose above sixth place. Even their diehard fans called the Dodgers, dem bums."

"Dem Bums became the Dodgers. That was their big name for them: our bums, our beloved bums. But the term, when it was first used, was pejorative. In the Twenties and Thirties the people in Brooklyn needed the Dodgers to win, and they'd go out to the ballgame and the Dodgers would lose, and they'd lose stupidly and carelessly and dumbly and people would come out of Ebbets Field saying Them bums, those lousy bums, they lost again — How'd those bums do today? And it wasn't until they started to win that the nickname became an admirable nickname. It became capitalized."
— Robert Creamer

"I think in the past that certainly Brooklyn's character was defined by the Brooklyn Dodgers. Even just the name Dodgers, coming from these trolley cars that everybody had to dodge. The idea that Brooklyn felt a stepchild to New York City, and that somehow the Dodgers, the Bums, were stepchilds too — they were gonna show the hotty-totty New Yorkers that we were really better than them — defined who Brooklyn was, and even in Long Island, where I grew up, I felt that sense of Brooklyn, and it was all part of the Dodgers. I don't know that that exists today in the same way, that you define who you are through your team and through your city, and I think it's a loss. It means that people are more fragmented. They've got themselves and a few friends but they don't have that group sense, unless there's a win — but that's not the same. That's not what this was all about when I was growing up. We hardly ever won and it didn't matter."
— Doris Kearns Goodwin

1926; Andy Cohen, the first Jew in the major leagues, is signed to the New York Giants by John McGraw.

Baseball is the great American sport, and as the Jew is thoroughly Americanized, there is no reason why his name should not be prominently found upon the baseball roll of honor.
— The American Hebrew, 1926

1927; Satchel Paige makes his Negro league debut with the NNL Birmingham Black Barons.

How to stay young: 1) Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood. 2) If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. 3) Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. 4) Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. A social ramble ain't restful. 5) Avoid running at all times. 6) Don't look back — something might be gaining on you.
— Satchel Paige

"The most celebrated of all black baseball stars was a tall, gangly pitcher of indeterminate age: Leroy 'Satchel' Paige. A natural showman and shrewd self-promoter, he drew black baseball's biggest crowds for 22 years. He pretended to be a sort of sleepy country boy, giving distinctive nicknames to all his friends, and reporters eagerly gathered the aphorisms he loved to coin. He may have been the greatest pitcher of all time." — KB

"Satchel Paige had a good arm. A strong arm with no muscles. Like a slingshot."
— Connie Johnson

"On the mound, one rueful batter remembered, Satchel Paige threw fire. He had a whole arsenal of distinctive pitches: his Bee Ball, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball, Long Tom, Hesitation Pitch..."

"Number one, that's a fastball, he'd call that his Midnight Rider. The changeup, he'd call that Four-Day Creeper..."
— Sammie Haynes, catcher

"He kicked his leg impossibly high before pitching, then he'd throw around that foot. Half the guys, one victim remembered, were hitting at that foot coming up. They rarely hit the ball at all. When playing hometown teams Paige liked to guarantee to strike out the first nine men up. Then he would call in the outfield and make good on his promise."

People only saw the major leaguers in the big cities. I believe people got a chance to see me everywhere. I played all over. Farm fields, penitentiaries. Anyplace in this whole country where there was a baseball diamond, they know me, and see me.
— Satchel Paige

"Because black baseball was played in so many places, and because few black teams had the money to pay someone to keep score, no one knows precisely how many games he won. Paige himself estimated that he pitched in 2,500 games and won 2,000 of them — four times the major league record." — KB

1928; Carl Hubbell debuts with the New York Giants.

"Well I was always fascinated by Carl Hubbell. Mr Highpockets. He was a lefthanded pitcher for the New York Giants and his most famous pitch was the screwball, and he'd thrown so many of these things that his arm was literally deformed, and you could see it when he walked out to the pitcher's mound. His arm — a screwball is a reverse curve, like that — and he'd thrown so many that the palm was almost out when he walked out, and curious. And I was so impressed by this pitcher that I used to walk around like that when I was about 9 years old. My mother used to say, What is wrong with that arm of yours, anyway? They finally made me stop it; it looked as though I'd fallen out a window or something and my parents hadn't had enough money to get me the right operation to get the thing twisted back right."
— George Plimpton

"I saw so many great pitchers, and maybe it's because of an early impression, but of all the pitchers I saw — thinking in terms of their control of themselves spiritually, as well as their ability to throw the ball, to manipulate the pitch — I would say... Let's put it this way: If I had a ball game to be pitched and my life hung on the balance, I'd want Carl Hubbell to pitch it."
— Red Barber

1929 World Series; Connie Mack's Athletics defeat Joe McCarthy's Chicago Cubs.

"Finances had forced Connie Mack to disband his first championship team in 1914, and it had taken him 15 years to climb back to the top. His newly constituted A's won back-to-back championships in 1929 and 1930, and the pennant in 1931. Mack's finest pitcher was Robert Moses "Lefty" Grove. He was so fast, a sportswriter said, he could throw a lamb chop past a wolf. He was a savage competitor who sometimes threw at his own teammates in batting practice, and was notorious for ripping his clothes and smashing lockers when he lost, something he didn't do very often. During the Athletics' three championship years he won 79 and lost just 15.

"The A's hitters rivaled even the Yankees' Murderers Row. Mickey Cochrane was the best-hitting, fastest-running catcher the game had yet seen, but he was called Black Mike because of the foul mood that overcame him when the Athletics suffered even a momentary setback. Leftfielder Al Simmons was a Polish immigrant's son, whose real name was Aloisius Szymanski. He drove in more than 100 runs 11 years in a row. He just couldn't help it, Simmons said, he hated pitchers. But the most frightening hitter was first baseman Jimmie Foxx, Double X, who hit 58 home runs one season, just two short of the record Babe Ruth had been sure would never be broken. He cut off his sleeves to display his massive biceps. Even his hair has muscles, a pitcher complained. Opposing players called him The Beast. Jimmie Foxx wasn't scouted, a pitcher said, he was trapped." — KB

Oct 29, 1929; Black Tuesday; stock market crash

1930; Babe Ruth signs a two-year contract paying $80,000 a season, the highest ever. When a reporter asked him whether it was unseemly, in the midst of the Depression, to be getting a bigger salary than President Herbert Hoover, he answered, Why not? I had a better year than he did.

"Despite the Depression, baseball was still big in New York, where Babe Ruth still dominated the game and filled the headlines. He was the idol of every schoolboy, the delight of every sportswriter, drinking and eating too much, cheerfully lighting up the half-smoked cigars he found on the men's room floor, doing his best to ignore the younger sluggers who were now overtaking him, including his seemingly invincible teammate, Lou Gehrig.

"Gehrig had become the best hitter in the American League, driving in runs at a faster clip than Ruth, but he still had to settle for second billing. The two men were growing increasingly distant, and now Gehrig became obsessed with setting a record no one could ever match. Since May of 1925 he had not missed a single game, and despite aches, sprains and fevers he determined never to take himself out of the lineup. Why don't you take a rest? someone asked him. There's no point to it, Gehrig answered, I like to play baseball, and if I were to sit on the bench the worry and fretting would take too much out of me." — KB

1930; Gus Greenlee, king of the Pittsburgh numbers racket, acquires and develops the Negro league Pittsburgh Crawfords, creating a crosstown rivalry with the Homestead Grays, the established black club owned since 1920 by ex-player Cumberland Posey Jr.

"Much of the drama of black baseball was centered in Pittsburgh. [...] Before long much of black baseball would be in the hands of racketeers, among the few members of the black community with enough money in the midst of the Great Depression to pay the bills." — KB

1930; Negro league Kansas City Monarchs begin carrying portable lights, for night play.

"Founded in 1920, the Monarchs dominated black baseball for more than 25 years. They won three pennants in a row between 1923 and 1925, and even in the darkest years of the Depression they were the most profitable of all the black ball clubs. One East Side black bartender remember that they made Kansas City the talk of the town all over the world. At the heart of the Monarchs was their hard-hitting first baseman, John Jordon "Buck" O'Neil, who would stay with the Monarchs for nearly 20 years, becoming their manager, leading them to 5 more Negro league pennants and two championships in the Black World Series." — KB

"We were the attraction. In our baseball the Kansas City Monarchs were like the New York Yankees in major league baseball. Very tops, very tops. We had the stars, and so to make a living we showed it to the world."
— Buck O'Neil

1930; Josh Gibson debuts with the Homestead Grays.

There is a catcher that any big league club would like to buy for $200,000. His name is Gibson. He can do everything. He hits the ball a mile. He catches so easy he might as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle. Too bad this Gibson is a colored fellow.
— Walter Johnson

"Josh Gibson was black baseball's greatest home run hitter, and, after Satchel Paige, its biggest crowd pleaser. He hit more than 70 home runs in 1931 alone, some of them soaring better than 575 feet, and his lifetime record may have approached 950. Legend had it that Gibson hit a ball so hard at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh that it never came down. The next day, Gibson was playing in Philadelphia, 300 miles away, when a ball dropped from the heavens into an outfielder's glove. The umpire pointed at Gibson and shouted, You're out! Yesterday, in Pittsburgh!

"Once when another player handed him a broken bat, thinking it was his, Gibson replied, I don't break bats. I wear them out. Gibson was often called the black Babe Ruth, but there were some who thought Ruth should have been called the white Josh Gibson." — KB

Sept 1930; Hank Greenberg, the "first great Jewish baseball star", debuts at first base for the Detroit Tigers. In 1934 he would lead the Tigers to the American League pennant, and in 1935 be the unanimous choice for MVP, driving in 170 runs.

"There had been Jewish major leaguers before him, including Andy Cohen of the Giants, but few did well, and the antisemitism of the times had forced many of them to change their names. Hank Greenberg never even considered it. Born in Greenwich Village, the son of a garment manufacturer who initially found his boy's interest in baseball bizarre, Greenberg broke into the minors playing in little Southern towns where crowds were said to be as curious to see a Jew as they were to watch the game. His power hitting brought him to the majors, where he soon faced a torrent of antisemitic abuse from players and fans alike. Greenberg's willingness to fight back eventually earned him the grudging respect of his fellow players. But Jewish fans, many of whom were recent immigrants and anxious to embrace the national pastime of their adopted country, worshiped him as a hero." — KB

"What better marriage of national aspiration and national passion, that one of their own could rise to become one of the great ballplayers of the time? He wouldn't play on the Jewish holidays, but he would hit a lot of home runs for the Detroit Tigers every other day of the year."
— Daniel Okrent

I came to feel that if I, as a Jew, hit a home run, I was hitting one against Hitler.
— Hank Greenberg

1930; Hack Wilson of the Chicago Cubs bats in 190 runs in the season; still a major league record. "He hit even harder than he drank. One writer said that Wilson was built along the lines of a beer keg, and not unfamiliar with its contents."

1930 World Series; Connie Mack's Athletics defeat Branch Rickey's Cardinals.

1931; Joe McCarthy leaves the Cubs to manage the New York Yankees for the next 15 years.

1931 World Series; Connie Mack falls in a rematch with Branch Rickey.

"Even the A's great lineup could no longer fill the seats at Shibe Park, and Connie Mack once again sold off his stars, this time to repay bank loans incurred after the Great Crash." — KB

1932; Greenlee Field, the first black-built and -owned baseball stadium, opens in Pittsburgh.

"When his black stars weren't allowed to use the showers in Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, Gus Greenlee built his Crawfords a $60,000 stadium. Then he stole Cumberland Posey's biggest stars, including Oscar Charleston and Judy Johnson [and Josh Gibson, not to mention Satchel Paige]. The result was a lineup which for a time rivaled the best white teams in history. The Crawfords played everywhere, a player remembered, in every ballpark, and we won. Won like we invented the game.

"Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige were relentless competitors. As teammates on the Crawfords they were a virtually unbeatable combination. But each believed he was the better ballplayer. You're the greatest hitter and I'm the greatest pitcher, Paige told Gibson when he left the Crawfords, Someday we're gonna meet up and we're gonna see who's best." — KB

1932; James "Cool Papa" Bell plays center field for the KC Monarchs and the Mexican winter leagues before bouncing to the Homestead Grays. "He may have been the fastest runner in baseball history, so fast that he once scored from first on a sacrifice bunt."

Cool Papa could snap off the light, get into bed and pull the covers up before the room was dark.
— Satchel Paige

1932; Shortstop Willie Wells, MVP of the Cuban winter league in 1929-30, plays for the Monarchs and the Grays before bouncing to the Chicago American Giants in '33, the Newark Eagles in '36 and, in 1940, Mexico.

"For most [blacks], the season didn't end in October. When the weather turned cold they headed south to Latin America, Cuba and Mexico, where they found a warm welcome playing wintertime baseball."

Not only do I get more money playing here, but I live like a king. I've found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. Here in Mexico, I am a man.
— Willie Wells

"Black and white in Cuba suffered that the blacks could not play in the big leagues, because we had many Cuban stars who were black. And we said, What a waste. It was the feeling, What a waste. And when the black athletes came to play in Cuba they were lionized. They were heroes, and they felt very comfortable in Cuba."
— Manuel Marquez-Sterling

June 3, 1932; Lou Gehrig becomes the first player to hit 4 home runs in a single game.

June 4, 1932; John McGraw retires.

After 30 years of continuous services, John Joseph McGraw has resigned as manager of the Giants. At the age of 59 Mr McGraw steps down because of ailing health, with his Giants in last place. Mr McGraw was a product of the old school of baseball, when fistfights were common, when red liquor was sold at all the parks, when only ladies of questionable social standing attended the game. To the end he was faithful to his truculent creed. The last official act he performed as manager of the Giants was to file a protest with the league against Bill Klem, the umpire.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

"He died two years later, mourned by many as the greatest of all baseball managers. The winner of 10 pennants. Not long after his death, his wife found among his affects a list of all the black players he had secretly wished he could hire over the decades." — KB

1932 World Series; Babe Ruth's called shot at Wrigley Field, the "most hotly debated moment in baseball history."

"One of the things about baseball is the imagination of people, and something remarkable happens. I was there! in their imaginations. When Babe Ruth allegedly pointed to right field bleachers before hitting his home run there against the Cubs, in that World Series — I've had at least, maybe a hundred people tell me, I was there! If everybody who said they were there really were there, Cubs park would seat a half million people."
— Studs Terkel

"The Yankees easily won the first two games in New York and then headed west. There was bad blood between the two teams. [Yankee manager Joe McCarthy formerly managed the Cubs.] Cub fans jeered and spat on Babe Ruth and his wife on the way in and out of their hotel. In the first inning of the third game Ruth hit a three-run homer off Chicago pitcher Charlie Root and rounded the bases amidst a nonstop torrent of taunts and abuse. It was only the beginning." — KB

"He came up again in the fifth inning, and this was after he'd fought for a shoestring catch and missed it and the Cubs tied the score. Ruth came to bat the next inning and the crowd was all over him, just hooting and jeering 'cause he messed up the play in the outfield, and he was yelling back at the Chicago bench and jeering and he said later, I never had so much fun in my life. It was the first time I got the crowd and the players on me at the same time. And he held up a finger when he missed — there were two called strikes and two called balls — he held up a finger saying, That's one. And he held it up again, That's two. And Hartnett, the Cub catcher, heard him say, Only takes one to hit it. A time-honored baseball phrase."
— Robert Creamer

"Then Ruth waved his arm. Whether he was merely gesturing toward the Cub dugout or pointing toward the center field stands, no one will ever know for sure." — KB

"And then he hit the home run. And it wasn't just that he hit a home run; he hit the longest home run ever seen in Chicago at that time to dead center field. And you didn't get center field home runs much in those days, that was a fairly rare thing. And it was a tremendous home run, and it just stunned the crowd. Ruth went down to first base and he told a reporter later he was saying to himself, You lucky bum, you lucky lucky bum! And he said something to the Cub first baseman, something to the second baseman, waved at the Cub dugout, came across home plate — Franklin Roosevelt was running for President for the first time and he was sitting in a box behind home plate, and they said when Ruth crossed home plate with a home run, Roosevelt just put his head back and laughed."
— Robert Creamer

"The pitcher, Charlie Root, swore that Ruth had never pointed to the fence. If he had, I'd have put one in his ear and knocked him on his ass. Lou Gehrig was no less certain that he had. What do you think of the nerve of that big monkey, he asked, calling his shot and getting away with it? [...] Ironically, Gehrig was the real star of the Yankees' four-game sweep, but few would remember his performance in the face of all the publicity Ruth got. Ruth himself was evasive when asked if he really had called his shot. It's in the papers, isn't it? he said, Why don't you read the papers?" — KB

Nov 1932; Franklin Roosevelt is elected President.

I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself, but for my team.
— FDR

1933;

"As Franklin Roosevelt began to implement his New Deal for the American people, the Depression had devastated organized baseball. Attendance dipped to its lowest levels in decades. Only the Yankees and a handful of other teams were profitable, and club owners everywhere scrambled to save their businesses. Some sold off their stars to survive. The minor leagues were hit even harder; more than half went out of business. Desperate to lure back paying customers, minor league owners tried dozens of innovations and promotions: mortgage nights, beauty contests, grocery giveaways, raffles, night baseball and cow milking contests." — KB

July 6, 1933; The first All-Star Game is held in Chicago's Comiskey Park, "to try to revive interest in baseball. Fittingly, Babe Ruth was the hero, hitting a dramatic 2-run home run that gave the American League the edge."

Sept 10, 1933; The first black All-Star Game is held, in Chicago at Comiskey Park as well. "Black fans also picked their favorites, voting in the pages of the country's top black newspapers. The East-West All-Star Game quickly became the biggest event of the Negro league season. That was the glory part of our baseball, one player remembered. The huge crowds sometimes reached 50,000."

1933 World Series; The New York Giants, under John McGraw's successor, Bill Terry, defeat Joe Cronin's Washington Senators. One year later Cronin is sold by his own father-in-law, owner Clark Griffith, to shore up the Senators' finances.

1934; Walter "Red" Barber, a young Southerner who has never even seen a major league ballgame, is hired by Larry MacPhail, general manager of the Cincinnati Reds and innovator, to broadcast the play-by-play at every game.

"Larry MacPhail was a banker's hard-drinking son, a born promoter, impatient with tradition, desperate to find new ways to boost attendance and rescue his club from bankruptcy in the midst of the Depression. He was also a champion of radio. Broadcasters had covered the World Series since 1922, but most owners feared that regular broadcasting would hurt ticket sales. Larry MacPhail was sure broadcasting would increase profits, and went into partnership with the owner of two local radio stations to prove it." — KB

"Anything new has to establish itself and gain its own credentials. When radio came along some of the entrenched conservative owners said, Wait, wait a minute. Why give away something that you're trying to sell for your living, to try to keep your enterprise afloat? And especially on days of threatening weather, when people will say, Well, it looks like it may rain, I'll just listen to the radio and I won't go. They did not realize at that time that it would be creating new fans, that it would be making families of fans. Before radio, by and large, the people who came into a ballpark were men. Once radio came along and came into the homes women began to understand the game. They didn't have to have somebody explain it to them; the play-by-play broadcaster was doing it. And attendance visibly went up when you had families coming instead of single members of the family. And that's the beginning of the impact of radio. Radio made new fans."
— Red Barber

1934; Buck Leonard debuts at first base with the Homestead Grays. "He was billed as the black Lou Gehrig. His steady, dependable hitting helped lead the Grays to 9 Negro league pennants in a row."

1934 All-Star Game; Carl Hubbell strikes out, in succession, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin.

1934; Gashouse Gang

They don't look like a major league ball club, or as major league ball clubs are supposed to look in this era of the well-dressed athlete. Their uniforms are stained and dirty and patched and ill-fitting. They don't shave before a game and most of them chew tobacco. They spit out of the sides of their mouths and then wipe the backs of their hands across their shirt fronts. They're not afraid of anybody.
— Frank Graham, New York Sun

"Baseball had never seen a team quite like the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, of the National League: a perfect symbol for a country down on its luck. They were daring, hotheaded, raucous, unstoppable; the carefully crafted creation of general manager Branch Rickey and his revolutionary farm system. In a time when people were forced to make do with less, the poorly paid Cardinals were everybody's heroes. They were led by Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash, who was celebrated for his furious reactions to bad calls, and he considered any call against the Cardinals bad. He hurled his glove into the air; leaped up and down on his cap until his spikes had shredded it. At least once this proved so persuasive that the umpire actually reversed himself and called for a game to be replayed. Shortstop Leo 'the Lip' Durocher was brash and cocky and good in the field, but so bad at bat that Babe Ruth named him the All-American Out. Leftfielder Joe Medwick, called Ducky because he ran like one, swung at almost everything, but connected enough to lead the league in runs batted in three seasons running, and to win the National League Triple Crown — something no one else has managed since. Third baseman Pepper Martin, the Wild Horse of the Osage, was a fierce competitor and former hobo who liked to drop sneezing powder into hotel ventilation systems. He was said to be so fast that back home in Oklahoma he liked to run down rabbits." — KB

I was in the top ten percent of my class in law school. I'm a doctor of jurisprudence. I'm an honorary doctor of laws. And I like to believe I'm an intelligent man. Then will you please tell me why in the name of common sense I spent four mortal hours today conversing with a person named Dizzy Dean?
— Branch Rickey

"The most famous member of the Cardinals was a cocky righthanded pitcher from Arkansas: Jerome Hanna Dean. A farmboy who had dropped out of school in the second grade — I didn't do so well in the first grade either, Dean said — he was an eighteen-year-old itinerant cotton picker when Rickey's scouts discovered him playing sandlot ball. Right from the start Dean was convinced of his own greatness. I'll put more people in the park than Babe Ruth, he told Branch Rickey, even before he was hired. Anybody who's had the pleasure of seeing me play knows that I am the greatest pitcher in the world. He was very nearly as good as he said he was. He averaged 24 wins a year for five seasons. Son, he liked to ask a batter to whom he hadn't pitched before, what kind of pitch would you like to miss? He was a master at drumming up publicity. Before the 1934 season began, Dizzy announced that he and his younger brother, Paul, whom the press insisted on calling Daffy, would together win 45 to 50 games. They did. Dizzy won 30 and Paul won 19." — KB

1934 World Series; Cardinals v. Tigers

"Dean won the first game, 8 to 3. Afterwards he wired Rickey that this American League is a pushover. I think if they pitched me the whole four days, he said, I'd win all of them.

"At the plate, Ducky Medwick was well on his way to setting a World Series record for most hits. In the fourth game Dizzy Dean, running to second, was hit in the head with a ball fielded by the shortstop. The throw knocked Dean senseless and he was rushed to the hospital. Headlines the next day said: X-rays of Dean's head showed nothing.

"In the seventh and deciding game Dean and the Cardinals were already ahead by seven runs when Ducky Medwick, star of the series, came to the plate. A fight broke out between Medwick and the third baseman. The Detroit crowd turned ugly. When Medwick later took his position in left field the Detroit fans pelted him with eggs, fruit and bottles. Commissioner Landis removed Medwick from the game for his own protection, depriving him of the chance to set the record for most hits in a World Series. The Cardinals won the game anyway, 11 to nothing, and the World Series, 4 games to 3. Afterwards Medwick was puzzled. I knew why they threw all that garbage at me, he said, What I could never figure out is why they brought it to the park in the first place." — KB

1934 postseason; Babe Ruth tours Japan with an all-star team.

"Half a million fans turned out in Tokyo to cheer the mythic hero they called Beibu Rusu. The Americans won 17 of 18 games and Ruth hit 13 home runs. But in one game a high school boy named Eiji Sawamura struck out Ruth, Charlie Gehringer, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx before the Americans managed to get a single, winning run. Sawamura became a national hero, and the tour sparked the formation of the first Japanese professional league." — KB

The Babe's big bulk today blotted out such unimportant things as international squabbles over oil and navies.
— New York Times

We like to believe that countries having a common interest in a great sport would rather fight it out on the diamond than on the battlefield.
— Sporting News

1935; Babe Ruth sold.

"He was, according to the Associated Press, still the most photographed man in the world, but by 1934 Babe Ruth was growing increasingly unhappy. He knew his best days were behind him, and he had glumly absorbed a series of humiliating pay cuts as his averages dropped. He no longer spoke to Lou Gehrig because of a misunderstanding between his wife and Gehrig's mother. And he couldn't stand the new Yankee manager, Joe McCarthy. Ruth desperately wanted to be manager himself, But how could you manage a team, Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert asked him, when you can't even manage yourself?" — KB

"That's sort of a myth: Ruth couldn't handle himself, how could he handle other players? That nonsense. I mean, the man drank a lot and he raised hell and he caroused but he was a major league player for 22 years; he must've taken care of himself pretty well. And could he have managed? Who knows. Some terrible people have become great managers and some likely people were terrible managers. He certainly deserved a chance. He didn't get it."
— Robert Creamer

"Ruth's Far Eastern tour was a triumph, but when he got back he learned that the Yankees, the team that he had built, had decided to dispense with his services and had no intention of making him a manager. He turned down an offer to run their best farm team as beneath his dignity. Instead he joined the worst club in the National League, the Boston Braves, lured by a vague promise of becoming manager the following season. The Braves never really meant to give him the manager's job. The main hope was that his mere presence would boost receipts." — KB

1935; Effa Manley and her husband become co-owners of the Negro league Newark Eagles. Effa runs the team until 1948. "Tough-minded and shrewd, she was a power in Negro baseball and the black community for more than fifteen years, sometimes donating the home game proceeds to the most important civil rights issue of the day: the campaign against lynching."

May 24, 1935; First night game in major league baseball. Larry MacPhail arranges for President Franklin D Roosevelt to push a button in the White House that lights up Crosley Field in Cincinnati for a game between the Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies.

June 1, 1935; Babe Ruth retires.

"On the last Sunday of his career [May 25], when he was 40 years old, playing for the Boston Braves, heartbroken that he'd left the Yankees, couldn't sign on with them, changed leagues — trying to prolong, trying to stay on in baseball, which all players want to do — fat, worn-out, near the end — the Boston Braves played in Pittsburgh and that last Sunday he hit three home runs, and the third home run, the last of his career — number 714 — went out of the ballpark, over the roof in Forbes Field. No one had ever hit a ball out of there, up to that point, ever. That is a farewell. Goodbye, baseball."
— Roger Angell

From then on, until the day he died, he sat by the telephone waiting for a call to manage that never came.
— Claire Ruth

1935 World Series; Tigers defeat Cubs.

1936; The First Class of the Baseball Hall of Fame is selected by vote of the Baseball Writers Association of America:

Ty Cobb
Babe Ruth
Honus Wagner
Christy Mathewson
Walter Johnson

May 1936; Joe DiMaggio debuts in the Yankee outfield.

"At 17 he had broken in with the San Francisco Seals at shortstop, and was moved to center field after committing 11 wild throws in a single exhibition game. But he hit safely in 61 straight games in his first year in the minors and batted .398 in his third. The press was ready when he joined the majors, and he did not disappoint, hitting 29 homers and knocking in 125 runs in his rookie season. DiMaggio was the perfect complement to Lou Gehrig. He would help lead the Yankees to four consecutive world championships [1936, 37, 38, 39], an accomplishment Babe Ruth and Murderers Row had never even approached." — KB

"Always you look for heroes. Always the people look up to see something that represents them, that is larger than they are, and, if it's perfect, that they might become. As a young boy when I was taken to my first game at Yankee Stadium — my god! Yankee Stadium! talk about awesome sights — to see Joe DiMaggio, whose name had that happy combination of vowels that mine had, to whom you could relate without knowing anything about San Francisco or anything else about him. But he was an Italian American. He was a baseball player. He didn't seem to have any other credential but his ability, and that was sufficient to make him a great hero and a great success, and therefore a great inspiration."
— Mario Cuomo

July 1936; Bob Feller, a 17-year-old fastball pitcher from Iowa, whose father had built him his own practice field, debuts with the Cleveland Indians. "In his very first start he struck out 15 St. Louis Browns. A few weeks later he set an American League record by striking out 17 A's. Then he went back home to finish high school."

"My father and mother brought me up. I knew where the stakes were set, and I concentrated on my game. I was very conscientious; good night's sleep, good nutrition. I practiced hard, worked hard, I did, as a kid on the farm, and my baseball career was number one. So I just didn't exactly, say, fall off the turnip truck.

"We went to the World Series in 1934 in St. Louis and saw the Gashouse Gang. And I thought right then and there that — I was only 15 — that major league baseball wasn't that far away. And, not being cocky, I had a lot of confidence. My father gave me a lot of confidence. I never was afraid of a batter on the mound. They may hit me, hit me well, but I was never afraid of them."
— Bob Feller

"Imagine Bob Feller, seventeen years old, in the small farming town of Van Meter, Iowa, throwing against the proverbial wall of the barn and having a fastball that could beat any in the major league at that time. What was particularly extraordinary — when the young Feller, at 17, came into the major leagues — and what people forget is that his fastball was so great because his curve ball was extraordinary too."
— Daniel Okrent

"Baseball stories are so various, and they swap characters in 'em, but the way I heard it, Lefty Gomez, himself a pitcher, faced an 18-year-old Bobby Feller. The first one came over and the umpire called a strike, and the second one came over, called a strike, and the third one came over and the umpire called a strike and Gomez said, I thought that last one sounded a little low."
— Shelby Foote

1936 World Series; Yankees defeat Giants.

1937; Trujilo All-Stars.

"In the middle of the 1937 season, Satchel Paige and 19 other Negro league players suddenly disappeared. They turned up in the Dominican Republic, playing on a team organized by the dictator, General Rafael Trujilo, a man who could not bear to lose. Their assignment was to win the national championship for the general. Trujilo had Paige's team put on armed guard the night before the big game, and gave orders that anyone who sold the players whiskey would be shot." — KB

By the seventh inning we were a run behind, and you could see Trujilo lining up his army. It began to look like a firing squad. In the last of the seventh we scored two runs. You never saw old Satch throw harder than that. I shut them out that last two innings and we won. I hustled back to our hotel and the next morning we blowed out of there in a hurry. We never did see Trujilo again, and I ain't sorry.
— Satchel Paige

1937 World Series; Yankees defeat Giants, again.

July 29, 1938; During a radio interview, Yankee outfielder Jake Powell "cheerfully explained that he kept in shape during the off-season by cracking niggers over the head while serving as a policeman back home in Ohio. The white press paid little attention, but the black press was outraged and threatened a boycott. Yankee management suspended Powell for ten days and sent him on a tour of bars in Harlem to apologize."

October 2, 1938; Hank Greenberg shoots for the home run record.

"On the last day of the season, newsreel crews were dispatched from New York to cover what might possibly be a historic confrontation between Cleveland and Detroit. Greenberg had already hit 58 home runs that summer, tying Jimmie Foxx's record for righthanded hitting. If his luck held he might tie, or even break Babe Ruth's record of 60, and the cameramen wanted to be there to record the action. But facing him on the mound that afternoon was Bob Feller. It was Feller's turn to make history. He set a new strikeout record of 18, and Hank Greenberg struck out twice. The next day Adolf Hitler's army invaded Czechoslovakia."

1938 World Series; Yankees sweep Cubs.

1938; Martín Dihigo, El Maestro, "the most versatile of all Negro league stars, a Cuban too dark-skinned to be considered for the majors, who played brilliantly at every position", leads the Mexican League simultaneously in both pitching and hitting. He will be the only player inducted into the American, Cuban and Mexican Baseball Halls of Fame.

1938 postseason; Major league players are polled as to whether they would object to playing alongside blacks. Four-fifths say they have no objections. A small band of black sportswriters begin actively campaigning for integration of the big leagues. Club owners are not interested. Chester Washington of the Pittsburgh Courier sends an unanswered telegram to the manager of the struggling Pittsburgh Pirates:

To Pie Traynor, Pittsburgh Pirates, Congress Hotel: Know your club needs players stop Have answers to your prayers right here in Pittsburgh stop Josh Gibson catcher Buck Leonard first base S Paige pitcher and Cool Papa Bell all available at reasonable figures stop Would make Pirates formidable pennant contenders stop What is your attitude? stop Wire answer

1939; Red Barber is brought from Cincinnati to New York by the Dodgers' new owner, Larry MacPhail, to become radio broadcaster for Brooklyn.

"No one ever came up with the expressions that Red Barber had. And so what he brought to New York, to the Metropolitan Area, was that country flavor that they were not familiar with at all. I mean, when he said rhubarb, everybody would go, Wow...rhubarb. And so he became part of the language: ducks on the pond; sitting in the tall cotton — I mean there were just a million of 'em. You would suddenly say, I wonder what that looks like when somebody leaps up against the wall or dives head-first into second or bowls over the catcher? So they'd come out to see what they'd been listening to."
— Vin Scully

"My first memory of baseball is radio, listening on the car radio to Red Barber talking from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. My father wanted to know how the games were going on. He was following Brooklyn. My mother and I — I was an only child — driving in the car, began to listen, I suppose, out of self-defense. And both of us, at about the same time, my mother and I, became caught up in the drama of the game."
— Donald Hall

1939 spring training; Lou Gehrig ails.

March 16, 1939, St. Petersburg. The older newspaper men sit in the chicken coop press boxes around the circuit and watch Lou Gehrig go through the laborious movements of playing first base, and wonder if they're seeing one of the institutions of the American League crumble before their eyes. They watch him at the bat and note he isn't hitting the ball well. They watch him round the bag and it's plain he isn't getting the balls he used to get. They watch him run and they fancy they can hear his bones creak and his lungs wheeze as he lumbers around the bases. On eyewitness testimony alone the verdict must be that of a battle-scarred veteran falling apart.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

May 1, 1939; Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, takes himself out of the Yankees lineup for the first time in 14 years, after playing 2,130 consecutive games.

"He was only 35 but had begun to play like an old man; dropping balls, missing again and again at bat, sliding his feet along rather than lifting them. During batting practice one afternoon, Joe DiMaggio watched in astonishment as the Yankees' hitting star missed ten fat pitches in a row. Gehrig could not understand what was wrong. Neither could his teammates. But he could not stand the thought of letting them down. He was benching himself, he said, for the good of the team."

To whom it may concern: This is to certify that Mr Lou Gehrig has been under examination at the Mayo Clinic from June 13 to June 19, 1939. After a careful and complete examination it was found that he is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This type of illness involves the motor pathways and cells of the central nervous system. The nature of this trouble makes it such that Mr Gehrig will be unable to continue his active participation as a baseball player. Signed, Dr Harold H Habian.

The road may come to an end here. Seems like our backs are to the wall. But there usually comes a way out. Where and what I know not. But who can tell that it might lead right on to greater things?
— Lou Gehrig, writing to his wife

June 12, 1939; The National Baseball Hall of Fame officially opens its doors in Cooperstown, New York, on the game's "dubious centennial". Twelve figures selected by the Baseball Writers of America are inducted, including Christy Mathewson, who had died in 1925, and Ty Cobb, who "refused to appear in the official photograph just to spite his ancient enemy, Kenesaw Mountain Landis". Inductees present are Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napoléon Lajoie, George Sisler and Walter Johnson.

It is our belief that baseball is loved by an entire nation, that it is the very backbone of America itself.
— Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis

This week the 100th anniversary of our — pardon us — national pastime is being celebrated. During this century of diamond-doings, however, Negro baseballers, in spite of their undoubted ability to bat, run, pitch, snare gargantuan flies, cavort around shortstop and the keystone sack and think baseball, haven't reached first base insofar as getting into the big leagues is concerned.
— Amsterdam News

Every known nationality, including Indians, Cubans, Filipinos, Jews, Italians, Greeks — with the lone exception of the American black man — have played in both the National and American Leagues. The white sporting public wants to see a good ball game. They do not raise the question of the nationality of a player who can knock a home run or can pitch a good game. There was no Hitler movement created in America when John McGraw of the New York Giants put Andy Cohen, a Jew, on second base. It was up to Cohen to make good or go. What is the matter with baseball? The answer is: plain prejudice, that's all.
— Chicago Defender

"I would like to think of the Negro leagues and the tragedy of the Negro leagues — the fact that these men were excluded from baseball — the way that Buck O'Neil thought about them: that nobody owed him any apology; he had his career. But I can't think of it that way. I don't think any of us can, and that O'Neil has a generosity of spirit that perhaps goes above and beyond the call. Systematically, for six decades black Americans were excluded from playing in the major leagues, in the minor leagues, in the organized wing of the national pastime. One thing one could say is that it was, therefore, not the national pastime. It was a closed society. One could also point out to those people who would say that baseball was at its best in the Twenties, at the time of Ruth and Gehrig, or in the Thirties when DiMaggio and Williams came along: Impossible! Impossible! When part of the national population was being systematically excluded from baseball it couldn't have been the best. What we are left with from the black leagues is memory, legend, and an endless series of what-ifs with the names attached to them of Josh Gibson and Ray Dandridge and Cool Papa Bell and Willie Wells and what might have been. What if these men had been there to play in the majors against the Ruths and the Cobbs and the Walter Johnsons and back farther, against Cap Anson who started it all?"
— Daniel Okrent

July 4, 1939; Lou Gehrig's farewell address. He dies two years later of what is now called Lou Gehrig's disease.

"A huge, sad crowd packed Yankee Stadium to pay tribute to their beloved hero. Babe Ruth came back and the two old teammates ended their long feud. Manager Joe McCarthy presented him with a trophy. At first, Gehrig was too moved to speak..."

For the past two weeks you've been reading about a bad break. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. That I might've been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.

1939 World Series; Yankees sweep Reds.

1942 Negro League World Series; Satchel Paige, pitching for the Kansas City Monarchs, finally faces Josh Gibson, batting for the Homestead Grays, in Game 2.

"Satchel Paige always thought he was the greatest pitcher in the world, and Josh Gibson thought he was the greatest hitter in the world and we did too. And Satchel and Josh in this World Series ballgame. Satchel's pitching, and we got a ballgame won — the Kansas City Monarchs. With two out in the ninth inning, the first-place hitter, he tripled off Satchel. We got two outs, so that didn't bother us at all. So, Satchel called me, said, Hey, Nancy, come here. I said, What do you want, Satchel? He said, Let me tell you what I'm fixing to do. I said, What are you fixing to do? He said, I'm going to walk Howard Easterling, I'm going to walk Buck Leonard, I'm going to pitch to Josh Gibson. I said, Man, don't be facetious. He said, That's what I'm going to do. I said, Time! I called the ump, I called the manager, who was Frank Duncan — great ballplayer himself — I said, Frank, you got to listen to what Satchel said. And so Satchel told him what was going to happen. And so, in walking Easterling and walking Buck Leonard to fill the bases — now, when he was walking Buck, Josh was in the circle, you know, and he's talking to Josh all the time, said, Josh, do you remember the day when we were playing on the same team and I told you that one day we were gonna meet and see who was the best? He said, Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Satchel said, All right, said, Now is the time to prove this thing. So when Josh comes up to the bat — listen, let me tell you what this man did. He said, Time! He called the trainer. Our trainer was Jew-Baby Floyd — and I don't know why they called him Jew-Baby, 'cause he was black as me — but anyway, when Jew-Baby comes out with his, you know, like the smock that the doctor would wear, and he's got a concoction in a glass. He's got a glass, he's got some water, and he puts this — I guess Alka-Seltzer or something — he pours this in that water and it fizzes and Satchel drinks it down. He lets out a belch — I can hear it, but nobody else heard it. And so, he said, Now I'm ready. So, the fans, now they know what's happening now, everybody — we got to have 40,000 people — they're standing, and here comes Satchel. Satchel said, You know, Josh, I'm going to throw you some fastballs. I'm going to throw you a fastball belt-high. Boom! Strike one. Josh didn't move the bat. He said, Now, I'm going to throw you another fastball, but this is going to be faster than the other fastball. Boom! Strike two. He said, Now, Josh, I've got you two strikes and no balls. You know, in this situation I'm supposed to knock you down, you know, brush you back, he said, but, uh-uh, I'm not gonna throw any smoke at your yoke, I'm gonna throw a pea at your knee. Boom! Strike three. And when he struck him out — you know, Satchel must be 6' 5" — Satchel stretched out, looked like he was 7 feet tall, and he walked off the field and walked by me and said, You know what, Nancy? Nobody hits Satchel. That was the end of that story."
— Buck O'Neil

Ken Burns' Baseball, 4th Inning: 1920-1930

2010-04-26T18:00:00.017-04:00

"Baseball is a human enterprise. Therefore, by definition, it's imperfect, it's flawed, it doesn't embody perfectly everything that's worthwhile about our country or about our culture. But it comes closer than most things in American life. And maybe this story, which is probably apocryphal, gets to the heart of it: An Englishman and an American having an argument about something that has nothing to do with baseball. It gets to the point where it's irreconcilable, to the point of exasperation, and the American says to the Englishman, Ah, screw the king! And the Englishman is taken aback, thinks for a minute and says, Well, screw Babe Ruth! Now think about that. The American thinks he can insult the Englishman by casting aspersions upon a person who has his position by virtue of nothing except for birth; nothing to do with personal qualities, good, bad or otherwise. But who does the Englishman think embodies America? Some scruffy kid who came from the humblest of beginnings, hung out as a six-year-old behind his father's bar; a big, badly flawed, swashbuckling palooka, who strides with great spirit — not just talent, but with a spirit of possibility and enjoyment of life across the American stage. That's an American to the Englishman. You give me Babe Ruth over any king who's ever sat on the throne and I'll be happy with that trade."
— Bob Costas

Who is this "Baby Ruth"? And what does she do?
— George Bernard Shaw

Babe Ruth:

He was a parade all by himself; a burst of dazzle and jingle; Santa Claus drinking his whiskey straight and groaning with a bellyache. Babe Ruth made the music that his joyous years danced to in a continuous party. What Babe Ruth is comes down one generation, handing it to the next, as a national heirloom.
— Jimmy Cannon

It is impossible to watch him at bat without experiencing an emotion. I've seen hundreds of ballplayers at the plate, and none of them managed to convey the message of impending doom to the pitching that Babe Ruth did with the cock of his head, the position of his legs, and the little gentle waving of the bat feathered in his two big paws.
— New York Daily News

I saw it all happen, from beginning to end. But sometimes I still can't believe what I saw. This nineteen-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated, only slightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball the world over; a man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled before or since. I saw a man transform from a human being into something pretty close to a god. If somebody had predicted that back on the Boston Red Sox in 1914, he woulda been thrown into a lunatic asylum.
— Harry Hooper

Feb 1914; George Herman Ruth, Jr, resident of St Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic reformatory and orphanage, is signed to the minor league Baltimore Orioles.

July 1914; Ruth signs to and debuts with the Boston Red Sox.

Babe Ruth joined us in the middle of 1914, a nineteen-year-old kid. He was a left-handed pitcher and a good one. He had never been anywhere, didn't know anything about manners or how to behave among people. Just a big, overgrown green pea. [...] Lord, he ate too much. He'd stop along the road when we were traveling and order half a dozen hot dogs and as many bottles of soda pop, stuff them in one after another, give a few belches and then roar, "Okay, boys, let's go!"
— Harry Hooper

"Off the field he was bigger, louder, more excitable than his teammates. He used other people's toothbrushes, ran the elevator up and down, and got married to Helen Woodford, a sixteen-year-old coffee shop waitress he met on his very first day in Boston. Everybody called him Baby, then just the Babe." — KB

1915; Rogers Hornsby debuts with the St. Louis Cardinals.

1916; Harry Frazee, a theatrical producer, purchases the Red Sox. "He liked baseball, but Broadway was his first love, and whenever he needed cash for a new show he would sell off one of his stars."

Somebody asked me if my club was for sale. What a ridiculous question! Of course it is for sale! So is my hat and my overcoat and my watch. Anyone who wants them can have them, at a price. I will dispose of my holdings in the Red Sox at any time, for my price.
— H. Harrison Frazee

1916 & 1918 World Series; Ruth pitches for the victorious Red Sox. "In the Red Sox' greatest years he was their greatest pitcher, setting a record of 29 and 2/3 scoreless World Series innings that stood for 43 years."

"The interesting thing, among the many many many endlessly interesting things about Babe Ruth — certainly the most stunning figure in baseball history — is that he was nearly as great a pitcher as he was a hitter. In his coming-up as a raw boy from Baltimore he mowed down his opponents in the American League; he was the best left-handed pitcher in the 1910s, without question, in the American League, and it was only because of the prodigal strength that resided in his bat that he moved off the mound. [...] When people get into discussions about who's the greatest ballplayer in history and they say, Well there was Ruth, but there was also DiMaggio and Cobb and Mays and Aaron and the other claimants. To me it seems like an utterly wasted discussion. Let us say that Ruth was not as good an offensive player as Willie Mays...but he was also one of the greatest pitchers ever! It is as if imagining that Beethoven and Cézanne were one person producing the same work. It just can't be compared to anything else."
— Daniel Okrent

1919; Ruth sets a new single-season record for home runs: 29. "Ruth liked to pitch, but he loved to hit, and he played outfield on the days he wasn't pitching so that he could do it more often. He is said to have modeled his swing after the best power hitter in the game: Shoeless Joe Jackson."

Dec, 1919; The Curse of the Bambino. Ruth is sold to the New York Yankees for "$125,000 plus the promise of a $300,000 personal loan with which Frazee could finance still another show. As security for the loan, Frazee put up Fenway Park itself."

Harry Frazee became the owner of the Red Sox and then before long he sold off all our best players and ruined the team. Sold them all to the Yankees. Ernie Shore, Duffy Lewis, Dutch Leonard, Carl Mays, Babe Ruth. I was disgusted. The Yankee dynasty of the Twenties was three-quarters the Red Sox of a few years before. Frazee was short of cash and he sold the whole team down the river to keep his dirty nose above the water. What a way to end a wonderful ball club.
— Harry Hooper

"The Red Sox never recovered. They had won 5 of the first 15 World Series. They would not even play in another World Series for more than a quarter of a century." — KB

Negro league baseball:

It matters not what branch of mankind the player sprang from with the fan, if he can deliver the goods. The Mick, the Sheeney, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon — his "nationality" is never a matter of moment if he can pitch or hit or field. In organized baseball there has been no distinction raised except tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible, the wisdom of which we will not discuss except to say that by such a rule some of the greatest players the game has ever known have been denied their opportunity.
— The Sporting News, 1923

"In 1919 the bloodiest race riots since the Civil War broke out in more than 25 Northern cities as black communities became the focus of white rage. The worst was in Chicago: Before it was over 38 were dead, 536 injured, whole neighborhoods burned and looted. The violence was a devastating blow to the millions of Southern blacks who had moved north fleeing segregation. But out of the riots grew a new assertiveness among African Americans. The black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey urged his people to look to themselves. No more fear, no more cringing, he said, no more begging and pleading. Now black culture flourished as never before. A Harlem renaissance began, and black businesses thrived in all the big cities. In riot-torn Chicago, Andrew "Rube" Foster created one of the most successful black enterprises..." — KB

Feb, 1920; The Negro National League (NNL) is organized and established by Rube Foster, owner and manager of the Chicago American Giants. It was his object, he said, to provide the North's growing black population with professional baseball of their own, to do something concrete for the loyalty of the race, and to eventually challenge the major leagues.

"...a very successful operation, actually. Probably the third biggest black business in the world."
— Buck O'Neil

When the big games shall have become history there will stalk across the pages of the record a massive figure, and its name will be Andrew Foster. The master of the show, who moves the figures on his checkerboard at will. The smooth-toned counselor of infinite wisdom and sober thought. Cold in refusals, warm in assents. Known to everybody, knows everybody. That's Rube.
— The Pittsburgh Courier

"The finest black pitcher of his time, Foster was a big, outwardly genial Texan who called friends and strangers alike Darlin'. But he was tough with the white owners of the big city stadiums where his teams played when the big leaguers were safely out of town. And he was tough on his players, too, insisting on the same kind of aggressive, fast-moving baseball preached by John McGraw, fining any member of his team $5 if he were tagged out standing up. You're supposed to slide, he said. No one unable consistently to bunt a ball into a cap could play for Rube Foster, and white managers regularly attended his games to study his tactics." — KB

If you play the best clubs in the land — white clubs, as you say — it will be a case of Greek meeting Greek. I fear nobody.
— Rube Foster

"What more interesting kind of organization could black people create than leagues and baseball? It was a sport that defined America, and so black people adopting this sport and showing we too can have leagues and we too can play this game and play it very well, in some way was black people showing white Americans: Yes, we're American. Yes, we can play this game and this game means something to us, too, and it means something in our history and in our heritage."
— Gerald Early

Live ball era:

We'd play a whole game with one ball if it stayed in the park. Lopsided and black and full of tobacco juice and licorice stains. Pitchers used to have it all their way then: spitballs and emory balls and whatnot. Until 1921 they had a dead ball. The only way you could get a home run is if the outfielder tripped and fell down. The ball wasn't wrapped tight and lots of times it'd get mashed on one side, come bouncing out there like a Mexican jumping bean. They wouldn't throw it out of the game, though. Only used three or four balls in a whole game. Now they use sixty or seventy.
— Sam Crawford

"During the first twenty years of the twentieth century great pitchers ruled the game: Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Walter Johnson. They had an advantage not available to their successors. The moment a new ball was thrown onto the field, part of every pitcher's job was to dirty it up. By turns they smeared it with mud, licorice, tobacco juice. It was deliberately scuffed, sandpapered, cut, even spiked. The result was a misshapen earth-colored ball that traveled through the air erratically, tended to soften in the later innings, and as it came over the plate was very hard to see." — KB

August 16, 1920; Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman is struck in the temple by a high, inside pitch thrown by the Yankees' Carl May. He dies the next day — big league baseball's first fatality. Thereafter, "as soon as a ball got dirty, the umpire had orders to substitute a spotless white new one, and the ball itself had been made livelier by winding more tightly the yarn within it. Overnight the balance shifted from the pitcher's mound to the batter's box. The era of the home run hitter was about to begin."

1920; In his debut year with the Yankees, Ruth breaks his previous year's home run record by 25, hitting 54. (More than all but one team managed to hit that year.) "His slugging average, a new statistic that measured the power of a hitter, was .847. In all the years since, no one else has ever come close to matching it." The Yankees become the first team to draw a million fans in a season, doing so in John McGraw's own Polo Grounds, to his fury.

"Babe Ruth revolutionized baseball. He changed it. Judge Landis came in and gave baseball its integrity. Ruth began hitting home runs and gave baseball its excitement. They changed everything from the ball itself, the construction of the bats, the philosophy of hitting, the philosophy of pitching...Babe Ruth changed it. We don't realize it today, but the game of baseball has never been the same since Babe Ruth began to hit home runs."
— Red Barber

"Now, at other times in the history, something so disruptive of tradition would've been held in check — the moguls of the game would've changed the rules; they'd done it twenty times before — but in the wake of the Black Sox scandal and the public fascination with Ruth they simply let it happen."
— Stephen Jay Gould

"Before Ruth, pitchers had been taught to pace themselves, only bearing down when someone was on base. Now, there was a danger of a run being scored at any moment. They had to bear down from the first pitch to the last. Between 1910 and 1920, eight pitchers won 30 or more games in a season. In the seventy-odd years since the advent of Babe Ruth, there have been just three." — KB

I got a letter the other day asking why I didn't write about baseball no more, as I used to write about nothing else, you might say. Well, friends, I may as well admit that I have kind of lost interest in the old game. A couple of years ago a ballplayer named Babe Ruth, that was a pitcher by birth, was made into an outfielder on account of how he could bust them, and the masterminds that control baseball says to themselves that, If it is home runs that the public wants to see, why, leave us give them home runs!
— Ring Lardner

"New heroes like Babe Ruth called for a new kind of reporting, and sportswriting reached its gaudy pinnacle in the 1920s, producing its own stars. Fred Lieb started as a player for his Philadelphia church team, the Princes of Peace, moved to New York and covered baseball for more than sixty years. Ford Frick of the New York Journal hammered out complete stories in eight minutes, which gave him the time he needed to act as Babe Ruth's ghostwriter. John Kieran of the New York Times liked to write up a game before it began, then edit his account to fit the sometimes-inconvenient facts. Damon Runyon of the New York American, who changed the carnation in his lapel three times a day, wrote his accounts of games as they happened, and rarely changed a word. And Shirley Povich, who's first name once got him included in Who's Who of American Women, would write eloquently about baseball for more than half a century for the Washington Post." — KB

1921; The farm system, in which major league clubs own and operate minor league clubs exclusively to breed star players, is invented and first implemented by Branch Rickey, general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Starting the Cardinal farm system was no sudden stroke of genius. It was a case of necessity being the mother of invention. We lived a precarious existence. Other clubs would outbid us. They had the money and the superior scouting system. We had to take the leavings or nothing at all.
— Branch Rickey

"The farm system made Rickey a rich man. He personally got ten cents on the dollar for every player he sold. In negotiating salaries, one player remembered, Mr Rickey came to kill you. If he could get a player to sign for five cents less than the player wanted, he felt he had accomplished something. Nobody, a friend said, knew how to put a dollar sign on the muscle better than Branch Rickey." — KB

June 1921; Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb square off.

Given the proper physical equipment, which consists solely in the strength to knock a ball forty feet farther than the average man can do it, anybody can play big league ball today. In other words, science is out the window.
— Ty Cobb

"Ty Cobb, now managing as well as playing for the Tigers, and with his own skills beginning to wane, hated the brash young newcomer and the impact he was having on the game. He demeaned Ruth's talent whenever he got the chance, and from the dugout called him Nigger. But when the two stars, whom sportswriters called the supermen of baseball, met in what was billed as a grudge series in 1921, Ruth homered in every game. Cobb hit only one. The New York Times reported that Ruth has stolen all of Cobb's thunder. Yankee manager Miller Huggins admitted that real students of the game might prefer Ty Cobb's classic brand of baseball, but Babe Ruth appealed to everybody. They all flocked to him, he said, because nowadays the American fan likes the fellow who carries the wallop." — KB

August 5, 1921; The first radio broadcast of a major league baseball game is carried by radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh.

"Baseball on the radio is part of the background music of America. That's basic! In a small town in a barbershop on a Saturday there's a ballgame in the background, it goes without saying. You may be having a discussion of somebody's herd of cattle or some professor talking, where I grew up, about the exam he's going to give, and the barber telling vaguely dirty jokes, but in the background of all that is a ballgame. That's basic. Of course."
— Charley McDowell

1921; Ruth breaks the home run record again, hitting 59.

"Babe Ruth erupted into baseball like an Everest in Kansas. There was no one like him before. No one remotely like him. In his third year as a full time player — that is, his third year not as a pitcher — just three years! — he held the career record for home runs. He went on to break his own record 577 times, and when he retired, with 714 home runs, the man in second place in career home runs — then Lou Gehrig — had fewer than half the number Ruth had. There's never been a disparity like that; a talent so disproportionate to what had come before."
— George Will

"Sportswriters competed to come up with new titles with which to decorate the headlines Ruth made daily. He was the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the Wali of Wallop, the Wazir of Wham, the Maharajah of Mash, the Rajah of Rap, the Caliph of Clout, the Behemoth of Bust." — KB

Don't tell me about Ruth. I've seen what he did to people. I've seen them! Fans driving miles in open wagons from the prairies of Oklahoma to see him in exhibition games as we headed north in the spring. I've seen kids, men, women with a dirty piece of paper or hoping for a grunt of recognition when they said Hiya, Babe. He never let them down, not once. He was the greatest crowd pleaser of them all.
— Waite Hoyt

"He lived fast and loose. He didn't live too long, but he lived while he did." — Milt Gaston

"Having married Helen Woodford and adopted a daughter, Dorothy, he tucked them away in an old farmhouse in rural Sudbury, Massachusetts, moved into an 11-room suite in the Ansonia hotel on Broadway, bought himself a 12-cylinder Packard, and set about indulging himself. In an age of conspicuous consumption he was the most conspicuous consumer of them all. Ruth made more money than any other player, and spent every penny of it, Like it was going out of style, a teammate remembered, and he often gave it away to perfect strangers. He drank bourbon and ginger ale before breakfast, changed silk shirts six and seven times a day, and became a favorite customer in whorehouses all across the country. The boy who sorted through his mail had orders to throw away everything except checks and letters from broads. Sportswriters never wrote about Ruth's excesses off the field — he was simply too popular. You can't boo a home run, one reporter noted." — KB

1921 World Series; The Yankees meet John McGraw's Giants at the Polo Grounds, home to both teams. "The Giants come-from-behind victory was especially sweet for McGraw. His pitchers managed to hold Ruth in check by throwing him mostly slow stuff."

We pitched only 9 curves and 3 fastballs to Ruth during the entire series, and of those 12, 11 set him on his backside.
— John McGraw

1921 postseason; Ruth violates league rules prohibiting players to participate in barnstorming tours in the off-season and is suspended by Commissioner Landis for the first six weeks of the 1922 season.

Who does that big monkey think he is? In this office he's just another player.
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis

May 1922; Federal Baseball Club v. National League is decided by the Supreme Court unanimously in favor of major league baseball, finding that MLB does not constitute interstate commerce under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The business is giving exhibitions of baseball, which are purely state affairs. It is true that, in order to attain for these exhibitions the great popularity that they have achieved, competitions must be arranged between clubs from different cities and states. But the fact that, in order to give the exhibitions, the Leagues must induce free persons to cross state lines and must arrange and pay for their doing so is not enough to change the character of the business. [...] the transport is a mere incident, not the essential thing. That to which it is incident, the exhibition, although made for money, would not be called trade of commerce in the commonly accepted use of those words. As it is put by defendant, personal effort not related to production is not a subject of commerce. That which in its consummation is not commerce does not become commerce among the states because the transportation that we have mentioned takes place.
— Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

"In essence, baseball could govern itself. The players would have no recourse in federal court; the government would not intervene in their disputes with management. Although antitrust laws applied to other sports, they somehow did not apply to the national pastime. The court's decision still stands to this day." — KB

May–June 1922; Ruth is suspended by AL President Ban Johnson after an outburst in which "Ruth threw dirt in an umpire's eyes, stormed into the stands to chase a heckler, and when the home crowd booed him, stood on the dugout roof shaking his fist and shouting, You're all yellow!" Weeks later Johnson suspends Ruth yet again, for using vulgar and vicious language to an umpire.

Your conduct was reprehensible to a great degree, shocking to every American mother who permits her boy to go to a game. A man of your stamp bodes no good in the profession. It seems the period has arrived when you should allow some intelligence to creep into a mind that has plainly been warped.
— Ban Johnson

"Ruth sat out nearly a third of the 1922 season and hit only 25 home runs. Attendance fell off."

1922 World Series; Despite Ruth's off-year the Yankees win the pennant again and face McGraw's Giants in a rematch, with identical outcome. Ruth hits a dismal .118.

Just pitch him low curves and slow stuff and he falls all over himself.
— John McGraw

This has been a tough epoch for kings, but not even those harassed crown-heads of Europe ever ran into greater grief than the once-reigning monarch of the mace fell heir to this week. He hit the ball out of the infield just three times, and during the remainder of the engagement he spent most of his afternoons tapping dinky blows to the pitcher or first. In his last 12 times at bat the once-mighty Bambino from Blooeyland failed to hit the ball hard enough to dent the cuticle of a custard pie.
— Grantland Rice

1922 postseason;

"That winter, at a baseball writers' dinner, State Senator Jimmy Walker, whose own private life would not have borne close scrutiny, lectured Ruth on the wages of dissipation. The Babe was letting down the little dirty-faced kids, Walker said. Ruth began to cry. He would do better, he promised, get back in shape, concentrate on the game again. I've had my last drink until next October, he told reporters, I'm going to my farm. I'm going to work my head off, and maybe part of my stomach, and then you watch me break that home run record." — KB

1923; The Eastern Colored League (ECL) is formed by white financiers to profit off competition with the NNL, luring off Rube Foster's players with better pay.

April, 1923; Yankee Stadium opens on the site of an old lumberyard in the Bronx; the largest baseball park in the country. Sportswriters would dub it The House That Ruth Built.

It is reported on good authority that, when the Babe first walked out to his position and looked about him, he was silent for almost a minute while he tried to find adequate words to express his emotions. Finally he emerged from his creative coma and remarked, "Some ballyard!"
— Heywood Broun

Only one more thing was in demand, and Babe Ruth supplied that. The big slugger is a keen student of the dramatic, in addition to being the greatest home run hitter. He was playing a new role yesterday: not the accustomed one of a renowned slugger, but that of a penitent trying to come back after a poor season and a poor World Series. Before the game he said that he would give a year of his life if he could hit a home run in his first game in the new stadium. The Babe was on trial, and he knew it better than anyone else. The ball came in slowly, but it went out quite rapidly, and as Ruth circled the bases he received probably the greatest ovation of his career; the biggest crowd rose to its feet and let loose the biggest shout in baseball history. Ruth, jogging over the home plate, grinned broadly, lifted his cap, and waved to the multitude.
— New York Times

June, 1923; Lou Gehrig debuts with the Yankees.

1923 World Series; Yankees face the Giants a third year in a row. This time, with their own stadium and a reformed Babe Ruth, the Yankees win; the club's first world championship.

1924; Rogers Hornsby, the "Rajah", second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals, who would average better than .400 each year from 1921 to 1925, and achieve a lifetime average of .358 (second only to Ty Cobb), hits .424, the twentieth century record.

Mr. Rogers Hornsby is the greatest right-handed hitter in baseball. If consistency is a jewel, then Mr. Hornsby is a whole rope of pearls. He has led the National League hitters for so many years that the name of the man he succeeded is lost to the memory of the oldest inhabitant.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

"From the mound Hornsby was a fearsome sight. For his part he never disliked pitchers, Hornsby said, he just felt sorry for them. [...] But Hornsby was too singleminded, too colorless, to seize the public imagination the way Ruth did. He would not even go to the movies for fear of damaging his eyes. When his mother died during the [1926] World Series he postponed her funeral until the series was over, then led his team to victory." — KB

Baseball is the only thing I know.
— Rogers Hornsby

"Rogers Hornsby was at bat, and Bill Klem, magisterial umpire, was behind the plate, and there was a rookie pitcher on the mound and the rookie was, quite reasonably, petrified. And he threw three pitches that just missed the plate and Klem said Ball one, Ball two, Ball three. The rookie got flustered and shouted at him, he said, Umpire, those were strikes! Klem took his mask off, looked out at the young man and said, Young man, when you throw a strike Mr. Hornsby will let you know."
— George Will

1924 AL pennant race; Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators, perennial losers, stop the Yankees cold.

"The phrase on the Senators for years was Washington: First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League. This was at a time when Clark Griffith owned the Senators. They didn't have much money, and less talent, and he said one day, The fans like home runs, and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our fans."
— George Will

"His name is in the record books more times than any other pitcher, in more different categories than any other pitcher. And he was a lovable person. In a sense the whole nation knew that Walter Johnson was doomed to play with the Washington Senators, rooted for him to get into a World Series, which he finally did."
— Shirley Povich

"Johnson was 36 years old and had been pitching since 1907. It may have been a new game, a hitter's game, but he was still capable of leading the league in strikeouts, shutouts, and earned run average. Now he propelled his team to the pennant with 13 consecutive wins, edging out the Yankees by 2 games." — KB

1924 World Series; Senators fight the Giants to Game 7, in which Johnson holds the Giant offense through the last 4 of 12 innings, long enough for the Senators to eke out a 1-run victory; Washington's first and only championship, and Johnson's.

1924; First Negro World Series held between NNL Kansas City Monarchs and ECL Philadelphia Hilldales. Monarchs win after 10 games.

1925; The Bellyache Heard 'Round the World

"Babe Ruth's promises to reform did not last beyond the end of the 1924 season, and by the time he got to spring training in 1925 he was a wreck: 30 pounds overweight, feverish, often drunk, torn between his wife, Helen, who had grown desperate over his womanizing, and a pretty artist's model named Claire Hodgson. On April 7 he collapsed in North Carolina with an intestinal illness so mysterious that some sportswriters speculated privately that Ruth might be suffering from venereal disease. London newspapers reported that he had died. His illness was so severe that major abdominal surgery was followed by seven weeks of absolute hospital rest. Newspapers reported that he had merely eaten too many hot dogs and drunk too many sodas." — KB

It is doubtful that Ruth again will be the superstar he was from 1919 through 1924. Next year Ruth will be 32, and at 32 the Babe will be older than Eddie Collins, Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb at that age. Babe has lived a much more strenuous life.
— Fred Lieb

June 1, 1925; Lou Gehrig plays the first of what would become 2,130 consecutive games.

He was the most valuable player the Yankees ever had, because he was the prime source of their greatest asset: an implicit confidence in themselves.
— New York World-Telegram

June 1, 1925; Coincidentally, Ruth returns from his illness that same day.

"He continued to drink and carouse, and to disobey the instructions of his diminutive manager, Miller Huggins. Finally, when he stayed out all night two nights running, Huggins fined him $5,000 and suspended him. Ruth would not be able to come back until he admitted the error of his ways and personally apologized. Ruth refused, saying he would never play for the Yankees again. Then came word that his wife, Helen, had suffered a nervous breakdown, anguished over his infidelity. When Ruth went to see her, cameramen followed him right into her hospital room. They were Catholic, so there was no possibility of divorce, but they agreed to separate. Ruth's suspension lasted only nine days. He could not bear to be away from baseball any longer. And when Huggins demanded that he not only apologize, but do so in front of the whole team, he meekly agreed. Ruth had his worst season in ten years. It seemed that his best years were over." — KB

October 7, 1925; Christy Mathewson, the 'Christian Gentleman', dies of tuberculosis, age 45. His lungs had never recovered from exposure to poison gas in 1918.

Why should God wish to take a thoroughbred like Matty so soon, and leave some others down here that could well be spared?
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis

1925 World Series; Pittsburgh defeats defending champs Washington. Flags fly at half mast for Christy Mathewson.

1926; Rube Foster, under "strain of trying to keep his fledgling league alive, had grown increasingly paranoid and taken to carrying a revolver everywhere he went. Midseason, worn out and suffering from the delusion that he was about to receive a call to pitch in the white World Series, he finally had to be institutionalized [in Kankakee, Illinois]. He died four years later."

1926;

"The last of the great pitchers of an earlier era, Grover Cleveland Alexander, was only a shadow of what he once had been; nearly 40 and almost deaf, subject to seizures, tortured by memories of the Western Front, sodden with drink. In the middle of the 1926 season, Joe McCarthy, the Chicago Cubs unsentimental new manager, let Alexander go. The Cubs had finished last in 1925, McCarthy explained, and if they finished last again, I'd rather it was without him. But Branch Rickey had seen something in the old man. He was sure Alexander had it in him to be a hero one more time, and hired him for St. Louis. The Cardinals won the National League pennant and faced the Yankees in the Series. Few gave the Cardinals much of a chance." — KB

1926 World Series;

"But Alexander pulled himself together to win the second and then the sixth game. He celebrated that night, and during the seventh game sat quietly in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium, nursing his hangover. In the seventh inning the Cardinals were leading 3 to 2, and two Yankees were out, but St. Louis was in trouble. New York had loaded the bases. Next up was Tony Lazzeri, a hard-hitting rookie of Italian descent best known for batting in runs. Rogers Hornsby, now the Cardinal manager, motioned to the bullpen: he wanted Alexander, hangover or no hangover. Alexander took his time walking out to the mound." — KB

I can see him yet, walking in from the left field bullpen through the gray mist. The Yankee fans recognized him right off, of course, but you didn't hear a sound from anywhere in that stadium. They just sat there and watched him walk in. And he took his time. He just came straggling along, a lean old Nebraskan, wearing a Cardinals sweater, his face wrinkled, that cap sitting on top of his head and tilted to one side. That's the way he liked to wear it.
— Les Bell

"Hornsby met him on the mound. When Alexander told him he planned to pitch Lazzeri fast and inside, Hornsby was appalled. You can't do that, he said, Lazzeri was sure to hit it out of the park. Alexander was unconcerned. If he swings at it he'll most likely hit it foul. Then I'm going to come outside with my breaking pitch. Hornsby backed off. Who am I, he said, to tell you how to pitch? Lazzeri was waiting." — KB

"My father, because baseball is dynastic, always said that his saddest moment in life was that famous 1926 last game of the World Series when a drunk and much superannuated Grover Cleveland Alexander was brought in with the bases loaded and Tony Lazzeri almost hit a home run that went foul by a couple feet and then struck out, thereby winning, ultimately, two innings later, the game for the Cardinals."
— Stephen Jay Gould

It was the Cardinals' first championship, and Alexander's first and only.

1927 Yankees; Murderers Row. Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs.

"James Thurber, I guess, he was the one who said ninety-five percent of American males put themselves to sleep at night striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees... Much easier to do now than it was then!"
— George Plimpton

When we got to the ballpark we knew we were going to win. That's all there was to it. We weren't cocky. I wouldn't call it confidence, either. We just knew. Like when you go to sleep, you know the sun is gonna come up in the morning.
— George Pipgras

"The 1927 Yankees may have been the greatest team in baseball history. Babe Ruth, dismissed as a has-been two years before, was back again with a vengeance. And there was no pennant race in the American League that year; the Yankees hammered out 110 victories. Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics finished a distant second, 19 games out. The Yankees were in first place from opening day to the end of the season, a feat that would be unequaled for 57 years.

"They did everything well. Yankee pitching was masterful: Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock, Urban Shocker, Dutch Ruether, Wilcy Moore and George Pipgras. But at bat they had no equal. They were called Murderers Row: Babe Ruth, Earle Combs, Bob Meusel, Tony Lazzeri and Lou Gehrig.

"He was now one of the best hitters in the game, but he was always in the shadow of his close friend and rival. He batted after Ruth; his home runs didn't soar the same way; he didn't swagger. And when the Yankee front office suggested he make his own headlines, by diving for catches he knew he couldn't make, or pretending easy catches had been hard, he gently refused. I'm not a headline guy, he said." — KB

"The combination of Ruth and Gehrig was not only wonderful in baseball terms, but it was aesthetically pleasing because they were so different in character. Lou Gehrig was a good man, a family man, a steady fellow. The exact opposite of Babe Ruth, who was out of control all the time. They both batted left-handed but Ruth's swing was nothing like Gehrig's swing. But think of the pitchers in those days, who had to face Babe Ruth, then Lou Gehrig!"
— Roger Angell

"For most of the 1927 season Lou Gehrig matched Babe Ruth home run-for-home run, and it was, in part, to distance himself from his rival that the Babe resolved to do something that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier: break his own record and hit 60 home runs in a single season. The public eagerly kept score as the weeks passed and the runs mounted up. Ruth did too, notching his bat every time he hit a home run, until it split after the 21st. On July 8 he hit his 27th, an inside-the-park home run. By September Ruth was carrying his new bat around the bases, to thwart souvenir seekers. When he hit number 56 and an overeager boy ran out to grab it, he dragged the bat and the boy along behind him as he crossed home plate. On September 30, the next-to-last day of the season, and needing just one more home run, he faced Tom Zachary of the Washington Senators." — KB

The first Zachary offering was a fast one which sailed over for a called strike. The next was high. The Babe took a vicious swing at the third-pitched ball and the bat connected with a crash that was audible in all parts of the stands. While the crowd cheered and the Yankee players roared their greeting the Babe made his triumphant, almost regal tour of the paths, and when he embedded his spikes in the rubber disk to officially homer 60, hats were tossed in the air, papers were torn up and tossed liberally, and the spirit of celebration permeated the place.
— New York Times

Sixty! Count 'em, sixty! Let's see some other sonofabitch match that!
— Babe Ruth

"It was generally agreed that no son of a bitch ever would." — KB

1927 World Series; Yankees sweep the Pirates in four.

1927; Walter Johnson retires, age 40. His record of 110 shutouts still stands.

1928; The Eastern Colored League collapses and disbands midseason. The NNL carries on.

1928 World Series; Yankees sweep the Cardinals in four.

1928; Ty Cobb retires, age 42. Lifetime batting average .367, the highest in history.

It will be a long time before the game develops a second Cobb, and then it will be just that: a second Cobb. You've seen the first and only.
— Joe Williams, New York World-Telegram

January 11, 1929; Helen Woodford, Babe Ruth's estranged wife, dies in a fire. Three months later Ruth marries his longtime mistress, Claire Hodgson.

"She cared for his daughter, put him on an allowance, and imposed a stern regimen: no hard liquor during the season, no hot dogs and soda before a game, in bed by 10pm. And to ensure that he kept to it, she traveled with him aboard the Yankee train. Claire Ruth acted very like the mother the Babe never really had, and he thrived on it." — KB

1929; Uniform numbers are instituted at the decree of Yankee owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert.

1929 World Series; Connie Mack's Athletics defeat the Cubs. Two weeks later the stock market crashes.

"If ever there were a source for rueful memories, at least for me, it's baseball. A World Series game I could have seen and missed, and it was a memorable one. Nineteen twenty-nine. My friend Jimmy O'Hare says, Let's go, it's the Cubs playing against the Athletics. The Athletics have Lefty Grove, that fireball pitcher; was gonna face Hornsby and Tyler and Stevenson, and Charlie Grimm, Gabby Hartnett — the sluggers! Speedball against the sluggers. Connie Mack puts in a guy he didn't use all season, an old guy named Howard Ehmke, with a ball that's slower than slow. Howard Ehmke strikes out 13 Cubs; they broke their backs swinging at his slowball. I missed that game; Jimmy saw it. A rueful memory of loss."
— Studs Terkel

1930; Grover Cleveland Alexander retires, age 43. His record of 90 shutouts is second only to Walter Johnson.

Ken Burns' Baseball, 3rd Inning: 1910-1920

2010-03-25T20:44:00.004-04:00

"Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience. That means it involves a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf. Baseball is the game of the long season, where small, incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose; there's no certainty, no given. You know when a season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time, the worst team's gonna win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games: that middle third. So it's a game that you can't like if winning's everything. And democracy's that way too."
— George Will

"Baseball transformed the language: A success was now a 'home run', crazy ideas came out of 'left field', and inappropriate behavior was 'off base'. The game was still fast and furious; speed and strategy took precedence over power. Ty Cobb and John McGraw still set the pace. When the decade began baseball had never been more popular. By its end fans everywhere would feel betrayed as some of the finest players in the game sought to sell out the national pastime." — KB

Bottom of the dead ball era:

"If you look at pictures of, say, the 1915 Pirates you're gonna see a very different kind of face than you see today. Hard men. Baseball at that point was a way out of the mines. This was a way for immigrant Americans to make a career, and they were tough men; hungry young men coming after the established older men. Baseball was played with a ferocity — of kind of life and death, which in a sense it was for these kind of players."
— George Will

That's the way it is in baseball. It's a tough racket. There's always someone sitting on the bench just itching to get in there in your place. Thinks he can do better. Wants your job in the worst way. Back to the coal mines for you, pal! The pressure never lets up. It doesn't matter what you did yesterday — that's history. It's tomorrow that counts. So you worry all the time. It never ends. Lords, baseball's a worrying thing.
— Stanley Coveleski

They have work to do, and they should be sleeping or eating, but they would rather do without sleep, or without a square meal deliberately eaten, than miss a minute of a ball game, even if they go on their night turn in the mill or factory, minus the rest that should be theirs.
— Pittsburgh journalist

"Baseball has been a passion of immigrants because it is a way into the United States; it's a kind of citizenship perhaps more authentic than anything which can be on a piece of paper. Sometimes it was the youngster's rebellion against his father — becoming less Polish, more American by taking up baseball — but it became an enormously important part of the American identity."
— Donald Hall

"Companies of every kind promoted baseball for their workers. Management believed it encouraged teamwork, provided a healthy way to fill spare time that might otherwise be devoted to labor agitation, and taught immigrant workers how to be real Americans. Nearly every industry had a league: railroads, steel, electricity, coal and iron, textiles, meatpacking, automobiles. And thousands of workers came out for factory games on the weekends. [...] At progressive Sing Sing prison on the Hudson River convicts played and beat visiting teams made up of electrical workers, insurance salesmen and stock exchange clerks. I want to go back to Sing Sing, one ex-con remembered, Down here I'm just a bum. But up there I was on the ball team." — KB

Opening Day, 1910; William Howard Taft becomes the first President ever to attend opening day, throw out the ceremonial first pitch.

1910; Connie Mack, manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for fifty years (1901-1950), leads the Athletics in what would be the first of his five world championship seasons. "They were a remarkable team, sparked by the fine clutch pitching of Albert Bender — who was a Chippewa Indian, and therefore known as Chief — and the so-called $100,000 infield of Stuffy McInnis, Eddie Collins, Black Jack Barry and Frank Baker, who led the league with 12 home runs. But it was their manager who deserved most of the credit."

I will not tolerate profanity, obscene language or personal insults from my bench. I will always insist as long as I am manager of the club that my boys be gentlemen. There is room for gentlemen at any profession.
— Connie Mack

He could be as tough as rawhide and as gentle as a mother, reasonable and obstinate beyond reason, and courtly and benevolent and fierce. He was kindhearted and hardfisted, drove a close bargain and was suckered in a hundred deals. He was generous and thoughtful, and autocratic and shy, and independent and altogether completely lovable.
— Red Smith, New York Herald Tribune

"Connie Mack — in the words of Wilfrid Sheed, like a tree from the Garden of Eden — came into baseball in the 1880s. He began as a not-very-good player and like so many other not-very-good players he took instead his passion for the game and, in his case, his brains and became a mogul; a great manager who would build terrific teams and then as soon as they had reached their pinnacle he would sell the players for as much money as he could possibly get."
— Daniel Okrent

It is more profitable for me to have a team that is in contention for most of the season but finishes about fourth. A team like that will draw well enough for the first part of the season to show a profit for the year. And you don't have to give the players raises when they don't win.
— Connie Mack

1910 Batting title race;

"Ty Cobb was locked in a fierce battle with Napoléon Lajoie of the Cleveland Indians for the batting championship of the American League. The hugely popular Lajoie had led the league in batting twice before, and was considered the greatest second baseman in the game. The Chalmers Motor Company had offered a new car to the man who won the title. Cobb wanted that car. But he was so detested by those who played against him that when he and Lajoie were neck and neck for the title at the very end of the season the manager of the St. Louis Browns, just to spite Cobb, ordered his third baseman to play so deep that Lajoie got six bunt singles in a row. The manager was found out and fired. Cobb ended up winning the title by a single percentage point. Years later it was discovered that, in fact, Lajoie should have won: Cobb's average had been inflated by counting one game twice. But both men got cars." — KB

1911; Beloved Cleveland pitcher Addie Joss, after a secret battle with meningitis, collapses before an exhibition game and dies eleven days later, age 31.

"Afraid that their owner would refuse to give them the day off to attend the funeral, his grieving teammates simply skipped town. [...] They staged a benefit game to aid his widow. All the great stars came: Walter Johnson, Smoky Joe Wood, Napoléon Lajoie and Ty Cobb. The game was a great success; they managed to raise $12,931. But it only increased the players' anxieties. With no pensions of their own, or job security or grievance procedure with the owners, they felt powerless. Walter Johnson complained in an article he wrote for Baseball Magazine called Baseball Slavery: The Great American Principle of Dog Eat Dog:

The employer tries to starve out the laborer, and the laborer tries to ruin the employer's business. They quarrel over a bone and rend each other like coyotes. And we are free born Americans with a Constitution and public schools! Our business philosophy is that of the wolf pack.
— Walter Johnson

1911; Grover Cleveland Alexander debuts with the Philadelphia Phillies.

He never complained, never alibied. He was never known to criticize a teammate or call an opposing ballplayer lucky. He accepted his great success modestly, and the many vicissitudes of his life in silence. He was easy to like, and hard to know.
— New York World Telegram

"If Walter Johnson and Christy Mathewson had a challenger for the title of best pitcher in baseball, it was a troubled young righthander named Grover Cleveland Alexander. A Nebraska farmboy, the son and grandson of alcoholics, and one of thirteen children, he had honed his startling accuracy by hurling rocks to kill birds to help feed his family. He was a minor league star at 22 when a shortstop's throw to first hit him squarely between the eyes. He was unconscious for two days, then stricken with double vision. He kept throwing anyway. He was afraid, he remembered, that if he did not he would go to pieces. And after months of relentless work his vision suddenly and mysteriously cleared, though he remained subject to epileptic seizures for the rest of his life. Alexander stormed into the majors in 1911, striking out 227 men for the Philadelphia Phillies in his very first season. He would win 30 or more games three seasons in a row. He pitched four one-hitters in 1915, and 90 shutouts during his long career. He was utterly businesslike on the mound, throwing an arsenal of pitches with pinpoint accuracy. Game after game he'd pitch in an hour and a half, a teammate recalled, no fussing around, no stalling, no wasted motion. Even the men he struck out so consistently liked him. Between games he was modest, good humored, and kept mostly to himself. But then he began to drink." — KB

1911; Cy Young retires, age 44.

1912; Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America, a players' union, is formed. "It had two goals: to rid baseball of the hated Reserve Clause, and to gain a larger share of the profits for the men who made those profits possible. At first they got nowhere; the owners simply ignored them."

1912; Casey Stengel debuts as an outfielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Throughout his career he would play for or manage all four New York teams: the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees and Mets.

1912; Fenway Park opens.

"Great stretches of Canadian forest have been destroyed to print the paper on which people have written paeans to Fenway Park. There's something in its intimacy, there's something in that incredible greenness, there's something in the peculiarity of the way that the outfield wall follows its meandering path from right to left, there's something about the way that it fits so tightly and neatly into the city, not surrounded by endless acres of ballparks, and there's something about the fact that it has been the site of so much baseball, um — tragedy might be an overstatement, but so much baseball sorrow has gone down there that you can compare it to a Civil War battlefield. It is a vale of tears."
— Daniel Okrent

1912 Players' Strike; "On May 15, 1912, at hilltop park in Manhattan, Ty Cobb endured the taunts of a New York fan, Claude Lueker, until after the third inning, when Lueker shouted that Cobb was a half nigger. Cobb vaulted the railing, knocked down the heckler and began stomping him with his spikes. When the crowd shouted that the man was helpless because he had no hands, Cobb replied I don't care if he doesn't have any feet, and kept kicking him until a park policeman pulled him away. Ban Johnson, president of the American League, suspended Cobb from organized baseball indefinitely."

Everybody took it as a joke. I was only kidding that fella and I frightened him to death. But I would not take from the United States Army what that man said to me, and the fans in New York cheered me to the echo when I left the field. I don't look for applause but for the first time in my life I was glad that the fans were with me.
— Ty Cobb

"Although his teammates despised Cobb, they thought he'd been justified. Being called a half nigger was considered an insult too great for any white man to bear. They refused to play until he was reinstated. It was the first players' strike in major league history. [...] Ban Johnson now warned that he would suspend every Tiger from the game unless they all agreed to return to the field. Cobb urged his teammates to give in, and when they did they were each fined $100. After Cobb paid only a $50 fine for the savage beating, Johnson lifted his suspension." — KB

"The more his fires burned the more that provoked him on the field and I suppose one could say that the happy byproduct was the extraordinary baseball that he gave the fans at the time, but...uh, there's a moment when you have to say it's not worth it. I think that Ty Cobb in his totality is an embarrassment to baseball."
— Daniel Okrent

1912 World Series; John McGraw's New York Giants, still smarting from the Merkle Boner in the 1908 pennant race, duke it out over eight games with the Boston Red Sox; nearly every game is close. Christy Mathewson faces "dazzling" fastball pitcher Smoky Joe Wood and the bat of the Red Sox' "regal center fielder, Tris Speaker — the Grey Eagle — a former rodeo cowboy who transformed outfield play."

No individual whether player, manager, owner, critic or spectator, who went through the 1912 World Series will ever forget it. There never was another like it. From the lofty perch of the bleacherite it was a series crammed with thrills and gulps, cheers and gasps, dejection and wild exultation, recrimination and adoration, excuse and condemnation.
— Spalding Guide

Game 2: "Mayor John F. 'Honey Fitz' Fitzgerald, grandfather of John F. Kennedy was there to throw out the first ball. He was a loyal member of the Royal Rooters, a hard-drinking band of one thousand fanatical fans who'd been cheering on the Red Sox since the turn of the century. Game 2 was enlivened by a fistfight between Tris Speaker and the Giant third baseman, Buck Herzog. The score was tied 6 to 6 in the 11th inning when the contest was inexplicably called because of impending darkness. After heated discussion officials declared that Game 2 would not count. If necessary the series would go to eight games."

Game 7: "Just before the game began the Royal Rooters filed onto the field on their way to their accustomed seats just beyond the left field foul line, but when they got there they found that their seats had already been sold. The Rooters refused to leave until they got them back. Mounted policemen had to be called in to drive them behind the bleachers. The near riot in the stands kept Smoky Joe from warming up. It was a rout: Giants win 11 to 4."

When he walked to the pitching mound this afternoon Wood wore a halo, but before three hours had gone fickle fandom was looking about for someone else to put on his pedestal. Wood lasted but one inning, and during that he pitched only 13 balls. They were more than enough, for they produced no less than 7 safe hits and 6 runs.
— New York Times

Game 8: Giant outfielder Fred Snodgrass drops an easy fly ball to blow the series. Red Sox win.

Write in the pages of World Series baseball history the name of Snodgrass. Write it large and black — not as a hero, truly not. Put him rather with Merkle, who was in such a hurry that he gave away a National League championship. Snodgrass was in such a hurry that he gave away a world championship.
— New York Times

"It's a game where during the course of it the emphasis is put on a single individual. Fred Snodgrass, who was one of the great players for the Giants back in the old days — I think it was in 1912 he missed a fly ball that lost the Giants the World Series. When he died, this enormously successful man, at the age of 83 or something like that, a banker in California or whatever, the headline read: Fred Snodgrass Dies — Muffed Fly Ball in 1912. Despite his success, despite his joys or grandchildren and so forth it was this one stigma that was attached to him for the rest of his life."
— George Plimpton

1913; Ebbets Field, built upon a garbage dump in Flatbush called Pigtown, opens with an exhibition game against the Highlanders (who would officially change their name that spring to the New York Yankees).

There is no greater optimist in baseball than president Charles Hercules Ebbets of the Brooklyn club. For thirty years he's been in baseball, and all that time he has had confidence in the Brooklyn fan. Through many seasons of losses and disappointments he has carried the Trolley Dodgers, losing money year after year, when those about him lost faith in the game as a paying proposition. But the confidence of Mr Ebbets has never been shaken. He believed years ago, as he does today, that Brooklyn is a major league city and that it would support a good team.
— New York Times

"The story of the Brooklyn Dodgers is the story of one of the five boroughs in New York. Brooklyn was an independent city to itself until 1898. It was one of the great cities; it was a city with a population bigger than Chicago. But because of the subway, because of the bridges, because of the water and electric facilities the state forced Brooklyn into the City of New York in 1898. And Brooklyn didn't want to be in the City of New York. New York had the tall buildings and this, that and the other, and the railroad stations and Broadway — Brooklyn was just, ah, well they called it the bedroom of New York. But the one thing that they had in Brooklyn was a baseball club called the Dodgers, and the whole borough of Brooklyn centered its love and attention on the Dodgers and used the Dodgers against the tall buildings of Manhattan."
— Red Barber

I've made more money than I ever expected to, but I'm putting all of it, and more too, into the new plant for the Brooklyn fans. Of course it's one thing to have a fine ball club and win a pennant, but to my mind there's something more important than that about a ball club. I believe the fans should be taken care of. A club should provide a suitable home for its patrons. This home should be in a location that's healthy, it should be safe and it should be convenient.
— Charles Hercules Ebbets

1913; Branch Rickey becomes manager of the St. Louis Browns, one of the poorest teams in the majors. "Ricky was a genius at making do with less. He approached his job scientifically, introducing unusual calisthenics, batting cages and sliding pits. He barred profanity and poker-playing and liquor, offered evening lectures on baseball theory called skull sessions, and, keeping a promise to his mother, managed just six days a week, leaving an assistant to take over for him on Sundays." As general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 he would sign Jackie Robinson.

"He was Leonardo in baseball; he did everything. He was artist and scientist and genius of a million kinds: He invented the farms systems, he devised ways of playing the game and of training players that had never before been considered."
— Daniel Okrent

Hitting alone will not win ball games. I want speed on my team, and I also want every man on the squad to know how to slide. I intend to have my players taught how to run. I don't say we will win any pennants, but I do think that my systematic training will be laying the foundation of a pennant winner. If this is theory, it is blamed good practical theory.
— Branch Rickey

No ballplayer can learn to steal bases by practicing sliding in the sand pits. I wouldn't ask a veteran to slide into a pit. I don't think much of this theory stuff.
— Miller Huggins, crosstown manager of St. Louis Cardinals

1914; The Federal League is formed out of an "outlaw" minor league and declares itself a major league. Its financiers "began offering big money to big stars willing to sign up with their teams. They even gave the players the right to become free agents. Eighty-one players were lured to the new league, including Three Finger Brown, Joe Tinker and Chief Bender. [...] But the upstart league was a direct challenge to Ban Johnson, who resented the interlopers just as National League owners had resented him when he launched the American League in 1901. Johnson denounced the competition as pirates and threatened to blacklist any players who jumped to the new league. But to stem the flood of deserting players, he and his owners also raised the salaries of remaining stars and pledged to do better even by average players in the future."

1914; Weeghman Park opens to host the Federal League's Chicago club. Renamed Wrigley Field in 1926.

1914; Eddie Collins, who played second base in Connie Mack's celebrated $100,000 infield, is traded to the Chicago White Sox when Mack sells off his championship team. "Collins hit over .340 for ten seasons and played with such cheerful confidence in his own skills that opponents and teammates alike called him Cocky Collins."

1915; Federal League owners sue organized baseball in federal court in Chicago, charging that the American and National Leagues constitute a monopoly. "The presiding judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was said to be death on trusts, but he was also a baseball fan." Landis permits the case to drag out while the Federal League collapses under financial strain. Ban Johnson rescinds his promises of better pay. (A decision would not be reached until 1922, when the Supreme Court ruled that, as primarily entertainment and not interstate commerce, MLB is exempt from antitrust laws.)

Do you realize that a decision in this case may tear down the very foundations of this game, so loved by thousands? Any blows at the thing called baseball would be regarded by this court as a blow to a national institution.
— Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis

Dear Sir — I don't give a damn to be in the big leagues unless I get something for my work. I see you want to give me a good fucking, but I'll pick shit with the chickens before I play for any less.
— Fred Toney, returning an unsigned contract, 1916

1916; Jimmy Claxton pitches his first game for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Six days later he is fired (a friend let slip that Claxton had black as well as Indian ancestry). "Claxton was the first black man to play organized white baseball in the twentieth century, and the last for thirty years."

1916 World Series;

October 8, 1916 — The withered stalk of the baseball season burst with a crash into radiant bloom at Braves Field today with the opening of the World's Series. The Superbas, pride of Brooklyn and of the National League, and the carmine-hosed Boston Warriors scrambled for the petals of the first blossom, and the entrants from New York started their scrambling a little late. They emerged from the struggle on the short end of a 6 - 5 score.

October 10, 1916 — Under lowering gray skies that finally yielded splashing tears of sympathy for a team mighty even in defeat, the Brooklyn Superbas went down today before the Boston Red Sox in the second encounter of the World's Series. Fourteen innings were needed to establish a final score of 2 to 1, and they were fourteen innings of such baseball as shuttles the heart of the genuine fan back and forth between his mouth and his heels, and every inning was a gem, clear cut and flashing, its colors now blue, now rosy.

October 13, 1916 — The Red Sox celebrated Columbus Day in their hometown by wresting the World's Championship banner free from the trembling, nerveless fingers of the Superbas and throwing it wide to the wind that swept Braves Field, theirs for another year.
— New York Times

1917; Honus Wagner retires, age 43.

The Great War:

1917-1918; "America's entry into World War I was very near in the spring of 1917. Millions had died in battlefields in Europe and Americans could no longer stand by. Baseball was eager to show that it was ready to do its part. Ban Johnson ordered teams to learn close order drill, and the Washington Senators showed off their marching skill lead by the athletic young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But baseball had become one of the biggest entertainment industries in the country, and when war actually came in April the owners saw no reason to stop playing. They argued that baseball should be declared an essential wartime industry so that players would be exempt from the draft. It didn't work."

With an astonishing disregard for the new proprieties and new decencies, the so-called magnates of baseball have proclaimed in both leagues their unswerving adherence to the wretched fallacy of "business as usual". That policy is not calculated to make us proud of baseball as an American institution.
— New York Times

July 21, 1918 — Baseball received a knockout wallop yesterday when Secretary Baker ruled: Players in the draft age must obtain employment calculated to aid in the successful prosecution of the war or shoulder guns and fight.
— Washington Star

"Fresh recruits drilled on the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Brooklyn and Manhattan teams had developed the game of baseball seventy years before. Some ballplayers found jobs in defense industries, where they were paid handsomely to play on company teams. Critics denounced them as slackers. But 247 major leaguers did serve, and 3 were killed in action. Soldiers played ball in camps and on battleships, on fields in Flanders, and in hastily constructed ballparks throughout France.

"Grover Cleveland Alexander served in the trenches with an artillery unit and emerged from the fighting shellshocked, his hearing damaged, drinking more heavily than ever to forget the horrors he had seen.

"Though Branch Rickey was 36 and had four children, he went to war too, became a major, and commanded a unit that included Captains Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. Cobb and Mathewson did not get to France until after the shooting stopped, but during a drill Mathewson was exposed to poison gas that fatally seared his lungs. He would live for seven more years, but his great career was over." — KB

1918 World Series;

September 6, 1918 — Far different from any incident that has ever occurred in the history of baseball was the great moment of the first World Series game between the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox, which came at Comiskey Park this afternoon during the seventh inning stretch. As the crowd of 19,274 spectators stood up to take the afternoon yawn the band broke forth with the strains of the Star Spangled Banner. The yawn was checked as the ballplayers turned quickly about and faced the music. First the song was taken up by a few, then others joined, and when the final notes came a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the very end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of today's enthusiasm.
— New York Times

"The wartime crowd sang so enthusiastically that the performance was repeated at every game of the series. From then on the song was an integral part of the national pastime, though it did not become the official national anthem until 1931.

"The Red Sox won the World Series that year, beating the Chicago Cubs 4 games to 2. One of the series' stars was the young pitcher Babe Ruth, who had won both his starts, including a masterful 1 to nothing shutout. It was Boston's fourth world championship in the decade; they have never won another." — KB

1919; Branch Rickey moves across town to manage the St. Louis Cardinals, stays for 23 years.

The Black Sox Scandal:

1919 Chicago White Sox; "No team played better and few teams were paid as poorly or got along as badly. Players deliberately crossed each other on the field. During infield practice no one threw the ball to second baseman Eddie Collins, Chicago's highest paid player, all season long. Teammate Chick Gandil had not spoken to Collins since 1915. Owner Charles A. Comiskey, 'The Old Roman', was himself a former player but now among the game's most parsimonious executives."

I thought you couldn't win without teamwork, until I joined the White Sox. Yet somehow we won a hundred games and the pennant that year.
— Eddie Collins

"They were abused horribly by Charles Comiskey, who was a man of a small mind, a tight fist and nasty temperament. The climate was too good for it not to happen."
— Daniel Okrent

"It certainly was a kind of have-and-have-not thing. The baseball players were very expendable; if you got hurt you were gone, there was no pension or anything else like that. And they saw people making money hand over fist. The owners — in Comiskey's case he owned the ballpark. He bottled his own soda in the basement! He was making a nickel on everything that moved in that ballpark, and there they were — they were nicknamed the Black Sox even before they threw the World Series because one year he started charging them for laundering their uniforms, and they went on strike by saying Okay, then we won't launder them, and they got dirtier and dirtier and dirtier until the sportswriters called them the Black Sox. And then in fact Comiskey said Okay, I'll launder your uniforms. And then he took it out of their World Series bonus."
— John Sayles

First baseman Chick Gandil, a former hobo and one-time club fighter, now near the end of his career, let it be known that, for the right money, he would be willing to talk some of his teammates into throwing the series. An ex-boxer, Abe Attell, and Sleepy Bill Burns, a one-time White Sox pitcher, connected Gandil to New York's most notorious gambler, Arnold Rothstein.

Who is he, anyhow? An actor? No. A dentist? No. He's a gambler. Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly, He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919. Fixed the World Series, I repeated? The idea staggered me. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. How did he happen to do that? I asked after a minute. He just saw the opportunity. Why isn't he in jail? They can't get him, old sport, he's a smart man.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"Rothstein was basically a guy who never gambled. He's known as a gambler and he never gambled on anything in his life which is why he got very very wealthy. He only put money ostensibly gambling on things that he knew were a sure thing or that he had covered so well that there was no way that he couldn't make a profit. I don't think he really cared about sports."
— John Sayles

The proposition to throw the World Series was first brought to me in New York City in front of the Ansonia Hotel. Chick Gandil came to me and said he wanted a conference. He asked me if anybody had approached me on the 1919 World Series with the purpose of fixing. I told him, Not yet. He asked me if it was fixed would I be willing to get in and go through with it? I told him I would refuse to answer right then.
— Lefty Williams

Gandil recruited six teammates: pitcher Claude "Lefty" Williams, outfielder Oscar "Happy" Felsch, third baseman "Buck" Weaver, shortstop "Swede" Risberg, righthanded pitcher Eddie Cicotte, and outfielder Joseph Jefferson Jackson. Reserve infielder Fred McMullin later demanded in on the fix, making eight. The smart ones insisted on their money up front.

The meeting was held about eight o'clock in the evening. I said, there's so much double crossing stuff, if I went in the series I wanted the money put in my hand. I went back to my room at eleven thirty and the 10 grand was under my pillow.
— Eddie Cicotte

Shoeless Joe Jackson, "a South Carolina country boy, had learned to bat from a Confederate veteran who had learned his baseball from Union soldiers in a northern prison camp. He had hoped to be a pitcher until he broke a batter's arm with a wild pitch. Jackson could neither read nor write, but he could hit; .408 in his rookie year, .356 lifetime — the third highest average in history. His home runs were called Saturday Specials because most of the textile workers' games in which he got his start were played on Saturdays, and he hit them with a special 48 ounce bat, Black Betsy, made for him by a local lumberman from the north side of a hickory tree and darkened with coat after coat of Jackson's tobacco juice. As for the nickname: He was said once to have been spotted in the minors playing in his socks when new shoes proved too tight."

The greatest natural hitter I ever saw.
— Ty Cobb

In two years he had risen from a poor mill boy to the rank of a player in the major leagues. The ignorant mill boy had become the hero of millions. Out on the hot prairies teams of Joe Jacksons battled desperately with the Ty Cobbs. There came a day when a crook spread money before this ignorant idol, and he fell. For a few dollars he sold his honor.
— New York World

1919 World Series; The White Sox were heavy favorites to beat the better paid but far weaker Cincinnati Reds. To boost gate receipts the owners decided that that year's Series would be a best of nine.

"This contest between the Reds and the White Sox is something that is concentrating the nation's attention and its faith; what was unsaid was the horror that existed in so many minds as the baseball establishment watched the Series being thrown. It was visible from the very first pitch, first game, when the signal was put in, when Eddie Cicotte hit the first batter, and that was the signal to the gamblers that the fix had worked. The only thing the gamblers did wrong with that series, from their own perspective, is that they made the mistake of letting the Reds win the first game, because that drove the odds down, and if the White Sox — the Black Sox — had won the first game Rothstein and his cohort would've made a hell of a lot more money.
[...]
"Everybody in the game knew it was happening. Nobody was even pretending that it wasn't happening. No one was admitting it out loud for the public. How could you admit it for the public? What would that mean?
[...]
"Ring Lardner, who was covering the series, he would walk up and down the train singing: I'm forever blowing ball games, pretty ball games in the air. And the players all knew what he was saying and they were seething with rage. [Ailing] Christy Mathewson sat in the press box with Hughie Fullerton, the great Chicago baseball writer, and Fullerton said I want you to point out to me things that aren't kosher, the plays that look like these guys are not trying their hardest, and Mathewson had a string of them throughout the series. It wasn't subtle."
— Daniel Okrent

There is no alibi for Cicotte. He pitched a great game, a determined game, and one that would have won nine times out of ten, but he brought the defeat crashing down upon his own head by trying to do all the defensive work. He made the wild throw that gave the Reds their opening, the only real one they had, and he followed that up by grabbing a ball thrown from the outfield and deflecting it past the catcher. A high fly to left blown by the wind over the head of Jackson, who was playing close in, followed, and Chicago was beaten.
— Hugh Fullerton, on Game 4

After the game was over I went up to my room; I was ill. I was sick all night. Felsch was in the room with me. I believe I discussed the matter with him and said, Happy, it'll never be done again. I don't believe he even answered me.
— Eddie Cicotte

They aren't hitting. I don't know what's the matter. But I do know that something's wrong with my gang. The bunch I had fighting in August for the pennant would've trimmed this Cincinnati bunch without a struggle. The bunch I have now couldn't beat a high school team.
— White Sox manager Kid Gleason

"Game 8 would be held in Chicago and Lefty Williams was scheduled to pitch. Humiliated by his poor play, and angered at not being paid all the money he was owed, he was now determined more than ever to win. But the night before the game, gamblers sent by Arnold Rothstein came to his room and threatened to harm his wife if he did not cooperate."

The Cincinnati Reds are the champions of the world. There'll be a great deal written about the World Series; there'll be a whole lot of inside stuff that never will be printed. The truth will remain that the team that was the hardest working won. The team which had the ability and individuality was beaten. The fact is, the Series was lost in the first game.
— Hugh Fullerton

Winter 1919; "In an article for the New York World Hugh Fullerton suggested that the Series had been fixed. The baseball establishment was outraged." American League President Ban Johnson, who hated Charles Comiskey, pursues the case for almost a year.

There's always some scandal of some kind following some big sporting event like the World Series. These yarns are manufactured out of whole cloth and grow out of bitterness due to losing wagers. I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent World Series on the level, and I would be the first to want information to the contrary. I would give $20,000 to anyone unearthing any information to that effect.
— Charles A. Comiskey

Sept 1920; Eight players are indicted by a grand jury. Eddie Cicotte and Joe Jackson give sworn confessions. All are suspended, ending the White Sox' 1920 pennant bid. Rothstein is exonerated of any blame.

October 7, 1920 — Fix these faces in your memory. These are the White Sox players who committed the astounding and contemptible crime of selling out the baseball world. They will be remembered from now on only for the depths of depravity to which they could sink.
— The Sporting News

Professional baseball is in a bad way, not so much because of the Chicago scandal, as because that scandal has provoked it to bringing up all the rumors and suspicions of years past. The general effect is to wrinkle the noses of fans, who will quit going to ball games if they get the impression that this sort of thing has been going on underground for years.
— New York Times

Nov 1920; The owners dissolve the old national commission that oversaw the game and replace it with a single independent Commissioner, vested with extraordinary powers, and appoint to the post Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge "with a reputation for willful independence equaled only by his flair for self promotion".

"Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was brought in as an authority figure — certainly looked the part, with his great granite face, shock of white hair; looked like Jupiter in a very bad mood."
— George Will

Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy. It is his training field for life work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more: You have planted suspicion of all things in his heart.
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis

"Will Rogers used to say that, You know, they needed a commissioner and they looked down the first base line and there was this old guy who was always sitting there so they decided to give him the job. The real reason they gave him the job is that he had found exactly what the owners wanted him to find in an antitrust lawsuit when he was a sitting federal judge, with the Federal League. But he surprised them. He ran the game as an absolute autocrat, but in terms of being beyond reach and beyond reproach and doing what he thought was right for the game, he did what one could say could never be done in baseball and hasn't been done since: He could make the owners follow him."
— Daniel Okrent

"Judge Landis is considered the savior of baseball by many people. I think he was what the political people considered him, which was a showboat judge. He's the kind of guy who gets a lot of headlines and then all his decisions are overturned. And he found the perfect place, which was in baseball where they said, There is no overturning your decision, you're the absolute commissioner for life, we can't fire you, you are the final word."
— John Sayles

Mar 1921; Landis places all eight players on the ineligible list for the 1921 season.

Aug 1921; All eight players are acquitted of conspiracy charges by a jury after the transcripts of Cicotte's and Jackson's confessions mysteriously vanish from the court file. Commissioner Landis immediately bans the eight men for life.

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.
— Kenesaw Mountain Landis

"Had he any sense of the consequences there's no way that he would have taken part in that. But I don't think that anyone could guess that a man as basically simple as Jackson could've known, really, what it meant, what he was doing. His livelihood was taken away after the 1920 season and with it really his life. He lived another thirty years but not very happily."
— Daniel Okrent

"Joe Jackson played outlaw baseball in south Georgia for a time, then ran a liquor store in Greenville, South Carolina. Ty Cobb once came in for a fifth of bourbon. Jackson did not seem to recognize his old rival. Cobb finally asked, Don't you know me, Joe? Sure, I know you, Ty, Jackson answered, I just didn't think anyone I used to know up there wanted to recognize me again."

"Arnold Rothstein moved on to bootlegging, drug peddling and labor racketeering, and was eventually shot to death by a rival gambler whom he had accused of fixing a poker game."

A game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics.
— William Howard Taft, 1910

Ken Burns' Baseball, 2nd Inning: 1900-1910

2010-02-10T01:29:00.011-05:00

"If you ask me, electric football is a metaphor for America. Always shaking, always noisy, never really knowing where it's going. Heh heh...Wait a minute...America's nothing like electric football! It's just a stupid game that doesn't even work. Get that camera off me! You heard me! Get your documentary-making butt outta here!"

— Ken Burns' Electric Football, Episode 17, "This Game Sucks" (The Critic)

"Major league baseball entered the twentieth century in trouble, beset by declining attendance, rowdyism, unhappy players, and feuding, greedy club owners, but then divided itself in two, cleaned itself up, and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The World Series began, and season after season more than five million fans filled stadiums to see their heroes play, and countless millions more, who had never been lucky enough to watch them in person, followed their every move in the sports pages. [...] Between 1900 and 1910 country boys and immigrants' sons and factory workers and streetwise toughs played on thousands of teams in hundreds of leagues from Maine to California. For the first time big league scouts began to travel the countryside on the lookout for future stars. Sportswriters called them ivory hunters. It would be an era that placed a premium on pitching and speed, in which runs were assembled slowly, one base at a time. It would see one pitcher win 41 games in a single season and the hardest hitting team hit just 16 home runs." (KB)

The dead ball era:

"The idea of going to the ballpark, say in 1900, was that the urban masses would get a taste of country pastoral air, that their lungs would expand by cheering, and nonsense like this. Baseball grew in the cities. It is an outgrowth of gambling, it's an outgrowth of crookedness, it's an outgrowth of drinking. It's a roistering, boisterous event. It is as wild as the Wild West."
— John Thorn

What's the matter with these National League magnates? What a shame it is that the greatest of sports should be in the hands of such a malodorous gang as these magnates have proven themselves to be on more than one occasion. League meetings are characterized by mudslinging, brawling, corruption, breaches of confidence, dishonorable conspiracies and threats of personal violence.
— Sporting News, 1899

"Players like Waddell, with their drinking, with their bad acting, with their inability to take their profession seriously, they came to baseball in its early years in very large numbers because baseball, though popular, was outside social norms. The instability of a career where you might work for a year or two and then be gone, the jumping from team to team, seemed to be suited toward individuals who couldn't fit as well in the rest of society. Now, it helped, in the case of Rube Waddell and many of these other sociopathic figures, that in addition to being sociopaths they also had incredibly strong arms or very good batting eyes."
— Daniel Okrent

1897; Debut of George Edward "Rube" Waddell, who "may have been the strangest man ever to play in the big leagues. A farmer's son from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, he possessed a fastball fearsome enough, and a curve wicked enough, to lead the American League in strikeouts for six straight years, and to outpitch Cy Young for 20 innings. But it was his personality that most people remembered. He poured ice water on his arm before he pitched, because, he said, otherwise he'd burn up the catcher's glove. And when he won a game he sometimes turned cartwheels on the mound. He drank too much; the Sporting News called him the 'sousepaw'. And he couldn't quite remember how many women he'd married. Between seasons Waddell wrestled alligators, and toured in a vaudeville melodrama. On the field his attention tended to wander; opponents could break his concentration by holding up puppies or bright shiny toys. He loved fires, and when a fire bell clanged he had to be restrained from leaving the game to chase the fire engine. Exasperated teammates and opposing players never knew what he'd do next, but fans loved him."

"One of the crosses that Connie Mack had to bear was Rube Waddell of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. When he went to sign Rube to his first contract he was met at the station in Punxsutawney by all the town leaders as he and Rube were about to get on the train, and Mack was terrified that they had come to tell Rube not to sign for so little money or that they wanted to keep him for the local team. One of them stepped forward and said, 'Mr Mack, we're here to thank you for getting him off of our hands.'"
— Daniel Okrent

Sunday would come and the little park would be packed way before game time, everybody wanting to see the great Rube Waddell pitch. Nowhere to be found! Manager'd be having a fit. And then just a few minutes before the game time there'd be a commotion in the grandstand — you'd hear people laughing and yelling, "Here comes Rube! Here comes Rube!" And there he'd come right through the stands. He'd jump down onto the field, cut across the infield to the clubhouse, taking off his shirt as he went, and in about three minutes — he never wore any underwear — he'd run back out in uniform and yell, "All right let's get 'em!"
— Sam Crawford

"He began that year (1903) sleeping in a firehouse in Camden, New Jersey, and ended it tending bar in a saloon in Wheeling, West Virginia. In between those events he won 22 games for the Philadelphia Athletics, played left end for the Business Men's Rugby Football Club of Grand Rapids, Michigan, toured the nation in a melodrama called The Stain of Guilt, courted, married and became separated from May Wynne Skinner of Lynn, Massachusetts, saved a woman from drowning, accidentally shot a friend through the hand, and was bitten by a lion."
— Lee Allen

"In 1904 Waddell struck out 349 batters, a record for American League lefthanders that still stands. But he was just too hard to handle. Although he was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball, his unreliability infuriated his teammates, and he was driven out of the big leagues and then out of the minors. Waddell contracted tuberculosis helping victims of a flood and died on April 1, 1914, at the age of 37." — KB

"At the turn of the century, major league veterans often refused even to speak to new players. Once, early in his career, a shy young outfielder dared compliment a New York Giant for hitting a home run. 'Nice hit,' he said. The veteran answered, 'Go to hell.' The young player was Johannes Peter Wagner — Honus Wagner — on his way to becoming the greatest player in the National League."

1900; Honus Wagner debuts with the Pittsburgh Pirates; remains a Pirate for 18 years, hits over .300 15 seasons in a row, steals 722 bases, and sets league records for at-bats and number of games played that stand for four decades. "He had a powerful build. His five foot eleven inch two hundred pound frame, it was said, featured a massive chest that might have come from a barrel-maker's shop, and shoulders broad enough to serve dinner on. His legs were badly bowed, but he had huge hands and arms so long opposing players swore he could tie his shoes without bending over. Nothing seemed to get past him, and he threw so hard to first base that pebbles, scooped up as he fielded grounders, were said to arrive along with the ball."

If a man with a voice loud enough to make himself heard all over the United States should stand on top of Pike's Peak and ask, "Who is the greatest ball player?" untold millions of Americans would shout, "Wagner!"
— U.S. Fullerton, American Magazine

No one ever saw anything graceful or picturesque about Wagner on the diamond. His movements have been likened to the gambols of a caracoling elephant. He's so ungainly and so bowlegged that when he runs his limbs seem to be moving in a circle after the fashion of a propeller. But he could run like the wind.
— New York American

And it turned out that ol' Honus was the best third baseman in the league. He was also the best first baseman, the best second baseman, the best shortstop and the best outfielder. That was in fielding. And since he lead the league in batting 8 times between 1900 and 1911, you know that he was the best hitter too. As well as the best baserunner.
— Tommy Leach

1900; Christy Mathewson, the 'Christian Gentleman', debuts with the New York Giants.

Matty was without a peer. He had a greater variety of stuff than any pitcher I ever knew or handled. His fastball was the equal of Walter Johnson's, or Amos Rusie's. He had the fadeaway down to perfection, and he used his knowledge of batsmen to greater effect than any twirler in the game. He possessed wonderful control, remarkable fielding ability, and was one of the finest sportsmen the game has ever known.
— John McGraw

Mathewson was the greatest pitcher who ever lived. It was wonderful to watch him pitch, when he wasn't pitching against you.
— Connie Mack

"He took a scientific approach to his work, carefully cataloging his pitches. His fastball could arrive with an inward, an outward, or an upward shoot, he once explained. He also threw a slowball, a drop curve, an out curve, a rise ball, a spitball, and the fallaway, what pitchers later called the screwball." — KB

The fallaway, which I have used, if I may be pardoned for saying so, with greater effectiveness than any other pitcher, is an exceptionally slow ball and calculated to deceive the greatest batter. As it rushes toward him it looks like a fast high ball. Six feet from him when it begins to drop it has the appearance of a slow drop ball. And then as he swings, it is traveling in two directions at once.
— Christy Mathewson

"Christy Mathewson was Frank Merriwell in the flesh. He was so virtuous he would not give interviews to sportswriters who he heard cheated on their wives."
— Studs Terkel

"Small boys had admired other players. They worshipped Christy Mathewson. He was the perfect hero for his age. He seemed to have sprung from the pages of the dime baseball novels American boys now devoured. Sportswriters and fans across the country called him the Christian Gentleman. No one did more to improve the reputation of the baseball player, and he did it with style." — KB

1900; Byron Bancroft "Ban" Johnson, who had taken over a struggling minor league circuit called the Western League in 1894 and made it a financial success, changes the name to the American League and begins to talk of moving East, to challenge the big city monopoly of Albert Goodwill Spalding's troubled National League. "He promised honest baseball, cheaper ticket prices, and a wholesome, family atmosphere."

If we had waited for the National League to do something for us, we would have remained a minor league forever. The American League will be the principal organization of the country within a very short time. Mark my prediction.
— Ban Johnson, Feb 1901

Ban Johnson never missed an opportunity to make a speech. It was always the same speech, all about how he, singlehanded and alone, had made baseball a gentleman's sport, and it must be kept forever clean because sportsmanship spoke from the heart of America, and he would lay down his life to save our beloved nation. At which he would begin to cry.
— Baseball Digest

1901; The American League declares itself a major league. Spalding balks.

"By the end of the 1902 season even Spalding's Guide to Baseball admitted that the American League has more star players and can furnish a better article of baseball than the National League." — KB

1901; Hot dogs are introduced to the ballpark at a New York Giants game by concessionaire Harry M Stevens.

1902; John McGraw, who had jumped to the new AL club in Baltimore the previous year, is suspended by Ban Johnson for abusing an umpire. In retaliation McGraw quits the AL midseason to become player-manager of the NL New York Giants, where he would stay for thirty years.

It was an important part of McGraw's great capacity for leadership that he would take kids out of the coal mines and out of the wheat fields and make them walk and talk and chatter and play ball with the look of eagles.
— Heywood Broun

You couldn't come around and second guess McGraw's players in his presence without having a fight on your hands. He stood up for us at all times. We always called him Mr McGraw, never John or Mac, always Mr McGraw.
— Chief Meyers

McGraw's very walk across the field in a hostile town was a challenge to the multitude, and the ferocity of McGraw's teams aroused such resentment on the road that he routinely demanded police protection against irate fans.
— Grantland Rice

"He was profane, pugnacious, unrelenting. No one made a move on the field without his consent. McGraw was said once to have fined a player for hitting a home run, that drove in two runs, because he had ordered him to bunt."
— KB

The main idea is to win. — John McGraw

1902; Andrew "Rube" Foster debuts with the Negro league Chicago Union Giants at pitcher; the nickname he earned by defeating, in his rookie year, the great Rube Waddell. "John McGraw himself quietly hired Foster to show the New York Giant pitching staff what he knew. Christy Mathewson is said to have learned to throw his celebrated fadeaway from Rube Foster." In 1920 Foster would organize the Negro National League.

Baseball is the most popular sport in this country. In every hamlet, town and city may be the future Rube Fosters. Romping over corner lots, batting, pitching, and learning how to play the game. Organize your team!
— W. E. B. Du Bois

1903; National League owners sue for peace and formally recognize the American League; thus established are two, separate but equal, major leagues, both retaining the Reserve Clause and neither admitting representation for the players.

October 1, 1903; First game of the first World Series, NL Pittsburgh Pirates v. AL Boston Pilgrims/Americans (predecessor to the Red Sox). Cy Young starts Game One for Boston. Honus Wagner's Pirates lose the series 5-3.

That was probably the wildest series ever played. Arguing all the time between the teams, between the players and the umpires, and especially between the players and the fans. That's the truth. The fans were part of the game in those days. They'd pour right out onto the field and argue with the players and the umpires. It was sorta hard to keep the game going sometimes, to say the least. [...] I think those Boston fans actually won that series for the Pilgrims. We beat them three out of the first four games, and then they'd start singing that damn Tessie song. You could hardly play ball they were singing Tessie so damn loud. Only instead of singing "Tessie, I love you madly", they'd sing special lyrics, like when Honus Wagner came to bat they'd sing, "Honus, why do you hit so badly?" Sort of got on your nerves after a while, and before we knew what had happened we'd lost the series.
— Tommy Leach

1904; Upon winning the NL pennant, John McGraw "took an especially sweet revenge on Ban Johnson. Rather than have anything to do with the league that had suspended him, he simply refused to play the Boston Pilgrims for the championship. There was no World Series in 1904."

1905; The Abner Doubleday myth. "Spalding was determined to prove that baseball was an exclusively American invention, the brainchild of some ingenious American lad. He appointed a commission to prove it, but two years of research turned up almost nothing. Then, in 1905, a letter arrived from a frail old man who claimed that General Abner Doubleday had invented baseball as boy in Cooperstown, New York, one afternoon in 1839. It wasn't true. But it was just what Spalding had been looking for. It proved, he said, that baseball truly was the national game. Played by Americans, watched by Americans, now invented by an American."

"We need Doubleday because as a culture we have to have origin myths. Baseball has no point of origin; it evolved, we know that. So they set up a commission, and they ginned up this absurd story about Abner Doubleday, who, as one writer said, probably didn't know a baseball from a kumquat, but he did fire the first responsive Union volley at Fort Sumter and he did briefly command the troops at Gettysburg, so to have an American hero as the originator of the game seemed very appropriate indeed. It's total mythology. In fact there is no single point of origin."
— Stephen Jay Gould

"Let's not try to find a starting place for baseball. Let's consider it to be the Darwinian product of centuries of movement of people and continents and oceans and something rising from the sea and turning eventually after years of evolution into Barry Bonds."
— Daniel Okrent

1905; Ty Cobb debuts with the AL Detroit Tigers. "He liked sentimentality in his opponents because he had none himself. Baseball, he said, is something like a war."

All across the country fans began to argue: Who was better? Cobb or the great Honus Wagner?

The greatest ball player of all time? I'd pick the Detroit man. Because he is, in my judgment, the most expert man of his profession, and is able to respond better than any other ballplayer to any demand made upon him. He plays ball with his whole anatomy, his head, his arms, his hands, his legs, his feet. I have never seen a man who had his heart more centered in the sport than Cobb has when he's playing. I believe Cobb would continue to play ball if he were charged something for the privilege, and if the only spectator were the groundskeeper.
— Charles Comiskey

Baseball is a redblooded sport for redblooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.
— Ty Cobb

"Ty Cobb is one of the great natural forces of baseball. He is testament to how far you can get simply through will. I don't think Ty Cobb had tremendous tremendous natural ability, I don't think he would be a great athlete today. But his intensity, his drive was unparalleled. Cobb was pursued by demons from his childhood, from his parentage, from his racial consciousness, and he took out all of his aggressions on the playing field. Everyone was his enemy. It was easy for Cobb to play the game of baseball as if it were the game of life, and it was a violent struggle every day, 154 games a year."
— John Thorn

My father had his head blown off when I was eighteen years old by a member of my own family [his mother]. I didn't get over that. I've never gotten over it.
— Ty Cobb

Every rookie gets a little hazing but most of them just take it and laugh. Cobb took it the wrong way. He came up with an antagonist attitude which, in his mind, turned any little razzing into a life and death struggle. He always figured everybody was ganging up on him. He came up from the South and he was still fighting the Civil War. As far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees before he even met us.
— Sam Crawford

Sure I fought. I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me. Tried every dirty trick to cut me down, but I beat the bastards and left 'em in the ditch.
— Ty Cobb

"A man of such fierce determination to play that one time, in an exhibition game in Toledo, Ohio — he had tonsillitis — he went and had his tonsils out by a quack, who was later sent to an insane asylum, without anesthetics. Played later that day."
— George Will

"He developed ulcers, took to sleeping with a revolver under his pillow, and soon began to display an obsessive animosity toward blacks. One day when a black groundskeeper tried to shake his hand Cobb slapped him, chased him into the dugout, then tried to strangle the man's wife when she came to his aid. And when Cobb's teammates pulled him off her, he tried to punch them too."
— KB

If I hadn't been determined to outdo the other fella at all costs, I doubt I would've hit .320. In other words, my lifetime batting average has been increased at least fifty points by qualities I'd call purely mental.
— Ty Cobb

The cruelty of Cobb's style fascinated the multitudes, but it also alienated them. He played in a climate of hostility, friendless by choice in a violent world he populated with enemies. He was the strangest of all our sports idols. But not even his disagreeable character could destroy the image of his greatness as a ballplayer. Ty Cobb was the best. That seemed to be all he wanted.
— Jimmy Cannon

1905 World Series; Christy Mathewson, who had won 31 games that season, "easily deceived the hitters on the [Philadelphia] Athletics in the series, pitching a record three shutouts in six days. Twenty-seven innings and not a single run; the greatest pitching performance in World Series history."

1906; John Henry "Pop" Lloyd debuts with the Negro league Cuban X-Giants at shortstop. Called by his fans the "black Honus Wagner", the authentic Wagner said he was honored by the comparison.

"The 1906 Chicago Cubs are believed by many to have been the best team in baseball history. They moved smoothly to the pennant that year, winning 116 games and losing just 36. One key to the Cubs consistency was their infield, the celebrated double play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance. Chicago fans loved them but they did not much like each other, or anyone else for that matter. First baseman and manager Frank Chance, once called the greatest amateur brawler in the world, fined his players ten dollars if they so much as shook hands with an opposing player. Second baseman Johnny Evers was so touchy that his teammates called him the Human Crab, and he missed one entire season after suffering a nervous breakdown. Shortstop Joe Tinker was ordinarily a cheerful man, but even he refused to speak with Evers for two whole seasons after a quarrel over cab fare."

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double —
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."

— Baseball's Sad Lexicon, by Franklin P Adams

1906 World Series; AL Chicago White Sox, called the "Hitless Wonders" because the team averaged just .230 and hit only 7 home runs all season, upset the heavily favored NL Chicago Cubs. "No one had counted on the superb pitching of White Sox ace, Ed Walsh, master of the spitball."

Big Ed Walsh, oh brother! You talk about spitballs — I think that the ball disintegrated and got back together when the catcher got hold of it. I think when it went past the plate it was just spit going by.
— Sam Crawford

"Ball players have to be able to cope with defeat more constantly than anyone else. It isn't just that they lose four times out of six it's that they have to play again tomorrow, and if they lose tomorrow that's two in a row. In a week you can lose seven in a row. A losing streak can mount up on you so much faster than a winning streak that it's a kind of terror that grips a team. It's like the spooky music that runs under baseball."
— Thomas Boswell

1907; Walter Johnson debuts with the AL Washington Senators.

On August second, 1907, I encountered the most threatening sight I ever saw on a ball field. He was only a rookie and we licked our lips as we warmed up. Evidently, manager "Pongo" Joe Cantillon had picked a rube outta the cornfields of the deepest bushes to pitch against us. He was a tall, shambling galoot, with arms so long they hung far out of his sleeves and with a sidearm delivery that looked unimpressive at first glance. One of the Tigers imitated a cow mooing and we hollered, "Get the pitchfork ready, Joe! Your hayseed's on the way back to the barn!" The first time I faced him I watched him take that easy windup, and then something went past that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him. Every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.
— Ty Cobb

"He was a Kansas farm boy, but when he was found by the scouts for the Washington Senators he was pitching in a league in Idaho, fifteen hundred miles away. The very idea of this scout traveling out there and finding this unlikely league, and in that league finding a diamond, a true jewel like Johnson, represents to me this notion of the game's national spread and national appeal."
— Daniel Okrent

"Johnson hurled the ball so fast that one batter left the box after two swings. The umpire told him he had a third swing coming. I know, he said, and you can have the next one, it won't do me any good. Another batter simply shook his head, You can't hit what you can't see." — KB

There's only one way to time Johnson's fastball: When you see the arm start forward, swing.
— Birdie McCree

"New York writers are determined to make Christy Mathewson the best pitcher, the pitcher-hero of all time. And in that sense they tended to ignore Walter Johnson. They couldn't do this because Walter Johnson surpassed Mathewson in so many ways. If Walter Johnson were pitching for a team that had the winning percentage of Mathewson's Giants there would have been no contest."
— Shirley Povich

"But for all Johnson's skill and speed there was one hitter whom he could not seem to intimidate. A young Georgian playing for Detroit, who soon found a way to get hits off Johnson. Walter Johnson was a kindly man, the Georgian explained, and never really wanted to hurt anybody..."

...It was useless to try for more than a single off Johnson. You had to poke and try to meet the ball. If you swung you were dead. After he told me he was afraid he might kill a hitter, I used to cheat. I'd crowd the plate till I was actually sticking my toes on it, knowing he'd be so timid that he'd pitch me wide. Then with two balls and no strikes he'd ease one up to get one over. That's the Johnson pitch I hit.
— Ty Cobb

1907 World Series; Chicago Cubs come back from their collapse in the previous year's series to defeat Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers four games to none.

1908; Take Me Out to the Ball Game is written by vaudevillian Jack Norworth.

September 23 1908; The Merkle Boner. With the National League pennant on the line between archrivals Chicago Cubs and New York Giants, Giant Al Bridwell drives in what would have been the winning run, but baserunner Fred Merkle fails to touch second, believing the game to be over as hundreds of fans rush the field, and is subsequently forced out, ending the game in a tie. The Cubs go on to win the pennant. Merkle never lives it down.

It is criminal to say that Merkle is stupid and to blame the loss of the pennant on him. We were robbed of it, and you can't say Merkle did that.
— John McGraw

I wish I'd never gotten that hit. I wish I'd struck out instead. If I'd done that, then it would have spared Fred a lot of humiliation.
— Al Bridwell.

1908 World Series; Chicago Cubs defeat Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers a second year in a row. They have not won a World Series since.

"I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis, and I made a historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinal fans and grew up happy and liberal, and I became a Cub fan and grew up embittered and conservative."
— George Will

1909 World Series; NL Pittsburgh Pirates v. AL Detroit Tigers. "For the first time, Ty Cobb would have to face his great rival and near opposite in all things, Honus Wagner."

They met today for the first time, these Cobb and Wagner. It was an interesting study in contrasts. On the one hand was the Georgia boy, lithe and trim as a greyhound, his build speaking the athlete in every line. And on the other, the enormous, heavy-bodied German, the picture of strength and stability, without, however, any apparent suggestion of quickness or movement.
— The Detroit News

Honus Wagner completely outplayed Ty Cobb, and Pittsburgh won. Cobb had led the Tigers to three consecutive World Series and lost all three. He never played in another.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

2010-02-01T13:09:00.041-05:00

It's a Terry Gilliam movie all right. Dragged howling from the abyss of creative death, as per his idiom. Not since the hounded career of Orson Welles has a filmmaker suffered such an epic of adversity, although I think it can be said that the forces aligned against Welles were hardly as outrageous in their cosmic conspiracy. (See Lost in La Mancha if you know not the full tale.) Yet through and despite some nefarious pact of his own — every Gilliam film is autobiographical — the Maddest Python has birthed alive a squalling ruddy babe. Not the handsomest of his children, nor blessed with any especial felicity, but lucky to draw breath at all, and perhaps, in its weakness, to be more than usually doted upon by its mother.

Within the mutable Imaginarium Gilliam comes closest to recreating the architectural anarchy of the subversive Python cut-outs, and I found myself desperately hoping for tromping feet and angels trumpeting from the buttocks. Oh, were this film an explicitly self-reflexive journey into the mindscape of its maker! Like Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Wouldn't that be brilliant? Instead we visit the narrow imaginations of dullards, for the most part. Nevertheless the mood is dominated by essential Gilliam qualities — heedless incongruity and furious whim — beloved by me and yet confounding to the passerby.

The Amateurs

2010-01-30T23:59:00.000-05:00

As in, amateur porno film makers. A small town apparently populated by numbskulls, knuckleheads and nymphos (?) bands together to make a skin flick, for some reason. I was prepared to report that this quickie is at least better than Zack and Miri, just to dig at Kevin Smith a bit, but the truth is the Amateurs came up short in the end. Neither movie has much to offer besides a grab bag of assorted hearty laughs, and while they're plenty good while they last (best scene: the gang holds a meeting in a gazebo, but business is interrupted by the ravenous devouring of corn chips), sadly the Amateurs bag is down to crumbs by the end of act two. Smith I think offered a few more yuks, and was at least more honest about his intentions; the Amateurs dawdles on a lot of extraneous bullshit about ex-wives and film festivals and way too many irrelevant and unfunny characters. Jeff Bridges works overtime, though, to prop up the ungainly thing, and we can be grateful for the leftover Lebowski he throws our way.

Green Street Hooligans

2010-01-29T23:59:00.001-05:00

The crops hit the stiffs
An' the spikes whipped the quiffs
They're all looking 'round
For the last gang in town

I suppose it would be more apropos to quote Cockney Rejects, as closely associated as those particular and particularly impertinent street punks are with the West Ham United's perplexing anthem, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles. In fact, given the subject, the absence of CR or anything remotely Oi! is telling — Green Street is not a UK version of The Warriors. Alas. Modern hooligan firms as depicted are probably more familiar with Fred Durst than Jimmy Pursey. So no points for taste. All the same, and despite the unwelcome presence of the feeble Elijah Wood, and despite the fact that the gruesome little clot does not sustain enough damage to pop his cheeping chicklet skull, this is a passably entertaining movie. I learned something about the social structure of football hooliganery, enjoyed some crunchy knuckledusting for sport, and was actually impressed with the besotted authenticity of one scene of communal pre-match pregaming.

I hear The Firm (1988) with Gary Oldman is a superior treatment of the subject.

Weeds, Seasons 2 + 3

2010-01-28T23:59:00.000-05:00

The sly setup was over by the end of the first season. Then the DEA and U-Turn and a gang-of-the-month started making themselves guests uninvited, the series chalked an official body count on the tally board, the kids found out (oh heavens), and our flirtation with the fetching Ms Nancy Botwin stalled, as these things always do, with a table dance for heroin. The limber trick of escape performed by the writers in seasons two and three, after all the damning evidence against her character (as_a_mother) has been arrayed, is to make Nancy sympathetic anew. We come to realize a truth about her: She is far more damaged by the loss of Judah than she ever lets on. We don't know what she was like before, but without him there as the father she doesn't feel like a mother. Certainly not the rosy suburban mother-cliche that grates in her grief. She's alienated from her community and alienated from her boys; Judah was her connection to Silas and Shane. Andy has become more admirable for trying to step up, to reconnect Nancy to the world, but it can't be his fault that the task is beyond him. With no other family to call on, and as the Botwins transplant to even more alien soil, it's unclear how Nancy will ever be okay.

The Brothers Bloom

2010-01-27T20:09:00.003-05:00

Richie and Margot hug themselves inside Richie's yellow sleepover tent, trying to be small. She traces round and round remembered grooves on a vinyl anodyne. She asks him how many stitches he got and he shows her. They do the accounting. A fall from the monkey bars equals two stitches. How far did you fall? She regards the sleeping bag they once secreted into a museum, to be on their own but safe, to wonder in safety at the contents of the world — the distant condition of childhood. I think of the mixed-up files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler (given to me and me alone by my crush, my teacher, third grade), or maybe Holden Caulfield and his little sister at the zoo, or, now, the last scene in the Squid and the Whale, beholding terrible monsters in their frozen taxidermy, understanding that such things be real... Margot at the flap. Somehow I think also of the end of On the Road and the final unheard shout of Dean Moriarty receding out of experience and into remembrance; a reunion turned final part, unresolved. Nothing to be done about it now. "I think we're just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that, Richie."

The brothers Stephen and Bloom are about the Tenenbaum family business: ostensible adults replaying, reenacting and renegotiating the dramas and traumas of the child. The gamechanging difference is that Stephen is a Great Man. He is capable of shaping destinies and resolving what others cannot. We call that charisma. Wes Anderson is fonder of less effectual men and fools — the residents and guests of 111 Archer Avenue remain mostly subject to circumstance — but two of Anderson's characters are known to bear a touch of greatness, when each gathers himself: Max Fischer and Mr Fox.

Stephen is like Max Fischer well tutored by Harry Lime.

And thus the energy that electrifies Rian Johnson's film, that bursts the title BROTHERS BLOOM into showbiz light, that gives lively meter to the poetry of image and supplies ebullient throwaway decor, is channeled direct from Stephen's certitude in the power of his fiction; the confidence of the con man. To lie is to reshape the world.

Another book I read around third grade, one of the few from that time I still keep with me, is The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald. It is the story of two brothers, a brilliant ten-year-old con artist and his admiring younger, growing up in Mormon Utah in the 1890s (from whence the young Stephen and Bloom, given their anachronistic dress, might well have issued). Call it the further adventures of Tom Sawyer; Gilded Age hucksterism with a Sears Roebuck catalog as the prankster's bible. Stephen's businesslike philosophy, and the Great Brain would quite agree, is that "the perfect con is one where everyone involved gets just what they wanted." Every scheme, then, is a whitewashed fence. These boys, destined to be great men or great fools, nothing less, are of a familiar and favorite type: the youthful trickster, the merry liar, the brash altar boys at the church of America's patron saint, Old Scratch... Tom Sawyer is an orphan, as are the Brothers Bloom; the Great Brain (also name of Tom) is blessed with freckles bestowed by neither his mother or father. You can guess at the secret parentage and benefactor of each.

Credit where credit is due. Writer-director Johnson is as exciting right now as Anderson was nine years ago. Both are in love with old movies (Anderson's Francophilia in particular is ever more prominent) but whereas Anderson gives nod to his influences with the occasional trinket homage, otherwise nurturing his own signature picturebook visual style, Johnson is a true classicist in the dramatic flair of his staging and lighting — old Hollywood glamour reinvigorated by indie spirit. Consider one of my favorite shots. Aboard the much refined steamer Fidele at evening the camera pans from the parlor to the dining deck, gliding past a decorative microdrama that plays out in the foreground: An unnamed man leans in for a romantic kiss, the unnamed woman turns her head away in disdain. An entire story in a moment, placed solely for atmosphere, and the camera glides on. It is Johnson's confidence as a filmmaker that is on loan to Stephen, his bold invention.

I've said on record that film noir is probably the most difficult genre for a director to get right. The Brothers Bloom is Johnson's second feature film. His first was Brick (2005), one of the most original pictures of the decade and among the best works of all modern noir. Johnson's masterful conceit was to set a classic, mean, hardboiled detective noir in a contemporary California high school, mapping all the character types from one realm to the other. It's like one of Fischer's plays, except not cute. And that's the further genius of it — it's the complement to Anderson: ostensible children playing adult roles attended by dead sincerity and all due gravity. And so on we negotiate our place.

Ken Burns' Baseball, 1st Inning: 1840s-1900

2010-01-20T02:46:00.013-05:00

In our sundown perambulations of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing 'base', a certain game of ball. Let us go forth a while and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms. A game of ball is glorious.
— Walt Whitman, 1846

"The first thing about it — and this seems so obvious that maybe we overlook it — baseball is a beautiful thing. It's more beautiful in an old park that's asymmetrical and quirky, but even, and I hate to say this because it might encourage them, but even in a dome with artificial turf it's beautiful; the way the field fans out, the choreography of the sport, the pace and rhythm of it, the fact that that pace and rhythm allows for conversation and reflection and opinion and comparison..." — Bob Costas

"It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn." — KB

"There's so much about the game that appeals to the intellectual and to the psyche; the symmetry of it, the orderliness of it, the justice of it...the fact that it throws off other controls. It's greater than time strictures. In the other sports you have time — you have to play against the clock, and when the clock runs out your chance is over. No clock in baseball. You play until you lose, and if you can keep that rally alive, if you can keep going, if you can keep getting hits you can play until a week from now. Nothing stops you. There is no parameter that makes it impossible for you to perform still more excellently." — Mario Cuomo

"Baseball has nearly all the qualities and the narrative that the country has. It's competitive, it's spirited, it's got the joshing and it's got the intellectual side; the great students of it. But it's also got labor unions and management and gimmicks and promotion and venality...great public fools in baseball and great public heroes...self-serving people and generous people. And it has pride and unity of town and of country and it'll do for a figure for the American system."
— Charley McDowell

It's our game. That's the chief fact in connection with it. America's game has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere. It belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our American life.
— Walt Whitman, 1889

Origins of the game:

Abner Doubleday, according to the myth constructed by a National League commission in 1905, invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.

"Abner Doubleday never claimed to have anything to do with baseball, may never have even seen a professional game." — KB

From cricket and rounders to townball:

The ball once struck off
Away flies the boy
To the next destined post
And then home, with joy
— 1744

A fine day. Play ball in the campus. But am beaten, for I miss catching and striking the ball.
— Princeton College, 1786

"By 1800 townball and its many variations were played nearly everywhere. On their way back from the Pacific Ocean Lewis and Clark played a game of 'base' with the Nez Perce Indians as they prepared to cross the Bitterroot Mountains." — KB

Ball playing communicated such an impulse to our limbs and joints, that there is nothing now heard of, in our leisure hours, but ball, ball, ball. I cannot prophesy with any degree of accuracy concerning the continuance of this rage for play, but the effect is good, since there's been a thorough-going reformation from inactivity and torpitude.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1824

"In the 1830s, on the western frontier of Missouri, ball was the favorite sport of Joseph Smith, founder of a new religious sect called the Mormons." — KB

The amateur era:

Sept 1845; The New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club is formed, "the nucleus of the great American game of baseball" (Seymour Church).

Alexander Joy Cartwright, of the Knickerbockers, invented baseball and spread the game west, during the California gold rush, and all the way to Hawaii.

June 19, 1846; First real baseball game in history is held by the Knickerbockers at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. "By the 1850s New York was baseball mad."

Henry Chadwick, as a sportswriter and statistician, is credited with making 1856 "the birth year of the evolution of baseball" by popularizing the game in the New York press. Remembered as the "father of baseball".

Americans do not care to dawdle over a sleep-inspiring game, all through the heat of a June or July day. What they do they want to do in a hurry. In baseball all is lightning. Thus the reason for the American antipathy to cricket can readily be understood. — Henry Chadwick

Dec 5, 1856; The Sunday New York Mercury refers to baseball as "the national pastime".

1857; National Association of Base Ball Players established. Promotes the amateur game.

The Civil War:

"If there was any transforming incident in the history of baseball, as in the history of this country, it was the Civil War. Play in the 1840s and '50s was not for the middle class, it was not for the working class, it was reserved for so-called gentlemen. Play became democratic when it became portable. It became a people's game." — John Thorn

We were playing ball between the lines near Alexandria, Texas, when suddenly there came a scattering fire of which the three outfielders caught the brunt. The center field was hit and was captured. The left and right field managed to get back into our lines. The rebel attack was repelled without serious difficulty, but we had lost not only our center field but the only baseball in Alexandria, Texas.

Oct 1867; The African American Pythian Base Ball Club of Philadelphia is denied membership in the Pennsylvania Association of Base Ball Players.

Dec 1867; The NABBP bans blacks.

William "Candy" Cummings discovers the curveball while pitching for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in April, 1867.

I began to watch the flight of the ball through the air and distinctly saw it curve. A surge of joy flooded over me that I shall never forget. I said not a word, saw many a batter at that game throw down his stick in disgust. Every time I was successful I could scarcely keep from dancing for pure joy. The secret was mine. — Candy Cummings

I heard that this year we at Harvard won the base ball championship because we have a pitcher who has a fine curve ball. I am further instructed that the purpose of the curve ball is to deliberately deceive the batter. Harvard is not in the business of teaching deception. — Charles Eliot, President of Harvard College

The professional era:

1869; Harry Wright assembles and manages the first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. Relocates his Red Stockings to Boston in 1871.

Every magnate in the country is indebted to this man, Harry Wright, for the establishment of baseball as a business, and every patron for furnishing him with a systematic recreation. Every player is indebted to him for inaugurating an occupation by which he gains a livelihood, and the country at large for adding one more industry to furnish employment. — Sporting Life, 1894

Baseball is business now, and I'm trying to arrange our games to make them successful and make them pay.
— Harry Wright

1871; National Association of Professional Base Ball Players established. The Chicago White Stockings* are charter members.

Baseball has fallen. Yes, the national game has become degraded. At certain match games large amounts of money changed hands among the spectatory. A noted New York club is said to have sold the results of a match. Barred chins and broken fingers may be easily mended, but a disfigured reputation may never be entirely repaired. Once more, abandon the bat, boys, if you cannot keep the game pure. — Henry Chadwick

The aim of baseball is to employ professional players to perspire in public for the benefit of gamblers. — The New York Times

Feb 2, 1876; William Hulbert, backer of the Chicago White Stockings, organizes the foundation of the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. Game hereafter is controlled by the club owners.

Adrian "Cap" Anson, captain of the Chicago White Stockings, "the greatest player of his century". Batted over .300 for 20 consecutive seasons, drove in 1700 runs and was the first player to accumulate 3000 hits.

1877; Scandal! Four players on the Louisville Grays, including Jim Devlin, "one of the National League's greatest pitchers", throw the season. Hulbert bans Devlin for life, and the Grays fold.

Mike "King" Kelly, catcher for the Chicago White Stockings, later Boston, was "the most popular and most notorious star of the 19th century" and "the trickiest player who ever handled a baseball". His aggressive baserunning inspired the hit song, Slide, Kelly, Slide.

"He sometimes cut across the diamond, skipping second altogether when the umpire was not looking. [...] Kelly drank as hard as he competed. Once A.G. Spalding put Pinkerton detectives on his trail and accused him of having been in a saloon at 3AM drinking lemonade. Kelly was indignant. 'It was straight whiskey,' he said, 'I never drank a lemonade at that hour in my life.'" — KB

"One of the great stories — my favorite — is the day when he was sitting on the bench, and the rule at the time was that if you wanted to substitute for a player all you had to do was announce yourself. So a foul ball comes in the direction of the bench, Kelly stands up and yells out, 'Kelly now catching for Boston!', catches the ball, and it's recorded as an out. This is the trickster, this is the villain, this is the fool. He is also a great great player. He is all the wonderful archetypes of baseball wrapped into one, and he also managed to drink himself to death before he hit the age of forty, so that's also an archetype, alas, in baseball." — John Thorn

1882; Midwestern club owners left out of the National League establish the American Base Ball Association (AA). "Its games cost just a quarter, its teams played on Sundays, and its ballparks sold liquor. The new Beer & Whiskey League drew bigger, rowdier crowds. The stands filled with working men and immigrants, not the middle class native-born fans who followed the National League."

1882; Albert Goodwill Spalding, "the finest pitcher of the 1870s", assumes control of the National League and the Chicago White Stockings after the death of William Hulbert. His Chicago-based sporting goods company supplies all the baseballs used in the NL.

"The railroads had Commodore Vanderbilt. Big Steel had Andrew Carnegie. Big Oil: John D. Rockefeller. Baseball had Albert Goodwill Spalding." — KB

A magnate must be a strong man among strong men. Everything is possible to him who dares. — A.G. Spalding

"Like other captains of industry, Spalding crushed or bought out his competitors, becoming the largest sporting goods manufacturer in the country. Newspapers called him the Baseball Messiah." — KB

Roger Connor of the NL New York Giants was "the era's greatest home run hitter", whose career record 138 would stand until Babe Ruth.

1884; Pete "The Gladiator" Browning of the AA Louisville Eclipse (lifetime BA .343), breaks his favorite bat. Apprentice woodworker Bud Hillerich offers to craft Browning a new custom bat: the first Louisville Slugger.

1884; Moses Fleetwood Walker is the first African American in the majors, catching for the AA Toledo Blue Stockings. "More than 50 blacks played professional baseball alongside whites during the 1870s and '80s, but it was never easy."

"Cap Anson himself tried to have Walker ejected from an exhibition game, threatening not to play if they didn't get that nigger off the field." — KB

Ball players do not burn with a desire to have colored men on the team. It is in fact the deep-seated objection to Afro-Americans that gave rise to the feet-first slide. The Buffalos had a Negro for second base (Frank Grant). He was a few shades blacker than a raven but was one of the best players in the Eastern League. The players of the opposing team made it a point to spike this brunette Buffalo. They would tarry at second when they might easily make third, just to toy with the sensitive shins of the second baseman. The poor man played only two games out of five. The rest of the time he was on crutches.
— Sporting Life

1887; "When it seemed likely that the New York Giants would hire the black pitcher, George Stovey, Cap Anson made it clear that neither he nor any of his White Stockings would ever play a team on which blacks were welcome." Shortly thereafter the NL and AA adopt the unwritten Gentlemen's Agreement, drawing the color line in professional baseball.

If anywhere in this world the social barriers are broken down it is on the ball field. There many men of low birth and poor breeding are the idols of the rich and cultured. The best man is he who plays best. In view of these facts the objection to colored men is ridiculous. If social distinctions are to be made, half the players in the country will be shut out. Better make character and personal habits the test. — The Newark Sunday Call, 1887

Just why Adrian C. Hanson was so strongly opposed to colored players on white teams cannot be explained. His repugnant feeling toward colored ball players, and his opposition, with his great power and popularity in baseball circles, hastened the exclusion of the black man from the white leagues. — Sol White

1888; Spalding takes his White Stockings and a pickup team of all-stars on a much-publicized world tour to spread the gospel of Spalding sporting goods and the great American game. Upon return the reception is attended by Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain.

We are up at breakfast early as we are to start at ten o'clock for the pyramids. Camels and donkeys have been secured for the party, the ball players in uniform as for the first time the Sphinx is to witness a game of baseball. After lunch we have photos taken at the Sphinx, and then proceed to play our historical game of ball with about 200 Arabs for an audience. They took more interest in the game than the average Englishman, and did not once refer to it as "the old game of rounders, you know".

1888; Casey at the Bat composed by Ernest Thayer. Popularized by vaudevillian De Wolf Hopper.

1889; John Montgomery Ward, second baseman for the New York Giants, who had founded in 1885 the Brotherhood of Professional Base-Ball Players, the first players' union, organizes the splinter Players' League in opposition to the management of the NL.

There was a time when the National League stood for integrity and fair dealing. Today it stands for dollars and cents. Once it looked to the elevation of the game and an honest exhibition of the sport. Today its eyes are on the turnstile. Players have been bought, sold, and exchanged as though they were sheep instead of American citizens. [...] There is now no escape for the player. If he attempts to elude the operation of the rule he becomes at once a professional outlaw, and the hand of every club is against him. Like a fugitive slave law, the Reserve Clause denies him a harbor or a livelihood, and carries him back bound and shackled to the club from which he attempted to escape. We have, then, the curious result of a contract, which on its face is for seven months, being binding for life.
— John Montgomery Ward**.

I am for war without quarter. I want to fight until one of us drops dead. From this point on it will simply be a case of dog eat dog, and the dog with the bulldog tendencies will live the longest. — A.G. Spalding

1890; The Brotherhood is crushed and the National League swallows both the Players' League and the Beer & Whiskey League, securing a monopoly on major league baseball. The Reserve Clause remains intact.

The Players' League is deader than the proverbial doornail. When the spring comes and the grass is green upon the last resting place of anarchy, the national agreement will rise again in all its weight and restore to America in all its purity its national pastime: the great game of baseball. — A.G. Spalding

The inside game era:

Denton True "Cy" Young, of the Cleveland Spiders, later Boston, is credited with 511 career wins between 1890 and 1911, "a record never even approached by any other pitcher".

1890s; "Two teams dominated the '90s: the Boston Beaneaters and the Baltimore Orioles. Boston, led by Billy Hamilton and Hugh Duffy, pioneered what would be called the Inside Game, but the Orioles perfected it; sacrifice bunts, squeeze plays, double steals. They fought and struggled for every run. [...] In an era of dirty baseball the Orioles delighted in being the dirtiest. Managed by the outfielder, Ned Hanlon, known as Foxy Ned, the Orioles were one of the greatest teams ever assembled."

Baseball was mighty glamorous and exciting to me, but there's no use in blinking at the fact that at that time the game was thought by solid, respectable people to be only one degree above grand larceny, arson and mayhem, and those who engaged in it were beneath the notice of decent society. — Connie Mack

"The ball players, they were from the fringes of society. These were not educated men. These were not men who knew how to hold a cup of tea with just two fingers and stick out three. And the kind of game they played suited the kind of people that they were. [...] They were the ones who devised the famous Baltimore Chop. They would intentionally hit down on the ball, hoping to get a large bounce which would give the runner time to make it all the way to first base before the shortstop or second baseman could even field it. Opposing teams to combat this would flood the area in front of home plate..." — Daniel Okrent

Dan Brouthers, Orioles' first baseman, "the greatest power hitter of the 1880s, bettering .300 in 14 seasons".

"Wee Willie" Keeler, Orioles' right field, was "the game's preeminent place hitter. Asked for the secret of his success, he answered, 'Keep your eye clear and hit 'em where they ain't.' He once managed at least one hit in 44 consecutive games."

Hughie "Ee-Yah" Jennings, Orioles' shortstop, "in 1896 hit .401, stole 70 bases, and set a record in his specialty: He managed to get hit by pitched balls 49 times. Between seasons he practiced law."

John McGraw, Orioles' third baseman, "the most pugnacious Oriole of them all":

The toughest of the toughs, and an abomination of the diamond; a rough, unruly man, he uses every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick.

"He was a man who controlled his own destiny and attempted to control the destiny of anybody who came near him." — Daniel Okrent

The one true American.
— George Bernard Shaw

"Mayhem seemed to follow John McGraw wherever he went. When he got into a fistfight with the opposing third baseman in Boston in 1894, both benches emptied, fans began brawling, someone set the stands on fire, and the entire wooden ballpark and 170 neighborhood buildings went up in flames.
[...]
John McGraw would stay in baseball for more than 40 years, and become one of the game's greatest managers."
— KB

"Baltimore and Boston were wildly successful, but the two teams so overwhelmed their competition that baseball crowds dwindled dangerously for those clubs in other cities... Then a national depression cut further into profits, and the owners slashed players' salaries. Clergymen and the newspapers denounced the rowdyism and scandal that followed the game everywhere, and the owners seemed incapable of doing anything. By the end of the 19th century the professional game was in trouble. It would take a new generation of baseball players, stars who would come to represent the best and the worst of the new 20th century, to rescue the national pastime. By 1900 Walt Whitman and Alexander Joy Cartwright and Harry Wright had died; Ty Cobb and Casey Stengel and George Herman Ruth had been born." (KB)

"The great lesson in sports is supposed to be that you not only learn the elation of winning, but you learn how to lose. There's a lot of emphasis on that in the British attitude toward sports, and Americans have it, too. But there's something very American about being a poor loser, refusing to shake the other fella's hand. He says, 'He's a scoundrel, he always was a scoundrel, and he's even more of a scoundrel now that he's beat me.' There's something likable about that in people...it's bad sportsmanship."
— Shelby Foote

Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.
— Mark Twain

* Predecessor to the Cubs, not the White Sox.
** No relation to Chicago business giant Aaron Montgomery Ward.

Up in the Air

2010-01-13T19:22:00.003-05:00

A year ago I penned a list of young, mainstream American directors of consequence. At the time I thought Jason Reitman, son of Ivan, having made only Thank You for Smoking and Juno, not well enough established to include. Now there is no question.

[Normally I don't bother with spoiler alerts, but since I want you to see this movie as unprepared as I was, and since I don't wish to censor my reaction, I'm making an exception. Spoilers ahead.]

The primary story, about a man who lives divested of all personal attachments, is one female away from boilerplate romantic comedy. Enter female and, to my (temporary) consternation, the setup proceeds to play out in the all-too-obvious fashion, all the way to the hackneyed scene where we endure a change of heart at podium and the painfully inevitable Go get her! sequence that follows.

Up to that point we are forced to make allowances for this routine romance as mere cover for the real story, the arresting and astonishingly truthful secondary story, that reveals itself only after Natalie gets dumped. The heart of the film is a conversation between top-of-twentysomething and bottom-of-fortysomething about ideals and expectations on either side of the horrible gulf that lies between. How rare and valuable this dialogue, this mentorship and exchange. Reitman creates a space for your participation, invites you to see yourself there and reflect.

The tertiary story is the fallout of recession, the doleful ranks of the culled. It's a dozen personal stories that stand for thousands, a black inversion of the roll of couples in When Harry Met Sally. By including their stories Reitman takes on a responsibility to respect the pain of their experience. It would be cheap, in a movie about the moment of loss, to permit Movie Star George Clooney to find love and live happily ever after. Like a massive and heretofore inert narrative lever, the primary story is finally brought to bear: He loses the girl, and not only the girl, but the very idea he ever had her. It comes as a terrible shock and stinging of the unfair — indeed the audience might feel as hurt by Reitman's rom-com deception. Bingham is tossed back into the cold blue sky, plans of a future dashed below.

But neither is this a pessimistic film. In the four character resolutions (including Bingham's niece & husband) Reitman acknowledges all the seasons. At this moment, some people have it all and flaunt it; some people are struggling but steady; some people have come through hardship to glimpse a promising new day; and some people have just been let go.

...

I didn't get fired from my job. I quit because I didn't like it. I couldn't spend any more time being unhappy. I left my work unfinished; work that people are still counting on, relying on me to do. I've cut off communication out of embarrassment. Perhaps I could burn bridges professionally.

The trouble is, I find I can't move on until I put that fire out. There's an e-mail I need to write, for closure...

...Okay, I wrote it. And sent it. The prospect of publishing the above sentences forced me to. Now I think I'll have a beer and watch a movie.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

2010-01-10T00:00:00.002-05:00

With a title like that you'd expect, or at least hope for, something a little more biting. Ah, well. I went looking for redemption for Simon Pegg and I'll keep looking. The guy has an intrinsically funny physical manner, I think because he looks like an anvil was dropped on Bruce Willis, and it left him kinda wobbly.

I'm betting the farm on Spaced.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

2010-01-09T00:00:00.014-05:00

Four good things about this indie comedy, which presupposes that the afterlife for suicides is the same as life, only a little worse. The premise is intriguing and ripe. The location filming in desolate urban outskirts and sparsely littered wastes prompted one reviewer to claim "a cross between the Mojave Desert and Trenton, New Jersey". The soundtrack is courtesy of Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony-era Gogol Bordello, plus a bit of Joy Division; a nice surprise. Tom Waits.

Four bad things. The premise is wasted on incurious characters and a flaky, irresolute narrative; thankfully at least the screenplay is too disorganized to accomplish any moralizing. The camerawork is dull and the intentionally muted color palette adds more boredom than atmosphere; David Gordon Green this ain't. The songs are tacked on, not part of an organic whole — study Scorsese (Mean Streets) to learn how to integrate pop songs into the rhythm of editing. Too little Tom Waits.

This is exactly the kind of movie, like post-Clerks Kevin Smith, that can fool the semiliterate into thinking they have good "indie" taste.

The Good German

2010-01-08T00:00:00.001-05:00

Shenanigans! Soderbergh revives the 40s war drama for some reason...probably because he loves old movies and he thought it would be fun: Clooney as Bogart, Blanchett as Bergman, Tobey Maguire as Peter Lorre. Too bad we're missing a good Sydney Greenstreet, and for that matter an Orson; the obliterated and occupied Berlin that Soderbergh summons to the screen, largely by dint of archival Soviet footage (rubble streets and close-ups of bundled proles, natch), consciously evokes The Third Man as often as Casablanca. In fact I should say Cate is much more Alida Valli than Ingrid, but you get the idea.

I stopped bothering with the plot at some point, simply enjoying the forms and the idea of Bogie saying fuck a lot.

Syriana

2010-01-07T00:00:00.001-05:00

A movie should run as long as it takes to tell its story, no more or less. Syriana is notoriously challenging to keep up with, but if you've hung in there for 12o minutes you deserve to be given an extra 30 that properly connect the dots. How is it that Clooney won the Oscar when, after the CIA cuts him loose, none of Bob's actions add up? Too many pieces of his performance in the final act seem to have been cut for length.

What the heck is he doing flagging down the prince's convoy out in the middle of the gee-dee Saudi desert? What does he hope to achieve — or is he just a shaken screwjob? I'm sure the screenwriter knows, but we don't, and at that point we ought to. We know Bob feels betrayed, but are we really to believe, based on what survived the cutting room, that the Agency's true agenda comes to him as a shock, or that suddenly he feels such obligation toward the prince he's never met? More story please.

Some have praised the film for leaving the viewer as bewildered as the characters by the marvelous snarl of energy politics. I do admire that quality of the screenplay, effective as it is in the overall cast of relations, and so am all the more critical of the mishandled Clooney storyline; where the pleasure of breathless bewilderment sours on suspicion of a cheat.

Run Fatboy Run + Big Nothing

2010-01-06T00:00:00.001-05:00

My high opinion of Simon Pegg may have been premature. Let us hereafter ascribe primary writing credit on Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz to Edgar Wright, since evidently Pegg's judgment falters rather badly outside the nest. Would you believe me if I told you that the great Shaun nurtures a working friendship with former Friend, David Schwimmer? Ugh! They costar in the toxically uninspired Big Nothing (in which Pegg dribbles forth a hideous facsimile of a Southern US accent), followed by Run Fatboy Run, a puzzlingly gutless Pegg vehicle that served as Schwimmer's directing debut... Yeelch! Even more bizarrely, RFR was co-written by Pegg and Michael Ian Black, for whom I also had some regard as a timely comic wit. Is Schwimmer like some kind of terrible infection? An associate offhandedly remarked, upon hearing my description of these two dismal collaborations, that it sounds like Schwimmer-Pegg could be "the Merchant Ivory of shit". Ew ew ew. I don't wanna talk about it anymore.

Away We Go

2010-01-05T00:00:00.002-05:00

...comes front loaded with comedy, a recommended bill of bit performers including the sure-handed Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara, reprising a few notes on stupendously unreliable parenthood from The Squid and the Whale and Orange County, the show-stopping Allison Janney aka Juno's stepmom (and a person of significance on The West Wing, a show I'm not aware of anyone ever watching) as a live wire mother of alarming insouciance, and Jim Gaffigan in a rare film appearance funny for his retiring grumble (perhaps a character of his he couldn't easily shoehorn into stand-up).

Then somehow Mendes blunders into a middle vignette that is just rubbish, as if his compass of instincts momentarily passed a transformer. Oh, my dear Maggie G...you and your brother aren't really good for much besides the perversely infantile, are you? "No, sir," she purred.

After Madison Mendes regains himself and, as if a little embarrassed by the episode, hangs up the clowning shoes in favor of his warmest and fuzziest pair of slippers. The screenplay is all sentiment in the second half, but sensible enough, and we are persuaded to believe well-observed in the way youngish lovers and misfits who've waited this long might go about inventing a narrative for themselves.

A better product on the whole than the mishandled Revolutionary Road.

You're gonna need a bigger budget

2009-12-31T00:00:00.003-05:00

Of all the motion pictures I've seen from all the decades and all the world my favorite is still Raiders of the Lost Ark. Its constant companions are Empire and Jaws; the movies that made me love movies in the first place.

They tell me of a drive-in theater, and I'm not altogether too young to remember the sacrosanct lots of old, but they tell me of one especial immemorial night when the Perseids fell and small Tiberi-chan was parked before God and God lit up with the Empire Strikes Back. Something of that experience — of popcorn power chords struck at a significant place, a ground like to a baseball diamond where intersect the ley lines of Americana — must have been imprinted upon the courseless mush of my wee brain, a signet pressed into the wobbling raw Spielbergus et Lucas, simultaneously claiming and creating a blockbusting fanboy nascent.

Those two wayward sons of New Hollywood conspired to undo the progress made since the late 60s toward a less bloated, more artful American cinema. They invented a more profitable business and restored the imperial might of the studios. In particular, Spielberg elevated Universal Pictures from a third-rate manufacturer of budget and genre pics and television, never respected by the exalted likes of Paramount, MGM and Warner, to the stature of theme park-operating behemoth, which we nowadays take as a given. Studio fortunes in the 80s came to revolve around movies-for-boys, which is to say around me. It was the golden age of creature effects. The wizardry was mostly analog, toolshed cobbling of snips and snails, muppetry and dwarfs, with computer enhancement to excite Atari junkie kid genius. Was I supposed to lament the lost refinement and grit of the 70s? When rallied about me were mogwai, skeksis, slimers, krites, deadites, poltergeists, rancors, rock biters and toons? When I had heroes like Ash, Mad Max, Dr Jones, Pee-wee Herman, Baron Munchausen, Boba Fett, Doc Brown and Sloth? The 70s didn't give a crap about kids. The Bad News Bears, Star Wars and Meatballs are the exceptions, the harbingers, that prove the rule. Spielberg and Lucas oversaw the only decade of great and enduring movies dedicated to being a kid, and they were my heroes too*.

Which is not to say S & L are the foremost masters of their dubious craft. No one has done better work in the blockbuster/fx era than James Cameron. It's not even a competition. And before I consent to hear your appeals on behalf of Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson, let me remind you that all of Cameron's films are based on original screenplays written by Cameron himself. By design his radical fx are always an integral and purposeful component of the narrative, made indispensable servant to the story — never an end unto themselves. I wouldn't say the guy's writing has quite the psychological depth of Bergman, but he has been a student of physics and philosophy (The Abyss is a great underappreciated work of science fiction) and as a disciplined and conscientious showman Cameron is unsurpassed.

And so I graduated from E.T. and Willow to Aliens and T2, and by high school I aspired to become a CGI fx artist (at least prior to junior year when the intoxicating truth of physics re-centered my world). I pored over a monstrous glossy christmas tome: behind the scenes at Industrial Light & Magic. I was too dazzled to be cognizant of the fact that the kind of vigorous, joyful filmmaking I wanted to be a part of was already over, set to devolve into the sterile, routine and gratuitous. A decade of genuine heart had absently bumped into nineteen ninety-too-cool-for-school, and the kids once briefly indulged are now denied that wondrous admixture of respectful regard and frivolous fun. The tail end of the 80s creature movies (...Tremors, Dead Alive, Army of Darkness) petered out in 1993; what Spielberg started with one mechanical squalus he put to a halt with a stampede of digital dinos. Hollywood was dazzled by ever cheaper CGI that yielded ever higher revenues by its ever more careless application. Lucas publicly revealed the already advanced stage of his dementia in 1997 when, to my ultimate horror, Greedo shot first. That same year Spielberg dropped the first Jurassic Park sequel, the Cretaceous Turd, and so embarked upon his ongoing series of ill-conceived and unnecessary misadventures, misfires and inexcusable mistakes. To date: Lost World, A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds**, Indy 4. Dear Stevie has lost his rudder, at least in the waters of sci-fi and pulp; possibly it was eaten by a four and a half foot baby thresher shark. My milk has gone sour.

Cameron went into hiding in 1997 after Titanic, which is a great movie but lacking protein, like waffles. In his absence and with S & L bent wretchedly to the dark side it has been dark times for the blockbuster. Every season they make gobs of money and they stink. Gladiator and the latter Matrix and Pirates movies are only the most prominent heaps among the decade's catch of execrable garbage. But there have been freedom fighters. The original Matrix remains a worthy achievement, and Peter Jackson has kept the whip cracking with Lord of the Rings and King Kong; with any luck his protégé, Guillermo del Toro, will soon produce a masterwork. Sam Raimi (of all people) brought new respectability to the superhero flick with Spider-Man 2, bettered by Christopher Nolan's two Batman pictures and Watchmen. And most miraculously have appeared a pair of ragged knights, somber and quick in the dusk like Picasso's Quixote: two great, invaluable new movies about childhood that will last your whole life. On the shelf where you keep a Chewie figurine and the game ball from a little league glory, alongside the Goonies, the Neverending Story and Stand By Me, you may put Terry Gilliam's Tideland and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are.

Back to the crap. Six months ago the great and terrible Ebert, seizing the podium in a hectic fit, proclaimed Transformers 2 to be the abominable terminus of the Luco-Spielberg Folly. One can divine in the froth of his words Roger's wish that it be so. And certainly one can appreciate the fitting arc: As franchise royalty of the 80s Transformers would seem to have the right to spark the immolation of its kind. But alas (sweet mercy) Roger's wishes are not fishes. Them autobots grossed not quite a billion dollars, and so we folly on. If you paid to see the movie you are to blame.

Avatar is counterpoint to everything wrong with the blockbuster movie today. Cameron back from the Jundland Wastes, a new hope.

...

If my own wishes were fishes and copyright laws were stricken from the books I'm forced to concede the irony that Avatar would end up being the actual last of its kind. Absent copy protection the blockbuster would perish from the earth. When movies become free to distribute and exhibit a producer could never recoup a $200 million investment. Can you fathom donation and patronage supporting the summer movie season to which we are accustomed? I think the era would simply be over. Dino extincto. And you know what? I would be okay with that. To every thing a season.

* As a youngster I tended to assume my idols were just like me. When doing a report on Steven Spielberg in the fourth grade I was shocked — shocked! — to learn that he's a Jew. Really? But I thought Stevie was a Scout, like me... Admittedly thereafter the Nazi villains took on an even more sinister air, and I took greater satisfaction in their melting. I remember also my dad handing me the binoculars at a Cubs game and directing my attention to right field where — Sufferin' succotash! Andre Dawson was black.

** War of the Worlds in particular I cannot forgive. The gentle soul who created E.T. and Close Encounters, our two most humane, hopeful and beautiful pictures about making contact, had made a well known vow never to depict malevolent extraterrestrials. He felt it was a moral obligation, a chance to use the cinema not to fearmonger but to engender a more noble spirit of comity and curiosity. This gesture I felt had been Spielberg's most valuable contribution, of greater significance than Amistad or Schindler's List. So what in tarnation happened after 9/11 and the Iraq War? Spielberg reverted to exactly the kind of huddled hysterics I had long admired him for rising above — reviving our most iconic episode of baseless panic, to boot — in a time of national stress when his former clearheaded example was most needed. He betrayed us all.

Avatar

2009-12-19T03:28:00.005-05:00

From Beggar's Canyon, March 30:

Looming over the entire year is Avatar. ... James Cameron has not released a picture since Titanic in 1997. He is the greatest sci-fi action director of all time. He has spent the last decade developing 3D camera technology and time travel from his hyperbaric compound beneath the antarctic ice cap.

From an e-mail I sent, December 7:

Remember that this is the guy who gave us The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator and T2; he personally ushered in the CGI era. ... I don't know if Cameron is going to start a second FX revolution with Avatar, but he thinks he is, and if I had to put my money on someone it would be him. If anyone can make 3D a viable technology it is him. However, it is probably easiest to imagine Avatar becoming a $400 million disaster. We shall see.

From Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, 1994:

Noble Savage Syndrome. Thrown into the company of a native tribe of any description, the protagonist discovers the true meaning of life and sees through the sham of modern civilization. Wisdom and sensitivity are inevitably possessed by any race, class, age group, or ethnic or religious minority that has been misunderstood. Such movies seem well intentioned at first glance, but replace one stereotype for another...

Charles Stardom, upon exiting theater tonight:

"Oh man, this ain't no Ferngully!"

Thirst

2009-12-15T11:57:00.053-05:00

And here I am endorsing a vampire movie — and it's not even German. Given the sheer volume of bloodsucker cinema out there (Count Dracula alone has appeared in over 200 films, just shy of the record held by Sherlock Holmes) I'm guessing we've had to endure vampire priests on screen before now. Aside from the likelihood that every vampire iteration has been worked through, Christendom does have a particular weakness for baroque portraiture of spiritual confliction. I'm aware of two comics that explore such characters: the American Astro City and the manhwa Priest (both unread by me). I'd like to imagine the premise has been exploited primarily for caustic satire, but apologetic allegory seems more likely.

Thirst...I'm not sure which it is. Which is partly why I like it. Chan-wook Park has been artfully playing with blood for so long the vampire genre is a natural, perhaps inevitable fit. He gives us two principals pacted into a yin yang tug and fuck: the conscientious clergymen tortured by his accidental commitment to a liquid diet and the amoral hedonistic minx who mocks him. The superhuman particulars of vampirism are treated with almost throwaway casualness (of a sudden and without fanfare seemingly normal priest hops off a building), which is tasteful because by now we're overfamiliar with it all; Park knows to just get on with the story. It's a simple story poetically told, as is Park's strength, and not without its complement of twisted humor and kink.

The thing I love about Catholic priests is how much they hate themselves. They do my job for me.

Persepolis

2009-12-14T14:22:00.036-05:00

Moldering in the depths of my queue is a movie called The Band's Visit. Israeli production, live action, about an Arab Egyptian orchestra trying to get to a gig in Israel. Supposed to be good. Positively lousy with cross-cultural pathos. I'll get around to it, honest.

Persepolis also premiered at Cannes in 2007. A French production adapting an Iranian woman's autobiographical graphic novel to hand drawn animation. So I learned about these two stories of the Middle East at the same time, but the fact of animation made Persepolis inherently more appealing and higher priority. A drawing can distill the essence of a thing, disregard the superficial. I know when I see The Band's Visit I'm going to be looking at eight particular Arabs standing around some particular dirthole village, and the specificity of it will be itself a thing of value, but the message of commonality would be better served by images more abstract and general. Better a little cartoon girl living through warfare, unrest and expatriation in duotone and silhouette.

Avatar, preliminary

2009-12-11T17:49:00.006-05:00

I've been accused of not reviewing Avatar in a timely fashion. Seeing as the movie had its world premiere in London just yesterday, and opens in the US on December 18, this is a perfectly reasonable accusation. Therefore I am prepared to put forth an opinion:

Avatar is a load of crap. What, no Ewoks? Horseshit!

Good Night, and Good Luck

2009-12-10T12:00:00.002-05:00

A new theater was opening in the south suburbs, one of these premium joints with dinner and drink service, and the owners had the good taste to host the public premiere with a screening of Jaws. In attendance for signing and Q&A was a stormy Richard Dreyfuss, who upon emerging from his holding area to greet the line of fans threw his cap to the ground, glared with furious indignation and shouted a few unintelligible remarks. The fans clapped appreciatively. To see the Orca on the big screen was a thrill, although I felt the busily dining audience was paying rather too little attention to the movie. Afterwards was Q&A as promised and the irascible Hooper took the stage. We sated customers could not have expected the tongue lashing we were about to receive. Dreyfuss had schlepped first class all the way from Tinseltown with an axe to grind and we were to learn from this vituperative ham that we, the American people who'd come to see him fight a shark, were failing to teach our children the value of our civil liberties and the fundamentals of democracy. Apparently our great republic is crumbling because civics has vanished from American schools and our feckless indifference made it so. This went on for some time. Finally the mic was passed to a member of the indicted audience, hand raised. "Do you have any funny stories about working with that shark?"

He obediently responded with a few anecdotes and left. Feathers had been ruffled. I don't know how they run the public schools in Los Angeles County, but I sure as shit had to pass the Illinois and US Constitution tests in seventh and twelfth grade, and the Northwest Suburban Council of the BSA awarded my brothers and me three citizenship merit badges apiece, so the next left coast crusader to make a pit stop in a flyover state should please be aware that the Midwest ain't the San Fernando Valley.

Lucky for us Hollywood has over the years provided the occasional civics lesson, and when not overly condescending we are happy to embrace the message. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is probably the first to come to mind, but the Jimmy Stewart role that actually moves me is in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, one of several essential Ford films to which I was introduced in a college course on ethics. (The professor happily distributed VHS copies of all films discussed, as if dissemination of valued art should be free.) Stewart is the archetypal pilgrim, come to bring order to the Old West not with a Winchester but with a stack of law books and some crazy talk about the pursuit of happiness; when Jimmy recites from the Declaration of Independence to his gathered pupils I just go all weepy. Maybe it's 12 Angry Men or Atticus Finch that gets your patriotic druthers in a dither.

For as much as he is now a movie star, George Clooney is a television man through and through. So it follows that, to him, integrity in civic duty is a TV newsman named Edward R. Murrow. Hard to disagree.

Clooney's first two films as a director are in love with the roaring heyday of live network broadcast, bringing the spontaneity and recklessness of the 30s newsroom onto the soundstage while at the same time nursing a jaded contempt for its advertisement-driven banality; Chuck Barris and Murrows share a touch of self-loathing, if little else. But whereas Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is all enthusiasm and no discretion the sober follow-up, Good Night, and Good Luck, is as concise and disciplined as if Clooney were not an actor- but an editor-turned-director. (My favorite kind of -turned-director.) The discipline befits the material of course, and I especially admire the restraint exercised in allowing extended sequences of archival footage to do the talking, rather than pointlessly re-staging. All the elements are tasty in this coarse-grained montage, from the journalists' handsome and boozy social scene to the jazz recording studio interludes and period commercials. The creamy black and white set design makes me want to get around to Mad Men in a hurry.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

2009-12-09T18:00:00.002-05:00

I'm a little worried about Wes Anderson painting himself into a corner. Perhaps you are less concerned, given that Anderson has just departed from live action to release his first animated feature, which happens to be the most unique marquee picture of the year and, as an analog stop motion side scroller, runs rather contrary to prevailing aesthetics. Perhaps now more than ever the Anderson brand seems to you a wildcard.

You haven't been paying attention. Wes's world, like Dudley's, is distinctly and marvelously his own, but from the moment Dignan cuffed a bittersweet farewell in the prison yard it has been subject to an inexorable crayon-drafted procedure for geometric collapse. Fantastic Mr. Fox is the squared, boxed, folded and flattened final product; a wonderful dead end.

Bottle Rocket was the first and last time there were open spaces in an Anderson film — the unbound prairie of his home Texas where the gang shot fireworks on the lam. Rushmore came fully framed as a stage play, complete with title curtain, and more and more Anderson has used the edges of the image to frame reality, to ontologically exclude what lies outside. Margaret Yang flies in on her remote control airplane and the boys don't notice her until she's in frame, even though she's evidently standing right next to them in the middle of an empty tarmac. They don't watch her leave either; camera cuts away and she's just gone. By the time of Darjeeling Limited Anderson had perfected the coupling of this principle to the whip-pan for comic effect. In an early sequence the brothers tour an Indian city and, repeatedly, ridiculous goings-on are revealed just off screen. So he's used framing devices to great dramatic advantage, but steadily the dimensions are compacting and the walls closing in on Dignan's confinement.

One reviewer of Darjeeling described Anderson's sensibility as miniaturist. Exactly. The Tenenbaums' dollhouse was cross-sectioned into the diorama Belafonte, then cropped into a row of boxcar viewing boxes and now compressed into slides of life in an ant farm. Unless this progression ends the next Anderson project will be the gallery exhibit of microminiature paintings from Synecdoche, New York. I miss Texas.

That said, Fantastic Mr. Fox is brilliant. Go ahead and put it alongside the collected Wallace and Gromit as the best in feature length stop motion, superior in energy and wit to anything by Henry Selick or the increasingly banal Tim Burton. (Nightmare Before Christmas is a great feat of imagination, but take a fresh look at the script and execution — aside from a few musical highlights it's rather tedious.)

As a kids movie Mr. Fox follows a trusted recipe for longevity: alcohol, tobacco and firearms. And if every instance of the word "cuss" were replaced with the corresponding vulgarity this puppy would be Restricted. Naturally the soundtrack must be owned; the customary revival of a Rolling Stones tune is Street Fighting Man. And with Clooney on board Anderson could be issuing a challenge to Soderbergh in the caper business. Here are just a few of the key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers — can you see how incredible this is going to be? — hang gliding...

Erin Brockovich

2009-12-08T23:55:00.000-05:00

I'm having trouble telling the difference between Albert Finney and Brian Cox.

The Road (2009)

2009-12-04T02:28:00.030-05:00

At the end of The Life Aquatic Bill Murray tearfully pardons the jaguar shark that ate his friend and, in the film's emotional climax, his crew members all reach out to touch him with a gesture of comfort. The moment does not work. Anderson hasn't done the legwork necessary to earn it, such tender and unreserved sentiment. At best we wince with slight embarrassment and at worst we snicker.

The film adaptation of The Road is compromised by too many such moments. The ashen world has been sincerely apocalypted by the production design team, and we mutant veterans of Fallout nod in appreciation, but instead of total immersion into the reality of hell we are cheated by single-setup camerawork and a fatally impatient clip; result is only a little more involving than watching a bonus disc slideshow of concept art stills. And so good performances are left out in the cold. Take another look at how the Coen brothers managed to adapt McCarthy in No Country for Old Men: Pacing is everything. The pauses between the notes is where the art resides.

Brüno

2009-12-04T01:33:00.007-05:00

What makes Brüno a better movie than Borat is not the quality of the gags, which have actually degraded from zany inspiration (the running of the Jews is a bit to make Woody Allen jealous, and Borat's clucking suitcase is comic perfection) to obvious shock tactics (a talking penis haw haw), nor the audacity of the stunts*, which to Cohen's credit are bolder and more pointed this time around. At play is the Bond principle, by which a movie is only as good as its villain, and homophobia in the US and abroad today is far more insidious than the reclining geezer of antisemitism.

The anger here at the ignorant and prejudiced is palpable, through not only the cruelty with which Cohen dupes and humiliates his unwitting participants but also the overall hostility toward the audience as again and again he rubs your face into his freshly bleached taint. Every bit of it is justified.

* Incidentally, fuck Ron Paul, an absurd secessionist and prolific publisher of bigotry.

Sita Sings the Blues

2009-11-26T09:00:00.011-05:00

...

I'm coming around to the stance that copyright is bullshit and all art properly belongs in the public domain. Claim: Artists are not entitled to receive pay for the reproduction and use of their art.

What do you think of that? I'm not well versed on intellectual property law and its controversies, but a certain free culture movement outlet (QuestionCopyright) lead by Brooklyn-based animator Nina Paley currently has my ear. The above logo, her invention, is intended to change our thinking about the commonplace fact that, if you create a work of art that incorporates copyrighted material, the government will silence you. A copyright is a monopoly on a piece of information, issued and upheld by city hall, with the exclusive intent to remove that information from the sphere of free speech; copyright is censorship.

The consequence we live with is an impoverishing of culture. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an actual published version of Jane Austen's novel reworked to include among the sundry proposals and carriage rides a zombie outbreak, is possible because no one holds a copyright on Pride and Prejudice; it's public domain. However, I have no hope of ever obtaining permission to publish my own like-minded novel, Bridget Jones's Zombie Diary. This chapter heading is all I am permitted to share publicly:

129 lbs. (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 4 (excellent), cigarettes 21 (poor but will give up totally tomorrow), number of zombies killed 13

The invention and indefinite extension of ubiquitous copyrighting as a Fortune 500 business model, starting in the mid-twentieth century and becoming more prohibitive every year, has ensured that virtually all creative works made since the 1920s are presently locked out of public use, not a single such copyright will expire until 2019, and all works published today will remain unavailable into the next century.

Let's bring this close to home. Tideland, Terry Gilliam's latest (most?) neglected masterpiece, has been appallingly mishandled in its DVD release by distributor THINKFilm: Transfer features the incorrect aspect ratio 1.77:1, which a child will tell you is an unacceptable substitute for the glorious theatrical 2.35:1. THINKFucker is in no hurry to amend the situation, and so I remain unable to view and share this crushingly beautiful film. Now, if Tideland were not automatically copy protected by law, but rather by default freely available in the public domain, anyone could come along and print their own DVD version (say, the Beggar's Canyon Edition of Tideland) and legally collect all profits from its sale. Doubtless one such version would be made by persons who actually cared about quality enough to preserve the original 2.35:1 ratio, and that disc I would happily buy and show to you.

Closer to home. We will not in our lifetime see an official release of The Wonder Years. The soundtrack is an albatross; hundreds of classic songs licensed for one-time broadcast use only, plus syndication. Hundreds of copyrights between you and Winnie Cooper.

...

Animators are the most creative people on the planet. When not limited to live action photography motion pictures become the freest possible mode of expression, and so attract the most dynamic creative talent. This is why Adult Swim is consistently the best block of programming on television.

Don't be misled by the staid ways of postwar Disney or the rigid forms of conventional anime: It should not be surprising that the two most prominent cultural forces in animation happen to suffer (prosper) from creative anemia. Think instead of South Park, the program that long ago punched through the frontiers of satire, then accelerated. (They're now so far ahead that "edgy", the descriptor itself, sounds as obsolete as the Borscht Belt.) Think also of the generally acknowledged greatest sitcom of all time, The Simpsons. Hell, think of SpongeBob SquarePants, the kids show that could well be the apotheosis of the sight gag, surpassing anything in the Looney Tunes catalogue and even (I feel guilty saying it) Tom and Jerry. Japan is not without its superlative innovators either. The experimental miniseries known as FLCL is a freewheeling marriage of narrative and form as densely constructed as Citizen Kane or Ulysses, telling in its brain-melting fashion a deeply affecting coming-of-age story for which I offer the suggestive but altogether inadequate subtitle, Your Erection and What To Do With It: An Electric Riff on Puberty, Space Pirates and the Home Run.

Roger Ebert's exuberant review of Being John Malkovich opens with the exclamation, "What an endlessly inventive movie this is!" I'd like to turn that exclamation into a kind of seal of commendation — call it The Malky — and stamp it on worthy new films, shows, books-games-what-have-you as my highest honor, to share the delight of something new added to the world.

Sita — if, like me, you are comfortably unfamiliar with Indian* mythology — is a much-interpreted princess of yore whose romantic legend ennobles the tragic lot of the virtuous woman. Her colorful story and, more to the point, the telling of it among contemporary Indian and non-Indian audiences is the subject of Nina Paley's animated boogie woogie breakdown, her tribute to "the greatest break-up story ever told", produced independently by donation and loan (Paley admits to falling rather badly in debt) and made available online in 2008, generously sans copy protection. The film is in violation of certain arcane state and federal copyright laws due to the unlicensed use of vintage Jazz Age recordings and faces censure in the event of public exhibition. In the event of public exhibition the public's mind will be blown by the wreck of a Hindu circus train in Toontown, throbbing psychedelia spilled into one of Gilliam's more violent Python landscapes and Sita wiggling with all the pre-Code vavoom of Betty Boop — 30s surrealism on holiday aboard the Yellow Submarine — triple-narrated by quarrelsome silhouette puppets and a scratch pad proxy for Paley herself.

* dots not feathers

Gigantic

2009-11-25T12:00:00.001-05:00

If you ever find yourself saying, "Whoa, that homeless guy over there looks just like Zach Galifianakis," brace yourself. Because it is Zach Galifianakis. And he's trying to kill you.

New York Times Magazine article.

Criss Cross + The Underneath

2009-11-22T15:00:00.001-05:00

One must touch base with film noir from time to time, if one loves film at all. As a genre to embody the mythos of motion pictures it is second only to horror. Little holes made by a snub nose .38 in the spider hand of a dame bleed emulsion.

Criss Cross (1949) is a sufficiently nasty from-the-files crime brief badly smudged by an all-thumbs cast, but its semi-classic status is justified by a tautly Hitchcock third act and unexpectedly brutal finale. Burt Lancaster never was good for much in his beefcake heyday but I reserve a certain fondness due to his December portrayal of Doc 'Moonlight' Graham in Field of Dreams. Steven Soderbergh's 1995 remake is a bit of an oddity in the Soderbergh catalogue. Re-titled The Underneath, it might have fulfilled the languishing promise of the original screenplay had Soderbergh known at the time to segregate his arthouse doodling from the professionally tailored thrill. Instead the flick seems to be the mistake that taught him the lesson. The sin of pride. Where should be clockwork fatalism in bowing service to the gods of noir the direction sadly falters, fails to observe the rites, straying into a self-indulgent murk of convoluted chronology and stasis. Film noir is a high calling and unforgiving at that. In a way I'm actually relieved to discover that Steven is only human. (All hail the Coen brothers!)

Alison Elliott plays the femme fatale with a hardened set to her pretty face and a cold desolation in the eyes. Bad bad news, this girl. Not quite sociopathic but close enough for jazz. Those slightly puffy lower lids remind me of Peter Sarsgaard, who seems pleasant enough in interviews as he sips coffee and casually guts a cat. Taking over for Lancaster, the leading sap is portrayed by the preposterously soap opera puss of Peter Gallagher, famous son of Wooly Willy and Mrs Potato Head. His occasional willingness to be mocked and suffer misfortune onscreen helps take the edge off my need to work over that brow with a belt sander.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

2009-11-18T14:30:00.001-05:00

I've been admiring lately George Clooney and his quicksilver talent for comedy manner. Having finally toured the Ocean's Eleven trilogy, and now reflecting upon O Brother and this latest heehaw outing, it strikes me that Clooney's rascal mug can sell cornball slick as salvation on Sunday, then lickety-split turn and deliver a devastating roll of the eyes to the next unlucky schmuck who tries to get cute. No matter the game — Gomer Pyle or Mr Cool — he always wins even when he's losing, like limp-wristed Dr Jones in a fistfight against a shirtless Nazi pile of meat, because he's already won you over. The old comparisons to Clark Gable and Cary Grant* are apt, ace in the hole being that Clooney actually possesses subtlety.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is best viewed in trailer form, I'm sad to report. Without the scent of a story, dog will not hunt. Ewan McGregor is miscast once again...the only time he's ever been convincing onscreen is when crawling shuddering out of a toilet. Okay, I also liked him as Grimes the self-loathing coffee grunt. Understand that McGregor cannot be sold on handsome Scottishness because fundamentally he is leering and gross.

* CG, CG, GC?

Gears of War 2

2009-11-07T10:53:00.015-05:00

I kinda glossed over the gameplay experience of Resident Evil 5, busy as I was suggesting that one might have success opening a Klavern in Osaka (Just tell the Nips that Negroes flew the Enola Gay), but I'll remedy that right now with an illuminating side-by-side comparison to the gameplay experience of Gears of War 2:

Eh, they're pretty much the same. *punt*

Sugar (2008)

2009-11-03T10:57:00.042-05:00

The World Series stands at 3 to 2 New York and we check in hoping to see the Yankees blow it. The Cubs and Wrigley Field have a new owner from Omaha because the Tribune has sold everything down to its last pint of desk drawer bourbon. This week is last call for baseball.

Here's one for the road. A Dominican kid has got an arm. He leaves his family for the farm system riding everyone's high hopes. Progressing from training camp in Arizona to Single A in Iowa nothing goes terribly wrong, but the kid's game begins to falter. He sees the system doing what it's supposed to do: weed out. He lies to his mother on the phone about how things are going. He spends time lost. Slowly he sights his passion anew, where always it had been.

Sugar is the second indie drama from newcomer Ryan Fleck to completely stun me. Fleck seems to have an instinctive understanding for the texture of places and the people to be found there, as he proves by putting an educated white crack addict into an all-black Brooklyn junior high and displacing a monolingual athlete from the DR to the urban southwest to a Christian youth group in the heartland to a Big Apple flophouse and making each of these scenarios feel completely authentic.

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-11-02T17:40:00.000-05:00

I know where they are. I can draw you a map.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2009-11-01T22:44:00.013-05:00

The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.

— Homage to the runic (obsolete?) vernacular of Cormac McCarthy

I quote the above out of desperation. This is me reduced to flinging rubber chickens. For almost a year now I've been keeping this blog, coaxing myself to become a better writer. I've learned that flippant is easy. Sincere is hard. So I challenge myself to be sincere when the material calls for it. But I'm not up to this task. Not yet.

McCarthy saps my will to attempt to cobble a respectable sentence e'er again. Dammit, Jim, I'm a scientist not a literaturologist! In the face of such isolate mastery of the English language I am unworthy to so much as fart the alphabet.
...
I love this novel. It is as bleak a vision of our condition as possible. An unnamed apocalypse has scorched and fouled the land, the sea, the air. World over. Cows and birds are extinct and the other animals too and nothing will grow again. No hope for long term survival. The story is a one-way journey into the despair of darkness, into a cave: In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them.

On the journey are a father and son, just a small boy. The story is of their perfect love for each other. The question stirred in me, on first reading, is what to make of their love, of their choice to continue to exist each only for the sake of the other, in a world that has nothing else to offer nor ever will.

McCarthy knows truths about the relation between fathers and sons that I'm not ready to face. About the passing of the torch. A day will come when I won't be able to pick up this book at all.

Mad Max makes the end of the world look like a helluva lotta fun. Boys love the postapocalypse because it's one wild rumpus, full of crossbows and mutants and your own sweet pair of greaves. But I've discovered an important distinction. We already knew that horror movies fall into two classes: the giddy fun-to-be-scared (bring a date) experience and, well, the kind where you just feel sick. The difference between them is hope, which comes from the characters' (and the audience's) empowerment. The Road is the first example of postapocalyptic fiction I've encountered that is no fun, no fun at all. Not when there's nothing left to fight (for). Nothing even left of the world to parse. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Dante wrote of no hell so terrible and true as this.

The Road as an American novel (it won the Pulitzer) participates in the tradition of the doomed survivalist; a tradition so basic to American lit that the short stories To Build a Fire, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Outcasts of Poker Flat are standard high school curriculum. These are grim tales...such fatalism is heritage in our Haunted Land.

[Recommended viewing: Grizzly Man. Film adaptation of The Road releases later this month.]

Peanuts 1960's Collection

2009-10-28T18:00:00.001-04:00

There is exactly one place in the state of New Jersey that I love, and believe it or not it's to be found in miserable stinking Trenton. Wayfarers Erasmus and I struck dumbly upon this refuge while haphazardly in search of sustenance for body and soul, as is our idiom.

It was a winter to depress all winters. No frosty clarity or bearlike scoops of snow to twinkle the eye. Only the sucking winter murk of the Delaware river valley, laid down thin like the trail of a poisoned slug. (You know the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, with the crystalline floes of ice and heavenly shafts of light? Artistic license.) Where the trail crooks the scum is deposited, a natural debris catch upriver from nobler Philly. South Trenton between 206 and the crook forever sours under the bitter benediction of the Lower Free Bridge: TRENTON MAKES — THE WORLD TAKES. How to feel about a city whose most prominent public fixture just makes you sick to your stomach? We ventured into those neighborhoods blighted and forgotten, once factory housing, now not even worth turning into a ghetto. We were only a little hopeful, and only because Erasmus had spent less time there than I.

Hungarians and Germans had settled there once but were mostly gone. As a granitic record of their presence they left behind a runestone in the form of a restaurant called the Blue Danube. Coming in from the wet I could feel myself swell with warm oven air. We were cozied in by heavily stained woodwork, made back when trees were bigger. On the walls hung tin artifacts and oil paintings made back when the world was dimly lit and modest in color. The whole place strung up in multicolored little fuse capsule lights — the best kind. The magnificent bar like a snub-nosed tank, long enough for six stools maybe. A peaceful handful of regulars making the music of a few people quietly and comfortably gathered. The small TV set up in the corner was tuned into a network broadcast of It's a Wonderful Life. People were watching. Two squat matrons, probably sisters, served us on china with good thick forearms and the kind of stern cordiality that is so much more nourishing than false cheer. No kidding, they were watching It's a Wonderful Life.

The approaching season bares the truth of the world, the goodness and the sadness. We bundle up because our emotional armor falls away with the leaves. It snuck up on me a few days ago when I saw that the Peanuts television specials from the 60s have just been rereleased, with all due attention to quality. I thought about the scene where Royal takes Margot out for ice cream, to make amends, and the tender theme carol from A Charlie Brown Christmas plays. The Peanuts gang is there in Wes Anderson's gang, especially in the underdog sympathies, Chuck and Linus's oft-mocked sincerity, and the Lucy-ish notion of who gets to boss who around.

The dearest symbol of the season, for me, is Charlie Brown's scraggly little Christmas tree (Tannenbaum, in Deutsch) found amid gaudy aluminum commercialism. You may not remember just how often Charlie Brown laments that everyone has "gone commercial" — almost as often as he correctly identifies himself as "depressed" or the other kids cruelly call him "stupid". People suffer a similar amnesia with It's a Wonderful Life, forgetting how brutal it really is. (Capra and Stewart had just returned from the war.)

When I keep an apartment I like to get a little Charlie Brown tree for the holiday, for cheer. It must be got by trudging to the far corner of a tree farm with a bow saw.

If Peanuts contains another symbol as powerful (and even more universal) it is the unseen Little Red-Haired Girl, object of Charlie Brown's unrequited love. Inspired by Charles M. Schulz's own lost love, of course — the one who got away. From Schulz's biography, "I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone whom you love very much. A person who not only turns you down, but almost immediately will marry the victor. What a bitter blow that is."

The Girlfriend Experience + The Informant!

2009-10-27T12:00:00.004-04:00

Soderbergh is synonymous with shenanigans. That's the key to understanding his famously bimodal career. Half of Soderbergh's films, the ones he's most widely known for — Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Oceanses, The Good German, The Informant! — are marquee pictures about capital capers; the wily little guy vs the slippery establishment in a lively game of shakedown, fraud and con.

The other half, the indie and art house pics that cost less than Danny Ocean's third-best suit — Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Full Frontal, Eros, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience — are actually cut from the same cloth. (As are those few mid-range art house pics, like Solaris and Che.) Collectively these lower-profile numbers represent Soderbergh's own personal shenanigans, each a prank of sorts on the audience or, better yet, the industry.

I can't help but feel like Steven really put one over when Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d'Or in 1989. After all, that's the movie that invented the James Spader Experience, which is a bit like getting slapped with a dick.

Since then Soderbergh has sub-specialized in unconventional and unmarketable formats (like the miniseries and short film collections) and used his A-list leverage to actively subvert industry standards for how films are produced and released. Bubble was shot like a film school weekend assignment and released simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and via HD cable broadcast. Studio exec: He can't do that! Can he do that? Next the guy saunters off to Spain and Mexico for three months with Benicio del Toro and sixty million dollars and comes back with a four-hour biopic of Che Guevara. Studio exec: What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Steven shrugs. (A limited art house release garnered back half the budget.)

Possibly Soderbergh's most audacious con was getting Schizopolis accepted into the Criterion Collection. Make no mistake: If you watch that movie, the joke is on you.

The Girlfriend Experience is a classic bait and switch. Come see dynamite porn star Sasha Grey in her first dramatic role — as an ultra-chic Manhattan call girl! Wowie wow. You horndogs won't be disappointed, as long as you get your rocks off watching a hooker's toadlike Wall Street clients blubber and moan into her tits over the housing market collapse.

Kudos, you bastard.

Tulpan

2009-10-26T20:01:00.025-04:00

It is impossible to resist the opportunity to use the word yurt in a sentence. Even if the movie had stunk I'd still be excited to say something like, Never have I seen so much dung heaped about a yurt!

The Kazakh steppe looks to me rather like the Oklahoma panhandle, only more so. Flattened by the immensely azure sky is a spread of chalky canvas on which to sketch an existence. Asa, a would-be shepherd just back from the Russian navy, does exactly that: sketch on the pale side of his neckerchief a camel and a modest home and some guiding stars. His own dustblown paradise. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good yurt must be in want of a wife. Except Asa hasn't yet got a yurt, which makes two problems.

Dziga Vertov II. Man with a Movie Camera

2009-10-22T17:00:00.002-04:00

FOR VIEWERS' ATTENTION:

THIS FILM PRESENTS AN EXPERIMENT
IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
OF VISIBLE EVENTS

WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES
(A FILM WITHOUT INTERTITLES)

WITHOUT THE AID OF A SCENARIO
(A FILM WITHOUT A SCENARIO)

WITHOUT THE AID OF A THEATER
(A FILM WITHOUT ACTORS, SETS, ETC.)

THIS EXPERIMENTAL WORK AIMS
AT CREATING A TRULY INTERNATIONAL
ABSOLUTE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA
BASED ON ITS TOTAL SEPARATION
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATER AND LITERATURE

An unexpectedly extraordinary motion picture. If you know me, beware: I am going to buy this movie and show it to you. If you are a music lover, don't wait for me to find you. Watch it yourself now.

You might wonder how the above titles, which open the 1929 film, could precede anything other than a pretentious bore. My most vigorous assurances to the contrary. What we have here, in modern terms, is a 68-minute music video constructed without any specific music or sound at all. Understand how incredible this is. Of course the movie would be shown with orchestral accompaniment, but performing a piece composed afterward as with all scored films. A music video, on the other hand, does not precede the song. Point being that you know a music video when you see one by the way, even muted, the editing and the motion of the images create an undeniable rhythm.

Try watching on mute the scene in Clockwork Orange wherein Alex listens to the Ninth in his bedroom, with the chorus line of Jesuses. It's a short music video — impossible to imagine cutting those images together as Kubrick did unless he were taking dictation from a song. But that's exactly what Vertov did: create a continuous music video for an entire symphony except there was no symphony. He dictated music with film, frame by frame, note by note. I'm trying to say it's a goddamn work of genius. A summer of blockbusters is not so thrilling.

Version I saw is the 2002 Image Entertainment DVD release. The featured score is an original composed by the Alloy Orchestra in 1995, based on Vertov's own notes and instructions, and by many accounts it is the most preferred. I was spellbound.

Dziga Vertov I. Kinoglaz

2009-10-21T22:03:00.000-04:00

Much is owed to the revolutionary thrust of the early Soviets in general and Vertov in particular for separating the cinema from older art forms. In 1924 the Jewish-born native of Białystok, from his position as editor of the first newsreel series in Moscow, issued a proclamation on film theory by way of an experimental "Non-Fiction Film Thing" (we would call it a documentary, mostly staged). Put forth under the invented term Kinoglaz — literally Cinema Eye — was the statement of a progressive dogma for the right purposes of the film camera and the proper language of motion pictures.

Lars von Trier pulled a similar stunt with the Dogme 95 movement, to name a recent and equally assholish parallel. But we need our assholes and should get to know them. We learn the most by studying extremes.

Actually while viewing Kinoglaz and skimming some of Vertov's writings I was more frequently reminded of Scott McCloud's invaluable treatise on sequential art, Understanding Comics — not in terms of scope (McCloud is far more catholic in his views on the theory of comics) but in the passion and urgency of Vertov's appeal on behalf of his medium as a distinct, valuable and respectable form.

I probably shouldn't be making comparisons to McCloud. He seems like such a nice guy, and Vertov is a lunatic. (Apologies, Scott.) Consider the fork of departure between Vertov and his only more famous contemporary, Sergei Eisenstein. Both were instrumental in advancing the significance of editing as the grammar of the medium, and both adhered to the constructivist principle that the purpose of art was to serve a social (Marxist) agenda, but while Eisenstein felt there was a future for dramatic fiction in film Vertov was vehemently opposed. As he saw it man could evolve no further by continuing to study invisible aspects of life: the emotional and psychological underpinnings of dramatic fiction. These Vertov did crazily assert “prevent man from being as precise as a stopwatch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine.” Kinship with the machine...I wonder if Cronenberg is a fan.

For Vertov the eye of the camera bears witness to an absolute and total worldview that encompasses physical motion and visible change to the exclusion of all else. The machine does not think or feel; it moves and effects motion. And that is all that matters to the camera, to Vertov, to the synthesis of man's eye and the kinoglaz.

One sees the utility of this dogma to communist propaganda. Kinoglaz, the film, documents the activities of the Young Pioneers, a Leninist youth organization engaged in camp-making, river bathing, providing charity services, proselytizing and endless endless endless postering. They are busy little beavers. Make yourself useful and do something. Anyone who isn't in motion — the homeless, tubercular, mentally ill, addicted and indolent drunk — is an opportunity for someone else to give a helping hand.

Then Vertov puts the medium to work, using camera techniques like extreme angles and editing techniques like reverse and slow motion to distance the viewer from the emotional content of the images, forcing one instead to regard the fact of motion, the visible process of change. Two lengthy sequences depict a favorite subject: the production of goods, namely bread and beef. But shown entirely in reverse. So you get to watch a beef carcass be given back its viscera and have its skin skillfully reapplied by knife, then be unkilled in the stocks before it trods its way backward into a cattle car bound for the feedlot, etc. Same deal for a loaf of bread making its way back to a field of rye. At first I thought Vertov was just using the old gimmick to astound Russian peasants who'd never before seen moving pictures, but surely his intended audience was more sophisticated. Showing a process to be reversible makes it seem mechanical.

About the postering. In addition to the sheets pasted on every wall from Magadan to Minsk the film is jammed with poster-like intertitles. (I sometimes fool myself into thinking I can transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet, but really there's only like three characters I consistently remember.) This doesn't have anything to do with motion, and indeed Vertov would phase out intertitles from some of his later work, but it would seem to be in line with a constructivist notion of text as image, imparting the functionality of one to the other. Think of the bare lines and stark shapes of Kandinsky as approaching the quality of glyph, and vice versa. (McCloud's "picture plane" says it all.) However in the last reel Vertov makes the connection by juxtaposing intertitles with cartoon schematics for a crystal radio receiver and other electric devices — static diagrams/text to illustrate the machines/principles of Russia's future.

This is the kind of thinking that led to Skynet.

PS. Come for the agitprop, stay for the silhouette animation: a brief sequence of backlit stop motion 2D puppetry à la Lotte Reiniger.

Aelita, Queen of Mars

2009-10-19T16:36:00.014-04:00

Soviet Moscow sobers up in the post-revolution dawn of 1921, unaware that the swim of bold resolution and wincing doubt is being glassed by the restless and fascinated Queen of Mars. From her remote palace, atop the "tower of radiant energy" where hangs a preposterous array of plate glass triangles we readily accept to be a fabulous telescope, the beautiful Aelita espies a moment of affection between our good comrade Los and wife Natasha, Muscovites joyously posed on a balcony high above the vibrant winter cityscape — See how the Earthlings touch lips!

Or so our good comrade imagines. As chief engineer at the city's radio station Los has lately grown obsessed over a mysterious, indecipherable signal. His more pragmatic colleagues snort when someone posits Martian origin...but what if? Could Aelita be pining for him?

Natasha meanwhile is about the people's business, devotedly working at a checkpoint station where valiant soldiers returning from the republics are processed and essential goods are fairly distributed to the local proletariat. Patriotic pastimes like performing amateur Marxist theater and painting brightly sloganed posters keep everyone mindful of the rewarding job at hand: Build the great communist state.

But all is not well in the godless motherland. The people are somewhat less prosperous than one might hope in the wake of world war and revolution and civil war, and certain members of the former bourgeoisie are apt to remember the good old days. As a temporary measure the party has instituted a New Economic Policy with certain (regrettable) capitalist features intended as a shot in the arm. The loyal are concerned that this ideological compromise could weaken the people's resolve, and rightly so: Those former fat cats are soon up to their old tricks.

A pair of grifters befriend Natasha and acquire some office at the checkpoint. Before long the people's goods become subject to creative accounting, luxury items like chocolate and wine unerringly find their way into fat hands, and what started for Natasha as seemingly innocent perks becomes entry into an underground high society. Admirably she comes to reject such criminal decadence, but not before Los gets the wrong idea: Their marriage strained by time apart while attending to separate spheres of civic duty, she taking new work in a public orphanage and he at the construction of a power plant, Los returns home at one inopportune moment to discover of Natasha's dallyings and in a fit of jealousy and moral outrage shoots his wife dead.

Because Russians love subplots several are required at this juncture to aid now-fugitive Los in getting his ass to Mars. Fortuitously one of Los's colleagues looks exactly like Los with a fake beard and eyeglasses, and double-fortuitously that fellow has recently vanished (courtesy of the nogoodnik grifters — irony!) allowing Los to assume his identity. Hounded by a ridiculous would-be detective (enter light comic relief) who has abandoned "the case of the missing sugar" for more notable quarry, Los undeterred proceeds to hire a crew to set about the clandestine construction of a missile. Among the men is a former soldier whose own marital bliss has been threatened by boredom for lack of war; a comrade must have work to do! The endeavor is a success and, after the workers are pointedly paid for their labor, we are treated to a thrilling liftoff and interplanetary voyage, complete with flaming toy rocket crashing splendidly by zipline into a tabletop mock-up of the red planet. Los et al merrily hop out.

Aelita has been waiting! Such wonders to behold in her kingdom. The prols wear milk crate helmets and the handmaidens erector set bloomers. Art design was not done by Wassily Kandinsky, but you could've fooled me. The Martian sets and costumes are considered exemplary of constructivism, a Soviet art movement contemporary to German expressionism and similar in the use of highly abstract and spare representations. Basically everything is cut and rolled from stiff plastic or aluminum sheeting, like arts and crafts for severe kindergartners. This served the people's common agenda, I'm told.

But wouldntyaknowit: The Martian laborers are being exploited by the hegemonical elite. Such is the prols' state of woeful alienation that when overpopulation begins to concern the moneyed Elders a novel solution is enacted by way of this priceless intertitle:

So, by the decree of the Elders one-third of the life force will be stored in refrigerators.

The meaning of "life force" in a Marxist parable should be clear; witness a queue of catatonic workers slid down ramps in a loading facility and unceremoniously rolled into heaps. Upon Los's arrival revolution must be less than a reel away. Aelita readily joins to the cause — happily it seems the Queen is merely a figurehead and not party to the oppressive authority exercised by those dastardly Elders! With her backing Los pronounces:

Follow our examples, Comrades! Unite into a family of workers in a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

They do, and the yoke is lifted. But what's this!? Of a sudden Aelita seizes control of the army, turning back the tide of the people and setting herself up as a true dictator over all Mars. Los bemoans that Aelita has betrayed the revolution, just as did Natasha!

He grapples Aelita/Natasha in a death embrace, and we realize that it was All A Dream. Los comes to in Moscow, rushing home to find his dear Natasha alive and well (he shot at her but missed, you see). Oh, and that mysterious radio signal? Turns out it was just a publicity stunt — a veiled advertisement for car tires. A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch! Issue the moral of the story: Get your head out of the clouds and keep your feet on the ground, Bastian.

I wonder how effective this message was in 1924, given that the fantastical adventures on Mars as depicted are really fun and cool. It's like what Truffaut said about the impossibility of making an anti-war war movie.

A final note on Aelita and Metropolis (1927). It would be instructive to teach these two films together, to better draw out subtle distinctions in the prevailing Weimar and Soviet theories on art, science and class struggle. Viewed through the Queen's lens the significance of Metropolis's famous epigram is clearer.

Adventureland

2009-10-15T15:49:00.027-04:00

This is a really good movie, which is problematic because I want to encourage you to see it, but yet I must grumble about the unavoidable fact that it's a boy meets girl story and well handled though it is I just don't really care about boy meets girl stories anymore. Everything else about the movie is great, so please weight my grumble accordingly.

Adventureland's best elements bear comparison to Clerks as a chronicle of the overeducated and underskilled unexpectedly employed among a wage class they hadn't imagined when writing senior theses on Gogol. Gradually the ringing shellshock of postgraduate ambitions gone awry fades into the tinny repeat of corporate-approved PA music and a lungful of fried dough aerosol alerts you to the choking sensation that someone is taking in the slack on the parental tether.

In other totally unrelated news, I'm tired of watching all these popular movies. Time to crack open some Soviet art house pics.
...
I was in Chipotle the other day and they played Waitress in the Sky by the Replacements. I heard the intro and I was like, Whoa, this sounds just like the Replacements instead of whatever shitty band it's probably going to turn out to be...it sure would be great if I wasn't the only person I know who loves the 'Mats. But then it was the 'Mats! But no one else in the restaurant looked as excited as me. So anyway, listen to more 80s college rock. The Adventureland soundtrack has some prime cuts from the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and power pop influences Nick Lowe, Big Star.

Whip It

2009-10-14T03:25:00.113-04:00

If I were Drew Barrymore this is definitely the movie I would have made. It's good news for movie fans when an established actor turns director because actors love actors. They tend to cast by way of fan service, peopling and overpeopling their feature like the cover of Sgt Pepper.

For instance, as a former child star of the 80s I would definitely grant the role of the likable pop, an unspoken honor, to Daniel "voice of the Wonder Years" Stern. Remember that time on the Simpsons when Bart had a Wonder Years voiceover moment?

[To earn money for his comic book, Marge suggests that Bart get a job.]
BART: Me!?
VOICEOVER: Get a job? Were they serious? I didn't realize it at the time, but a little bit of my childhood had slipped away...forever.
HOMER: Bart! What are you staring at?
BART: Uh...nothing.
VOICEOVER: He didn't say it and neither did I, but at that moment, my dad and I were closer than we ever —
HOMER: Bart! Stop that!
BART: Sorry!

I wish Daniel Stern were narrating my life.

Since the flick is about Austin and Austin roller derby you've got to have an authentic local representative. Cue fully bearded Andrew Wilson, aka Future Man, the forgotten Wilson brother, as team coach. I honestly didn't recognize him till the end, having never expected to see the big lug outside of a Wes Anderson movie. Next thing you know Rob Zombie is gonna hire Pagoda.

On loan from Tarantino is that playful Kiwi stuntwoman — a no-brainer. But the most truly irrefutable choice is Juliette Lewis as the badass queen bitch of the derby. (I'm suddenly struck by the realization that in the past week I've seen both Mickey and Mallory kicking fresh butt.) Jammed as this movie is with cameo characters, a familiar assignment for Barrymore, she finds a personal moment for many of them and the cross-generation confrontation behind the rink between Lewis and Ellen Page is the best.

Naturally Barrymore takes upon herself the greatest risk of looking foolish by playing the team's unabashedly physical space cadet. (She jokes at one point about making little Ellen the team mascot, but really it's Drew who acts as mascot for her own movie.) This leaves the leadership slot open to SNL's Kristen Wiig, who deservedly adds a semi-dramatic breakthrough part to her resume of consistently spot-on comedy.

With all sincerity: Jimmy Fallon's finest hour.

The only lifeless corner of the movie, oddly enough, is our dear Junebug; Page's character feels underwritten as if taken for granted. Best friend Alia Shawkat upstages her in wryness and spunk in every scene — Maeby knows how to quickly carve out a sharp supporting role among bigger players. Page meanwhile seems to be waiting for the heavy drama to fall on center stage.

Barrymore knows how to throw a crazy party (she ought to), which is what Whip It amounts to even despite the fact that Page shows up without her dancing shoes. It's a damn fun time. As a director her feelgood sensibilities are impeccable and we should be so lucky as to have Ms Barrymore lift up and bear forward the torn denim standard of Riff Randell.

Murder City Devils at Riot Fest

2009-10-10T23:59:00.013-04:00

They played hard. Familiar as I am with the Devils' swan song live album and its shambolic roar — the death throes of a great sad beast — I was unprepared for the focused assault of last night's reunion performance. Taking the stage the four boys on guitar and vox made a line with their backs to the audience, as if for a moment of silent invocation. The show ripped open with the challenge-as-creed Get Off The Floor (If you're not going to dance what the fuck did you come here for?) and slammed shut with Murder City Riot. It was professional. Eight years to the month since the Devils folded (at the height of their power at the end of their rope) and the raw anguish of songs written by kids has worn into well-seasoned pain. Clint Eastwood is tougher now than in his poncho days.

Spencer himself is leaner and steadier, even having secured his storm-tossed sea captain beard into a more wolfish projection. He seems to have found a measure of grace. Still he howls I heard or read the only love is lost love, but with a new preface: "I've never been so wrong."

The Devils' ode to Johnny Thunders benefited most from a live interpretation, with its tyrannosaur bass line brought to the fore and Spencer's revealing point of clarification: "It wasn't New Orleans that killed Johnny. Johnny did it to himself. He was a FOOL." The song has become a cornerstone of the Devils' message to the kids (as I see it), along with Bear Away and Bride of the Elephant Man: Struggle and empathize with the struggles of others / Use that empathy to find a way not to destroy yourself but to somehow carry on.

The unequivocal hero of MCD is Iggy Pop of the Stooges. Many people are said to have "saved rock and roll" at one time or another...Spencer told it this way: Iggy found the very lowest form of art and reveled in its utterly indefensible quality; likened to the first caveman artist to paint not a handsome buffalo but an inarticulate scribble in shit. (Relatively sober throughout the night, here the old Spencer fumbled a bit for words. Appropriately enough.) In the same breath Mr Moody identified Kenneth Anger as a parallel figure in American underground film. I'm not yet conversant with Anger's work, but now I think I've put it off long enough. I like the sound of you rolling, rolling in that broken glass.

Part of me wanted to stand back from the pit to take in the full view, to catch every nuance of the Devils' on-stage dynamic and relish the response of the crowd as a whole. I might never get to see them again. But that is the instinct of a tourist, of a person busy fossilizing memories behind a camera. I don't have any photos of the show, and already the sounds are fading away, but I know I was there and I danced.

Zombieland

2009-10-08T16:55:00.000-04:00

Does not suck!

Well, that's it for Zombie Week (duration obviously negotiable). Until next time, remember: Aim for the head!

Resident Evil 5

2009-10-08T12:52:00.009-04:00

Game is set in Africa and all the zombies are, logically enough, black. I'd prefer to believe that this is a reasonable design choice at a time of post-political correctness. Yet it can't be helped that the zombified residents of an African village look and behave pretty much exactly like the extras from Birth of a Nation. So after pointing my shotgun into the face of the one hundredth consecutive jiga boo the little twinges of transgression start to add up.

The really unfortunate thing is that the designers have done nothing to counter possible accusations of latent racism. The characters with speaking roles are all white, save one minor soldier who is clearly African-American. Your female partner, Sheva, is supposedly African but evidently of a more Mediterranean stock than the local sub-Saharan natives. There are no non-zombie locals. No children either (save one menaced white girl) or other humanizing suggestions of culture.

In a series that has also been criticized for its condescending attitude toward gender roles (see article, which applauds the "female gendered space" of Super Metroid) Capcom is not doing itself any favors by pleading ignorance with respect to racial sensitivities.

As usual the Japanese have stolen an American cultural item and gotten it all wrong. (Where did they get their ideas about Brooklyn plumbers?) Typically the results are more amusing. I object to the zombie being used in this way, contrary to its nobler purpose.

World War Z + The Zombie Survival Guide

2009-10-05T20:39:00.010-04:00

Of the classic Universal Monsters five are associated with a respected work of literature (Drac, Frank, Hunch, Phantom, Invisible Man) and three were cooked up by harried screenwriters on assignment (Mummy, Wolf Man, Gill-man). The latter trio, as we know them today, are original creations of the cinema.

Not that they are without some important literary precedents. The creature from the black lagoon was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, the werewolf is an archetype owed to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and as for the mummy, well...there is Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, which is the basis for several scarifying Hammer ventures of the 70s, but it's doubtful whether the creators of the 1932 Boris Karloff stiff were familiar with the novel. Instead, the international press is largely responsible for the notion of the mummy as monster, having invented a "curse of the pharaohs" to drum up Egyptomania following the 1922 discovery of King Tut; such hoopla proved enough to pad out a hasty script.

The modern zombie is also an original spawn of the silver screen. I have mentioned that the zombie epidemic has progenitors in 50s sci-fi lit, which makes for a fine pedigree if you're willing to connect the two, but as far as most genteel folk are concerned (with reason) Zed has staggered through his forty years of life an unlettered wretch. After all, who wants to read about giving a ghoul the ol' claw hammer-to-the-forehead when you can watch it or play it? Try out this excerpt from my unpublished zombie novel: And then he killed one with a rake, and then he killed one with this old Tandy 1000 monitor, and then his girlfriend got bit so he had to stab her with an apple corer, and then he killed like three at once... It goes on, but I'm afraid there's not much in the way of romance or nuance for you lovers of vampire fiction (you might prefer my unpublished piece of Twilight fan fiction). I guess when you take away the visual splendor of the rancid neck wound a zombie does not make a very compelling character. The most "sophisticated" usage of Zed in the movies is as dummy target for satire, but even then the lurid humor tends to rely on sight gags, and the stories have always been limited to one very restrictive premise.

George Romero did the zombie a great service by creating the genre with a vein of social commentary, but also a great disservice by establishing the almost unbroken tradition of the zombie story as the story of a small band of survivors isolated from broader events. It is a perfect formula as far as low-budget horror filmmaking is concerned; by design it avoids the complex and far-reaching social, political and economic implications that a widespread plague of living death would have on the present-day global community. That is, every zombie movie avoids the most interesting implications of its subject because it is a really hard problem to figure out, and one not at all suitable for treatment on film. Someone was going to have to be brave enough to write the definitive literary treatment of the zombie epidemic, and it would necessarily be a work not of horror so much as social science fiction.

That person turned out to be the son of the guy who gave us Frankenstein's monster in tails singing Puttin' on the Ritz. If your dad spent every night at the dinner table humping himself and butchering show tunes I suppose, yes, you'd give a great deal of thought to the end of human civilization. In 2003 Max Brooks published a utilitarian-looking field handbook entitled The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From The Living Dead. The cover is adorned by an understated coat-of-arms: crossed machete and M1 carbine. Contents are direct, matter-of-fact and thorough in dispelling common myths about zombies and zombie attacks, detailing the pathology of the virus that causes zombification and the physical attributes of the infected, outlining proven tactics for defense and combat against the four classes of zombie outbreak, listing suggested weaponry and gear for individuals and groups, and instructing where and how to attempt to rebuild civilization from scratch in the event of Class 4. Included as a lengthy appendix is a record of all known or alleged zombie outbreaks in human history, summarizing archaeological evidence from every inhabited continent dating back as far as 60,000 BC and written accounts from the time of the Punic Wars to a series of documented incidents in Los Angeles in 1993 and 1994.

A strain of well-educated madness was required for the compiling of such a meticulously fabricated and utterly convincing document. For Brooks it was merely a warm-up. In 2006 we learned the true depths of his (it must be said) genius. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War should be commonly referred to as "Max Brooks' World War Z", the way we now say "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein". The Gothic flavor of those novels could not be more different from the sober journalism of WWZ, despite the structural similarities between the epistolary novel and Brooks' collection of transcribed and annotated interviews, which highlights once again my assertion that the zombie is the product of a more modern era of disenchantment and all-too-real postwar horrors (of which the television and internet media make us painfully aware, every day) that eclipse credulous Christian frettings about spooks and devils.

The book is modeled after Studs Terkel's oral history of World War II, The Good War; a collection of accounts of survivors from around the world and all walks of life that, taken together, relate the events of twenty-some years that span the initial outbreak in central China in the spring of 2011, the total collapse of global order by the autumn of 2012, the decade-long campaign waged by the re-marshaled US Army to reconquer North America from two hundred million zombies, and a further decade of rebuilding and reckoning in a shattered post-apocalypse. The Zombie Survival Guide appears as an in-world prewar publication, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Brooks covers the foresight and readiness of Israel (allow some author bias), the ironic boon of the institutions of apartheid in South Africa, the reversal of economic fortunes between Cuba and the US with the flow of white-collar refugees into the well-defended island and Castro's expedient embrace of capitalism, the evacuation of slow-to-respond Japan to frigid Kamchatka (zombies freeze solid in subzero conditions), the mysterious disappearance of the entire population of North Korea, the nuclear saber-rattling between Pakistan and India brought to a head (but not how you expect), the observation of global ecologic catastrophe by the stranded crew of the International Space Station, the deluge of refugees from the world's two most populous countries up onto the defensible Tibetan plateau (humanitarian crisis is too polite a phrase), the resurgence of the democratic Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan, the religious revival and restoration of a theocratic tsar in Russia, the reoccupation and siege of Europe's castles, the specter of German guilt in the face of mass death policy-making, the lunatic resolve of the French to reclaim Parisian sewers, the plausible appearance of a Waterworld of flotilla nations and the total autonomy and might of sovereign nuclear submarines. That's not even half the ideas sketched in this volume of bewildering creativity. I finished reading the book six months ago and still I don't have the stamina to try to fully convey its scope.

Let me reiterate that each of these events is conveyed by a different person's oral account of his or her personal story of survival, so rather than reading like a think tank's report on a hypothetical scenario every section is invested with deep and universal human drama. As comedy and tragedy go hand-in-hand, and as Brooks is inescapably his father's son, he does not leave us without the occasional moment of sublime levity, such as when Paris Hilton's latest reality show — Totally Zombie-Proof Celeb Party Compound in the Hamptons! — fails to live up to its name.

Max Brooks' World War Z reads like a symphony of commentary — a hundred individually humble voices, simple observations, many commonplace and a few profound, that when played in the context of one another gather into an immense and haunting emotional force. The book's most powerful passage reflects this analogy; talk to me after you've read it.

A Major Motion Picture is in the works... Well, if Watchmen turned out OK contrary to all my doomsaying, then just maybe there is hope for the cinema's first zombie epic.

[REC] + Quarantine

2009-09-29T14:30:00.000-04:00

The zombie is ground zero for low budget horror filmmaking. It is the most democratic of monsters, the movie equivalent of punk rock. Anyone can learn two chords and add food coloring to Karo syrup and recruit some neighbors (everyone, absolutely everyone, wants to play a zombie) and make a decent dead pic. You don't even need a script! A zombie uprising writes itself.

Zed is therefore a natural ally of the populist (or faux populist, since the big-budget Cloverfield) microgenre pioneered by The Blair Witch Project — a movie that continues to grow in stature with hindsight. We now know that the Blair Witch crew were exactly eight years ahead of their time. Not until 2007, when every schlump on the street was toting a digital video widget, did the handheld docu-horror flick finally catch on. Three such innovators premiered that autumn, two of them thick with zombies. The third was Paranormal Activity.

That season also saw the release of Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii. What delight to discover that revolutionary gameplay had come not from a rogue upstart, as you might expect, but from the most venerable franchise in platformers! It's nice to have your trust reaffirmed. Likewise one of the aforementioned zombie docs was Diary of the Dead, the fifth volume in George Romero's flagship Dead series, a forty-year-old franchise still under original management and still breaking new ground.

The other undead innovator, however, was a rogue upstart. From Spain, of all places. I know Spain has produced a few high profile horror movies recently (The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth from Guillermo del Toro, and The Orphanage from some other hombre) but the country doesn't really have a well-identified horror tradition like, say, Italy. But all people of all nations are welcome to participate in the ongoing zombie apocalypse. So anyway, the title of this película de terror is [REC] — more of a glyph, really — as in "recording", as if to scream avant-garde. The almost-real-time running documentary approach is kind of novel, but the only truly mind-blowing aspect of this otherwise standard outbreak story is the rapid response time of law enforcement and public health officials: someone calls the cops when this old lady goes berserk in her apartment, and within like ten minutes the city has quarantined the building with a SWAT team and biohazard gear. This is absolutely unprecedented foresight on the part of municipal authorities in dealing with the sudden appearance of the living dead. Evidently the Spanish have much greater faith in the competence of their public servants.

An American remake was released one year later (again, rapid response time!), more sensibly titled Quarantine. I find myself recommending both versions. The Spanish original is better cast, with more naturalistic-looking actors; the American actors look like typecast character actors, which is what they are, spoiling the realism. But sometimes technical chops make all the difference. The higher-budgeted Quarantine is tighter, faster, more intense, with convincing gore and more brutal kills. Basically what you expect from the good ol' USA.

Dead Space + Left 4 Dead

2009-09-28T12:00:00.000-04:00

[This week is Zombie Week. In anticipation of the theatrical release of Zombieland, which may or may not suck, several zombie-related articles forthcoming.]

The compass of the zombie is full of anger. The fundamental appeal is the idea of beating your neighbor to death with a club. That bastard had it coming, you see, because he's a stupid drone like all the others, shambling to the omnipresent tune of banality and injustice. You either fight or shuffle in step. Probably they'll overwhelm your resistance in the end.

Vampires aren't nearly so angry; petulant maybe. Disdainful. More often than not glamorously depressed: the inward obsessions of narcissism. The old superstition that vampires have no reflection is ironic, because in every depiction they only see themselves. The fascination with bloodsuckers is world-fleeing; the urge to slip away into a morphine bliss and leave a pretty corpse. Braineaters are the grim meat hook reality you face every day. The two monsters provide opposite forms of catharsis. I suppose we need them both.

But this is Zombie Week, dammit. Those dead-eyed fuckers are clawing at the door and you've got a twisted ankle, one shotgun shell and a garden hoe. Let's rock.

Suffering from extreme undeadicide withdrawal months after shelving my beloved copy of Dead Rising (best.zombie.game.ever), and forlorn in the knowledge that Dead Rising 2 is much too far away, like a health kit at the opposite end of a zombie-clogged mini mall, I hit the dealer for a quick fix.

The choice was between Dead Space, a sci-fi survival horror shooter set aboard a derelict spaceship infested by alien bugshit affixed to human hosts, and Left 4 Dead, a slick multiplayer shooter featuring the classic scenario: band of survivors versus wave after wave of hungry zedheads. The thing is, I do most of my killing solo — a partner is just a ghoul waiting to happen. I went with Dead Space.

It was the right choice. The zombie experience lives or dies by aesthetics; bone must crunch with a satisfying sound and blood must splatter with a certain joie de vivre. Atmosphere and tone must be sadistically controlled to instill paranoia and bring you regularly to the desperate blind-firing-your-last-five-pistol-rounds edge of panic. Dead Space succeeds inasmuch as it faithfully copies every page from the playbook of Doom 3, a stain-yourself terrifying game. The Alien-inspired art design is gorgeous to behold, especially during the soundless sequences on the airless ship exterior in view of drifting debris spotlit by a cold white star, as a tentacled fetus latches on to your head.

The game's primary selling point, emphasis on methodically dismembering your foes limb by mutated limb, is wicked fun*, at least until you acquire bigger guns that render precision shooting unnecessary and thereby undermine the mechanic. A major disappointment were the zero-g sequences; the prospect of floating around under attack from all 4π steradians had been a huge draw for me, but the actual implementation has your feet firmly planted on a stationary surface at all times. This is a missed opportunity: imagine in a dire situation wherein ammo is already scarce, and you've no jet pack, having to squander precious rounds to propel yourself through space, and hence every time you fire at an enemy push yourself off course. That'd be sweet.

Truth is I'm not going to finish the game. Despite initial immersion the gameplay stagnates by the halfway point with repetitive go-here-and-push-a-button missions and no compelling characters or storyline. Still, it was more enjoyable than the few minutes I recently had playing Left 4 Dead. The high-end shooter engines it uses is just too smooth for a horror game; you move and aim with unnatural fluidity, as if massless. The action is too bombastic and the environments under-designed. It's a shame, really. So few understand the art of the zombie.

* Expression not used in the Boston manner.

Paranormal Activity

2009-09-26T17:38:00.003-04:00

Would the Exorcist be as scary without the slime chucking and creative chiropractic? No, of course not. That stuff is freaky. But we all know the Exorcist was a one shot deal; it opened and closed the book on exorcism fu. Those crass tactics would never be truly effective again (especially now with CGI, which, if you are aware of it, is always just a tad more frightening than Svengoolie) because there's just no way to top what Friedkin did. One word: crucifucking — a moment so upsetting that it's rarely even mentioned, as if people are in denial of what they saw.

The Exorcist is the most Catholic movie ever made, the culmination of centuries of fanciful gothic scaremongering. By the same token the movie represents the death of the Roman Catholic Church, its last battle with the forces of darkness, its last moment of dignity after giving up all pretense of authority in Vatican II. Father Karras and Pazuzu both go down together. I've stood at the base of that precipitous staircase in Georgetown and do you know what I felt? Nothing. The old ghosts are gone.

Since then the demonic possession beat has been little trodden by any creations original and scary. The Evil Dead series was the most important thing to happen to horror between Halloween and the Blair Witch, but the only genuine fright it provides is the thought of Sam Raimi's ex-girlfriends. *shudder* In a way Evil Dead so thoroughly lampooned the concept of the Exorcist that it became impossible to treat seriously. As recently as this summer Raimi was still rattling the chestnut for yuks with Drag Me To Hell. But then it turns out that, two years ago, someone found a way to resurrect the kin of Pazuzu.

A no-budget independent movie called Paranormal Activity, shot as cinéma vérité with a single handheld camera, premiered at a horror film festival in 2007 and since then has been searching for a nationwide distributor. A one-night-only midnight screening was held at the Music Box on Thursday for a super-capacity crowd. A great night at the movies. Don't watch the trailer — in trying to draw an audience it errs by over-revealing. If and when this thing gets a DVD or wide theatrical release it should be seen and seen cold.

The film terrorizes in the vein of recent fare like Blair Witch, Open Water and The Descent: by exploiting the visceral fear of powerlessness. It's fun to be scared when you have a way of fighting back against the monsters and a chance of survival...not so fun when you are helpless, hopelessly lost and doomed. The makers of Paranormal Activity had an insight: Keep the demon, lose the priest. Now you're fucked. This experience, something like the drowning of your heart, is amplified by the implication that you are watching "found footage". What's even worse is that often you are watching stationary tripod footage of the characters being terrorized while they sleep. And there's nothing you can do.

Korea VI. Chan-wook Park

2009-09-25T19:30:00.007-04:00

Violence as art in the movies is conventionally dated to the blizzard of bullets of '69: Sam "Sonofabitch" Peckinpah elevated the gunfight to ballet in two sequences that bookend The Wild Bunch, introducing the slow motion death pirouette that, now, it's impossible to imagine the action movie without. This innovation was assisted by the brutal onscreen demise of Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier — the cultural impact can be felt in this passage from Roger Ebert's original 1967 review:

When people are shot in "Bonnie and Clyde" they are literally blown to bits. Perhaps that seems shocking. But perhaps at this time, it is useful to be reminded that bullets really do tear skin and bone, and that they don't make nice round little holes like the Swiss cheese effect in Fearless Fosdick.*

Personally I think it's cute to imagine young Roger, in his first year as a professional film critic, positioning himself on the vanguard of the American new wave and hyping the modernity of its attitude toward violence. (Verily, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are shot many times, but they are not by any stretch "literally blown to bits".)

If one wishes to look further back into the art of the kill (Yes, please!) it is apropos to mention one of the most enduring images of violence in all of cinema: the face and shattered glasses of a nurse on the Odessa Steps, shot through the eye. This image from Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin (1925) has become a meme, perpetuated I assume by Film 101 at every institution of higher learning; once you know it I promise you will see it quoted in a new movie or show at least once a year (spot the reference in 9 at a theater near you). The most famous homage occurs in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, wherein the grand staircase in Chicago's Union Station doubles for the Odessa Steps.

De Palma himself has been much talked about recently in the wake of Inglourious Basterds and its nod to Carrie's inferno, with Tarantino citing De Palma as a primary influence and the first of the fanboy filmmakers (see also John Landis). De Palma more than anyone is responsible for making operatic violence fun. It had been developed as art in the 70s when Hollywood was all serious and shit, but Scarface in '83 succeeded in transmuting The Wild Bunch into popcorn. John Woo based his career on this new alchemy: Hard Boiled (1992) is the last reel of The Wild Bunch miraculously sustained for two hours of improbable cool, and it set the trend for gun fu in the 90s. Reservoir Dogs was released that same year, and while its importance is primarily for dialogue, the use of a certain Dylanesque, pop, bubble-gum favorite from April of 1974 during an otherwise routine mutilation cum immolation scene cemented a popular taste for violence as absurdity, surreality.

The baton was passed at Cannes in 2004 when Tarantino personally stumped for Chan-wook Park's artfully bloody entry, Oldboy. Park had toppled Shiri from the balcony of the Korean box office with Joint Security Area in 2000, which might have been a standard military-political drama along the lines of A Few Good Men if not for Park's uncommon ability to take the sketch of a simple story — like a procedural or, the simplest of all, a revenge — and trace over it with sharp lines of beauty and pain. He traces in blood, buckets of it all told, but every ounce dispensed with clinical precision and discrimination. So you feel it.

Joint Security Area, in exploiting the thrill of intrigue in the DMZ, is somewhat creatively constrained by the delicacy of the political situation and Park's adherence to rhetoric about the hope for reunification (especially evident in light of his subsequent emergence as an auteur), but its financial success enabled him to commence a series of thematically linked projects, now codified as the Vengeance Trilogy, that established Park as Korea's best director of popular films and the most internationally famous. (Ki-duk Kim is Korea's best arthouse director; Ebert recently appointed Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring to his Great Movies list.)

The trilogy consists of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, although one should also include in this series Cut, the short film Park contributed to "Three... Extremes", a collection of East Asian horror. This inclusion with horror films should give you the flavor of Park's recipe for a dish best served cold. He sees in our nature a weakness for the belief that we can get what we want by bargaining in flesh. We are shown a recurrent series of kidnappings and hostage-takings that provoke more of the same; a cycle of transactions conducted in persons whole and in part, involving as well the literal exchange of organs, digits and the odd tongue. Invariably Park finds that neither satisfaction nor redemption can be achieved in such a market; once horrible deeds are done, they stay done.

Park has now made a vampire movie, called Thirst, to be released on DVD in November. This makes perfect sense. (I can't believe I'm looking forward to another bloodsucker.)

* It is probably necessary to explain that Fearless Fosdick is a parody of Dick Tracy that appeared as a comic strip-within-a-strip in Li'l Abner (which probably requires its own footnote, but I'll leave it up to you). He was frequently riddled by bullet holes, to mild effect. Everyone knew this in 1967.

Korea V. So Yong Kim

2009-09-21T20:47:00.019-04:00

I walked into the Gene Siskel Film Center one day and a Korean movie was playing so I saw it. It was called Treeless Mountain and it put me into the indie doze: that guiltily inattentive state of semi-consciousness that occurs when viewing an indie film that possesses artistic merit but you kinda don't really care. You are certain that the subject matter is very meaningful to a very narrow demographic to which you have no relation whatsoever. Also, you feel there has been excessive use of the close-up.

In her first two films, In Between Days and Treeless Mountain, director So Yong Kim has made a significant contribution to the world's supply of close-up footage of kindergarten and teenage Korean girls. I hope that she has received awards from the appropriate liberal-minded associations and funds. Meanwhile I shall quietly sneak out to go watch Raising Arizona.

Weeds, Season 1

2009-09-19T00:05:00.003-04:00

The most subversive aspect of the show is the way the creators do everything in their power to make Nancy Botwin genuinely likable — she is playfully attractive, fashionable, capable and sharp of wit, if charmingly naive at times — while dancing around the Joe Friday fact that she is neglecting and recklessly endangering the welfare of her children. The pluck and whimsy that livens every briskly-plotted episode is a seduction, luring you into an irresponsible diversion, gaining your lazy consent. The writers work with incredible dexterity to periodically expose and dismiss the reality of the situation; moments of clarity cut through the smoke. The watchword is responsibility. Unless someone calls a spade a spade relatively soon the outlook is *ahem* sticky for Nancy (but she's so cute!) and her kids.

Flight of the Conchords, Season 1

2009-09-18T00:05:00.009-04:00

At first I wasn't prepared to let the gonzo splatterama of early Peter Jackson speak for the character and tastes of all New Zealanders (just as I'm sure most Baltimoreans would prefer not to be represented by John Waters), but after viewing the clearly Jackson-inspired Black Sheep (2006), that beguiling tale about an outbreak of vicious weresheep, I was beginning to waver in my conviction that not all Kiwis could possibly be quite so utterly barmy. But it does kinda makes sense. I mean, what happens when you take a fleabitten shipload of Welsh and Scottish nutters, turn them upside down and force them to gather wool for a century at the end of the Earth? Hey, even Australia considers New Zealand a laughable backwater.

So what's a novelty music duo to do but embrace the stereotype? The craziest damn thing about these perpetually shellshocked rubes is that they seem to like being thought of that way. Contrast Australia's designated rep, Mick "Crocodile" Dundee, who is secondly a yahoo but firstly a toothy Harlequin hunk. That's a rather more assured self-image but far less funny, even when the humor draws from the same fish-out-of-water premise. And whereas Mick is competent and canny in his element, one gets the impression that the Conchords (and Murray), for all their sweet sincerity, would be just as adorably out of step back down underer, as if it's impossible to get your bearings on the other side of Oz.

NEW ZEALAND
DON'T EXPECT TOO MUCH — YOU'LL LOVE IT

Inglourious Basterds, Part XIV

2009-09-17T23:55:00.005-04:00

14. Sabotage (1936) is the source of the clip of the boy trying to carry flammable nitrate film canisters onto a London city bus, only to be admonished by the conductor. I tack on this necessary installment to the IB film series for several reasons, one being that it is my favorite movie of pre-Hollywood Alfred Hitchcock, from whom Tarantino has inherited the mantle of master of suspense; a second being that echoes of the plot are heard in IB, involving propaganda bombings and central intrigue that revolves around a movie theater. Based on the 1907 Joseph Conrad novel, The Secret Agent, which foreshadows a century of violent terrorism in the service of revolutionary movements, Sabotage is darker, more horrifying than anything Hitchcock would make until Vertigo.

9

2009-09-14T09:39:00.004-04:00

Within moments I was thinking of Myst, of the loving attention paid to small, functional objects and materials and their tactile quality, placed in context in an intimately realized space. Ray Bradbury would know how to describe that love. It has to do also with the natural delight taken in the working of simple devices and the way, under the close observance of a child, every thing seems to have something like a soul.

Note: Whatever had been reported about the use of a new CGI process to mimic the stilted movements of traditional stop motion animation (see Coraline) turns out to be unfounded, to my vague relief.

To Mega Therion

2009-09-13T23:34:00.024-04:00

Re: Communication Breakdown

If you've been listening to Katy Perry (or Guillaume de Machaut) all week you might reasonably balk at the task: Train your blissfully undamaged ears to distinguish between some two dozen willfully inaccessible subgenres of extreme metal (inasmuch as the genre distinctions are substantive and not meaningless inventions of the music press). Well, put your misgivings aside! We do not have any choice but to climb the metal taxonomy tree because, as George Mallory put it, it is there.

We shall bypass the NWOBHM roots of the extreme metal phyla, preferring the aberrant outgrowths therefrom, with one outstanding exception: Motörhead. Hurtling through old-time rock and roll on enough amphetamines to power Tokyo, Lemmy is bigger than metal itself, and he and his warts have long been considered trustees of punk rock.

Let's also get a nod to Metallica out of the way. They, like Green Day, functioned as a gateway band for many of us of a certain age, and we pay our respects. That being said, I have previously summed up thrash metal in one word: Slayer.

The following patchwork of notes pertains to my initial experience with the pioneers of black, doom, power and death metal.

The prehistory of extreme metal ends with Venom, the hallowed Geordie trio who first applied the brute aggression and DIY production of hardcore punk to heavy metal; their first album (Welcome to Hell) is prototype for the sound of America's thrash metal and textbook for the blasphemous lyrical and iconographic fixations of Europe's black metal. (The sonic template for black metal, however, was later set down by Bathory and Celtic Frost, to whom I'll return.) Critics invariably note that Venom were rather amateur musicians, but myself — coming from a position sympathetic to the one-chord wonder of punk rock, I hear an unsettling authenticity in Venom's professions of allegiance to Lucifer that slick production and showy fretwork would only undermine. Their primitive woodshed recordings never sound like anything other than three blokes banging on cheap instruments, and that's exactly what I imagine unhinged devil freaks do.

For pure entertainment I point to the farcical posturing of the black metal prince of Copenhagen, Mercyful Fate; good clean fun, in the unholy scheme of things — I challenge you not to snicker the entire time. Every song is a precious ritual diablo, drawn as precisely as a pentagram, and the stratospheric castrato cackle is exactly as threatening as Skeletor. Plus they can boast the hands-down funniest album cover in the long tradition of ridiculous metal artwork: a horned skull half-submerged in a wall of flames, with outstretched hand pointing directly at YOU and the terrifying admonition, "Don't Break the Oath". I want to drive all night with my evil friends and be awesome.

Now let's switch sides and be the good guys! Just reverse your reversible cloak and join ranks with the Excalibur-wielding wizard heroes of this most mystical tale — presto, power metal! You've been rocked by the DragonForce song on Guitar Hero III so you know how friggin' sweet Gauntlet-based rock and slash can be. The elder lords of this dorkus magnus genre are Hamburg's non-non-non-heinous Helloween; mandatory listening if ever you calculated THAC0.

If you prefer piracy to sorcery: Alestorm.

The village-stomping doom metal of England's Witchfinder General is what Black Sabbath would sound like if I liked Black Sabbath. (The thing about Ozzy Osbourne, let's face it, is that he is and always has been a whiny git.) More accessible to those who fear immoderate shredding, Witchfinder blew away my expectations (abstruse druggy drivel) with tight, stripped bare songcraft and gleefully calamitous burn-a-wench-drink-a-beer attitude. Smell the bitch cooking as the prior looks on with cool approbation. Cheers as well to a goddamn brilliant band name.

Most of these groups inspire a mixture of amusement and awe, but when listening to Bathory I feel an urge to fall to my knees and proffer a goat. The fourth track on Under the Sign of the Black Mark made me scream aloud in distress at what I was hearing. I had to shut it off and put on Robert Johnson just to chill the fuck out. Jeez...I felt like a Baptist schoolmarm reacting to Blue Suede Shoes, This is the devil's music! It's hard to say exactly what horrible images are brought to mind, but I think that's part of Black Mark's potency: it's an abstraction of pure terror.

To Mega Therion conjures more tangible nightmares. The second album issued down from the nape of the alpine glacier where dwell in isolation Celtic Frost, inventing and discarding the sounds that later bands would take up and call black or death, is announced by the baleful sounding of the horns of Hannibal's decimated legion. The muscular thrash that ensues is at times accented by the ringing of iron on anvil — hammer falls no doubt shaping some fell implement — and the coldblooded song of revenant whores. Lead vocals are frequently punctuated by a Hetfieldian Ooh! Indeed, Celtic Frost has been referred to as Europe's Metallica both in terms of their orchestration and unparalleled influence.

Death metal is however an altogether American folly. The sound can be described as Slayer, only more so. Frankly I'm having a hard time getting into it, at least the early stuff. As gestated in Florida by Death and Frisco by Possessed on such albums as Scream Bloody Gore and Seven Churches, the squalling infancy of metal's most brutal branch presents a serious challenge to the listener: the monotonic delivery deadens what should be very colorful subject matter. The death growl and blast beats and other raw materials are there — leave it to the Swedes to figure out what to do with them (I'm eager to visit the more melodic Gothenburg metal). But I've peeked into the later work of Death, which transitions into the frightening prospect of technical death metal, and am happy to report that upon hitting maturity in the early nineties the American scene is a well articulated monster.

Further up the tree it gets pretty woolly. Hold on to your butts.

Whiskey and Cookies

2009-09-12T12:25:00.002-04:00

Re: Communication Breakdown

Whilst wending a course over and through this Walpurgian wilderness, trying to make sense of the cacophony and put like with like, I have kept in mind a favorite passage from Chuck Klosterman's indispensable Fargo Rock City:

But what makes metal "heavy"? Good question. It becomes a particularly difficult issue when you consider that rock fans see a huge difference between the word "heavy" and the word "hard." For example, Led Zeppelin was heavy. To this day, the song "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is as heavy as weapons-grade plutonium. Black Sabbath was the heaviest of the heavy (although I always seem to remember them being heavier than they actually were; early Soundgarden records are actually heavier than Sab ever was). Meanwhile, a band like Metallica was hard (as they've matured, they've become less hard and more heavy). Skid Row and the early Crüe were pretty hard. Nirvana's first record on Sub Pop was heavy, but Nevermind was totally hard, which is undoubtedly why they ended up on MTV's Headbanger's Ball (that was the fateful episode where Kurt Cobain wore his dress, thereby providing the final death blow to the metal ideology).

Clearly, the "hard vs. heavy" argument is an abstract categorization. To some people it's stupidly obvious, and to other people it's just stupid. Here again, I think drugs are the best way to understand the difference. Bands who play "heavy" music are inevitably referred to as "stoner friendly." However, "hard" bands are not. Find some pot smokers and play Faster Pussycat for them — I assure you, they will freak out. It will literally hurt their brain. They'll start squinting (more so), and they'll hunch up their shoulders and cower and whine and kind of wave their hands at no one in particular. I nearly killed my aforementioned drug buddy by playing the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" when she was trapped in a coughing fit. Her recovery required a box of Nutter Butter cookies and almost four full hours of Frampton Comes Alive.

Sociologist and Teenage Wasteland author Donna Gaines described the teen metal audience as a suburban, white, alcoholic subculture, and she's completely correct. The only drugs that go with "hard" metal are bottles of booze (and cocaine, if you can afford it, which you probably can't if you spend all your time listening to Who Made Who). Conversely, "heavy" metal meshes perfectly with marijuana, especially if you're alone and prone to staring at things (such as Christmas lights, the Discovery Channel, or pornography).

It's tempting to suggest that "heavy" metal came from acid rock (like Iron Butterfly), while "hard" metal came from groups who took their influences from punk (that would explain Guns N' Roses). This seems like a logical connection, but it rarely adds up. A better point of schism is side one of the first Van Halen album ...

And then Chuck goes on to pontificate about the "shackled genius" of Eddie Van Halen for two pages and never really finishes his point. I happen to think that the acid/punk account adds up nicely. Heaviness is the very quick of doom metal, the parthenogenetic offspring of Sabbath. Contrast the buzzkilling lethality of black and death metal, enervated by the seed of hardcore (not heavycore) punk. It's stupidly obvious.

Kill City Nights

2009-09-08T21:50:00.090-04:00

My faith in radio was renewed last week when, whilst driving down a road that used to be the edge of town back when the town had edges and flipping stations between classic hard rock and classic album rock, I heard Alice Cooper's I'm Eighteen for the first time. Not since high school have I discovered a new favorite song via Marconi; I had forgotten such things were possible. As to how this essential track managed to evade me until now, well, these things happen. I admit to neglecting Alice Cooper, having only a peripheral awareness that Wayne and Garth were not worthy. Now I know why the Aurorans fell to their knees.
...
Most people probably think of Metropolis and Gotham City as alternate New York Cities: the Big Apple by day/night or, as their respective creators have put it, Manhattan above/below 14th Street. Well that's horseshit. A proper understanding of Americana places Metropolis nearer to the capital, somewhere on the Chesapeake Bay, while Gotham City adorns the rust belt between Chicago and Detroit. Frank Miller's Sin City belongs someplace out West.

Each of these serves its purpose in our national mythology, but I think there is room and need for another. A less conspicuous figure of the gothic Midwest as crossroads of labor and freight, situated upon the leviathan Mississippi and circumscribed by the brooding menace of the prairie. A watering hole for cowboys, truckers and sailors where the grain elevators stand sentinel and no one much looks at your face. At all times can be heard the rumble of a railyard. You can get there by heading west out of Indianapolis on I-74; else just follow the Lincoln Highway to the roller dam where the Rock River slips it to the Miss. Let's take our cue from Iggy, baby, and call it Kill City.

Heard in the roadhouses and subterranean downtown dives is the sound of rock and roll engine brakes and crane wreckage. A touch of the blues has wormed its way upriver. From out of every culvert echoes someone's last ruddy spittle and song. Have a listen: I call this sampler Kill City Nights.

[All songs made available for illicit download here — Get 'em while they're hott.]

1. What You Need — The Hookers
2. Gimme Danger — The Stooges
3. I'm Eighteen — Alice Cooper
4. Get It On — Turbonegro
5. Slicker Drips — The White Stripes
6. I Want You Right Now — MC5
7. Swing Low — The Gossip
8. Dear Hearts — Murder City Devils
9. Black Diamond — The Replacements
10. So Alone — Johnny Thunders
11. Kill City — Iggy Pop & James Williamson
12. Night Theme — Iggy Pop & James Williamson
13. Forming — Germs
14. Not Anymore — Dead Boys
15. Wall of a Song — The Whore Moans
16. T.V. Eye — The Stooges
17. Hospital — The Modern Lovers
18. So Cold — Rocket from the Tombs
19. Murder City Nights — Radio Birdman
20. Are You Ready (For Some Darkness) — Turbonegro
21. Broken Glass (live) — Murder City Devils

And I like it, love it, like it, love it

Flammen & Citronen

2009-09-07T11:20:00.020-04:00

Gangland Chicago transplanted to occupied Copenhagen, 1944: That's right, we're in thriller heaven. We've got what appears to be the entire Danish resistance (all twelve of them) operating under supposed orders from British Intelligence to assassinate key Danish collaborators and Nazi officials, all of whom claim to be double agents when least convenient for our faltering would-be assassins. Matters slightly complicated by the fact that the Brits do not recognize the existence of a "German resistance". Need I mention the inscrutable femme fatale? Trenchcoats and Thompson guns shepherd black market munitions through daylight street bombings and running board getaways; substitute bootleg and the corner pub haunts and country safehouses of drizzly Zealand make kissing cousins to Capone's drizzly Chicagoland.

Make a point to see this.

Taking Woodstock

2009-09-03T01:54:00.013-04:00

If Ang Lee wants to make a doe-eyed tribute to the transformative power of good vibrations, I guess he has the right. But me, I need to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right away, to get out the patchouli stink.

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously — all those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create; a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the acid culture: the desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

— Raoul Duke

Halloween II (2009)

2009-08-30T15:34:00.129-04:00

Artwork by Rob Zombie

Rob Zombie is one gracious motherfucker. Many directors, from John Ford to Robert Altman to Christopher Guest, are known for gathering to themselves a stock company, typically a dozen or so players with familial chemistry; Zombie seems determined to assemble the largest stock company on record. His casting credo could be "No role too big or too small" for to be filled by his ponderous mental Rolodex of befriended B- and Z-list celebrities. I don't think Roger Corman is as well-connected. (I imagine Zombie to be the bugbear that haunts the staff at Fangoria and Bloody Disgusting with feelings of fanboy inadequacy.) In a Zombie movie everybody is somebody you swear you've seen somewhere before; you can't even assume the teen meat are fresh faces: Playing Laurie Strode's friend Annie is none other than Danielle Harris — that's right, the seven-year-old girl from Halloweens 4 and 5 all grown up (and how). Zombie you magnificent bastard howdoyoudoit!?

I must relate that at one point during his audio commentary on the Halloween DVD Zombie's grumblings about how this-or-that particular day of shooting was plagued by faulty squibs and errant palm trees (he repeats a variation on this anecdote of woe for every scene, making perfectly clear that filmmaking is a monumental pain in the ass) are interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone, "Sorry, it's Malcolm McDowell..."

What's most remarkable about Zombie's growing troupe is that, unlike those of Corman, Ford etc, these actors have not been mentored and brought up by Zombie; just the opposite. The Astro Creep is above all a fan-turned-promoter. This guy doesn't even come from the film industry; he's been the frontman of a highly visible metal band for over twenty years. But to examine his career in the music biz as producer, recording artist and director of music videos is to realize that Zombie has always been an effective champion of his idols and influences. Case in point: the Zombie-produced Ramones tribute album, We're a Happy Family — take a gander at the list of artists that Zombie assembled, and note also that he got Stephen King to write the liner notes.

Now, in feature films, this Renaissance subhuman has synthesized his interests and expanded his audience as center-ring purveyor of Perdition, American Style. Zombie furnishes his pics with loving showcases of vintage rock/punk tunes and imagery and acts as a steadfast supporter (that is, employer) of the legions of forgotten, underappreciated and otherwise minor figures who have manned the trenches of cult film and television. Every time someone like P.J. Soles or — holy shit! the teacher from Head of the Class! — pops up in a Zombie cameo, if only long enough to be stabbed in the face, a rare thing is somehow conveyed: the sense that this actor is a person who is grateful to be remembered. Zombie gives each a moment of glory, a tasty line or the rare chance to play against type, and on screen they seem to be having fun. The performances are uniformly solid; these are workhorse actors, after all.

Zombie's movies are flawed. (Except Devil's Rejects...that one might be perfect.) He loves his cast and his reverent homages a bit too much, at the expense of structure and overall coherence. Halloween II is a big improvement over the first, but many of the kills still lack rhythm. Suspense is not his strong suit, but then I don't think suspense has ever been the strong suit of American pictures. Hitchcock was British of course, and what he brought to Hollywood will always be more or less an imported good. Zombie works in the tradition of Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre, my candidate for the most American movie of all time: big and punchy and messy and wickedly fun.

Texas chain saw massa-cree
They took my baby away from me
But she'll never get out of there
She'll never get out of there
I don't care, whoa oh oh

— The Ramones

My photos of the Johnny Ramone cenotaph and detail,
Hollywood Forever Cemetary

Inglourious Basterds, Part I

2009-08-26T02:54:00.005-04:00

Normally herein, when writing on a movie, I try to refrain from merely rattling off a list of the pop culture references astutely identified by yours truly. After all, that's what those discouraged trivia sections on Wikipedia are for. But I'll make an exception if I smell a potential film series. So, on the grounds that Tarantino wishes us to be informed on interwar cinema, and on the condition that we therefore restrict to cultural items of the 20s and 30s (that means no ticking off the various spaghetti westerns and military espionage flicks of the 60s that inspired QT's soundtrack and plot), I offer this splendid little program: a primer to enhance one's enjoyment of the finer points of Inglourious Basterds, in twelve parts.

1. Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (1929), aka The White Hell of Pitz Palu, is the feature presentation on German night at Shosanna's cinema, Le Gamaar. An early draft of the Inglourious Basterds script includes this bit of voiceover narration:

To operate a cinema in Paris during the occupation, one had two choices. Either you could show new German propaganda films, produced under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels. Or...you could have a German night in your weekly schedule, and show allowed German classic films. Their German night was Thursday.

Evidently Goebbels approved of this Bergfilm (a genre of mountaineering adventures popular in Germany in the 20s for their kraut-conquers-nature iconography) co-directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Arnold Fanck (pioneer of the Bergfilm) and starring the statuesque Leni Riefenstahl. Pabst is a pet topic of conversation throughout IB, even getting a nod of respect from our French-Jewish heroine, which embarrasses me as I know nothing of his work. My knowledge of Weimar cinema is mostly limited to Expressionism, whereas Pabst led filmmaking into the counter-movement known as New Objectivity (see Part X below). Riefenstahl began her infamous career as an actress — the epitome of the perfect German female, according to Hitler — and graduated to become the Führer's most favored director of propaganda (see Part VIII).

Addendum: White Hell turns out to be a stupendous adventure film — the most dramatic location photography I've seen in the silent era...flickers of Herzog.

Inglourious Basterds, Part II

2009-08-26T02:53:00.002-04:00

2. Le Corbeau (1943), aka The Raven, advertised on Shosanna's marquee, is some kind of indictment, maybe, about someone or other, perhaps, in contemporary Vichy France. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot apparently managed to simultaneously piss off the stalinist Resistance, the Catholic Church and his fascist underwriters, which makes him sound like my hero. I can attest that his later thrillers (Wages of Fear, Diabolique — made after the French government consented to restore his legal right to operate a camera in 1947) are beautifully bleak.

Inglourious Basterds, Part III

2009-08-26T02:52:00.002-04:00

3. Glückskinder (1936), aka Lucky Kids, the film Goebbels chooses to screen privately at Le Gamaar, was one of the Reichsminister's own productions as de facto head of Ufa, Germany's principal film studio. From the early draft of the IB script, Goebbels speaking:

Ahhh, "Lucky Kids", "Lucky Kids", "Lucky Kids". When all is said and done, my most purely enjoyable production. Not only that, I wouldn't be surprised, if sixty years from now, it's "Lucky Kids" that I'm the most remembered for. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but mark my words.

This screwball Frank Capra-knockoff features Lilian Harvey, one of the biggest stars of early German talkies — dubbed the "sweetest girl in the world". But Lilian was no Leni. Following her return to Germany in 1935 after a stint in Hollywood, Harvey's ties to Jewish theatre landed her under observation by the Gestapo. Indeed, while continuing to star in hits for Ufa, she secretly aided the escape of several Jewish contacts and herself fled to France, then the US, in 1940. Goebbels, in his fury, revoked her citizenship.

Inglourious Basterds, Part IV

2009-08-26T02:51:00.000-04:00

4. Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) is the best known of the few feature films of Max Linder, to whom Shosanna devotes a film festival. A predecessor to Charlie Chaplin in many respects, the French-Jewish Linder was writer/director/star of hundreds of slapstick shorts in the 1910s, appearing always as his dapper character Max. Failing to achieve comparable success in Hollywood after a traumatic tour of duty in WWI, Linder and his wife committed suicide in Paris on Halloween, 1925.

Inglourious Basterds, Part V

2009-08-26T02:50:00.001-04:00

5. The Kid (1921) is the one where Chaplin is bought as a plaything for a wealthy brat and the whole time he wears Spider-Man pajamas. I think. Private Zoller prefers Linder, but remarks that Linder never made a movie as good as The Kid.

Inglourious Basterds, Part VI

2009-08-26T02:49:00.011-04:00

6. Sergeant York (1941) is the American propaganda film starring Gary Cooper to which Zoller's Stolz der Nation is intended as counterpart. Directed by the normally dependable Howard Hawks, the Hollywood legend to whom Tarantino is often compared (by me), this treacly biopic on the most decorated American soldier of WWI, Sgt Alvin York, was shamelessly released on Fourth of July weekend to gobble up the box office in a year that should have belonged to Citizen Kane.* To hell with Gary Cooper. Everyone loves that guy for his tall handsomeness and supposed integrity, but to me he always comes off like a sullen twat with a chip on his shoulder.

* Think Rocky upstaging Taxi Driver in 1976.

Inglourious Basterds, Part VII

2009-08-26T02:48:00.005-04:00

7. King Kong (1933) is doubly represented in the La Louisiane tavern card game, both by the titular ape and its nominal co-creator, Edgar Wallace, a prolific English writer of crime fiction whose popularity in the UK was second only to Dickens. Today Wallace is best remembered for his monkey tale, although it is held that he actually contributed nothing of significance to the Kong screenplay, having voyaged to the US in 1931 to try his hand at lucrative Hollywood screenwriting only to suddenly drop dead in Beverly Hills from a bout of explosive diabetes.

Lt Hicox reports to Gen Mike Myers and PM Churchill that Goebbels, in his capacity as suzerain over Ufa, views his Jewish Hollywood counterpart to be the archetypally-meddling producer David O. Selznick, as opposed to figurehead MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer. Inasmuch as Selznick, the executive producer on King Kong for RKO Radio Pictures, was the most powerful and successful producer in Hollywood during the golden era of the studio system, and was celebrated/reviled for actively steering the creative process toward profitability, the analogy is accurate. Goebbels was a great admirer of Selznick's Gone With the Wind (1939), you know.

Inglourious Basterds, Part VIII

2009-08-26T02:47:00.005-04:00

8. Triumph des Willens (1935), aka Triumph of the Will, is mandatory viewing for students of history and film...especially if you hate the Jew! Seriously folks, this is probably the evilest thing ever. And who but the lovely and adorably misguided Leni Riefenstahl could have been handpicked by der Führer to document the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, that all the Teutonic world should share in the happy ascent of totalitarian fuckism? The unrepentant Frau Riefenstahl was honored In Memoriam at the 2004 Academy Awards ceremony, which drew, shall we say, a mixed response.

Inglourious Basterds, Part IX

2009-08-26T02:46:00.003-04:00

9. Der blaue Engel (1930), aka The Blue Angel, marks the entry of German cinema into the sound era as well as the introduction of megastar Marlene Dietrich, whom Austrian-American auteur Josef von Sternberg paired with the already-internationally renowned Emil Jannings. The drunken daddy Wilhelm proclaims that Dietrich is surpassed by Bridget von Hammersmark, but we know better. Sultry and hard-edged, Dietrich is the peerless matron of Weimar cabaret (Orson Welles wishes it was her chili he's getting fat on), and with her as inspiration von Sternberg established his legacy in film aesthetics: the very same sumptuous, evocative photographic techniques that Tarantino employs to lavish attention upon Shosanna and von Hammersmark.

The sausagey Emil Jannings appears in person at the Nazi film premiere as Ufa's top celebrity guest — indeed, bearing the Goebbels-bestowed title Staatsschauspieler (Artist of the State). His fine career was very definitely over subsequent to the fall of his patron Reich, but prior to becoming a fascist Jannings had starred in successful films on both sides of the Pond and had, in fact, received the first ever Academy Award for Best Actor, in 1929.

Inglourious Basterds, Part X

2009-08-26T02:45:00.008-04:00

10. Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), aka Pandora's Box, is the most highly regarded of the films of G.W. Pabst and exemplary of the influence of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) on German cinema from the mid-20s to the fall of the Weimar Republic. What I've gleaned is that Pabst moved away from the subjective, wildly distorted realities of Expressionism (which were well suited to the polarized ideology of the Nazi Party and its manipulative ends) toward frank and realistic depiction of social concerns and sexual taboos — roll call: drugs, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality — that prevailing conservative rhetoric preferred to demonize and blame on the Israelite. Pabst later decamped from such "decadent" material to weather the Third Reich making Nazi-approved films.

Prickly American actress Louise Brooks stormed out of the Hollywood social scene in a huff in 1928, expatriating to Germany where, in a two-year span, she made the three greatest films of her career in collaboration with Pabst. In Pandora's Box she delivers a remarkably naturalistic performance for the time period, makes a compelling case for the erotic potential of the close-up, suggests lesbianism, an arguable first in movie history, and of course wears the Dutch Boy bob-haircut popularized by Colleen Moore and herself (later revived by Mrs Mia Wallace).

Inglourious Basterds, Part XI

2009-08-26T02:44:00.005-04:00

11. Mata Hari (1931) is the sensational and lurid true! tale of the notorious Dutch courtesan and spy who made famous that place in France where the naked ladies dance and where she herself was later executed for treason. The appearance of her name on a card in La Louisiane undoubtedly refers to the Greta Garbo picture — her most commercially successful, if not best. I haven't gotten around to Garbo's catalogue yet, but I can reveal that she and Marlene Dietrich were rivals and she and Louise Brooks lovers...ooh! Otherwise I defer to Bette Davis's estimation of the taciturn Swede:

Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera.