Before iPod playlists and after mix tapes, there were mix CDs … and I made a lot of them. This periodic feature will look at some of those CDs and see if my opinions and tastes have lasted longer than the cheap CD-Rs the songs were recorded on. And yes, this is a pretty clear rip-off of Nathan Rabin’s Then That’s What I Called Music series.
Title: Songs Without Points or Counterpoints Inspiration: Lifelong affinity for bad wordplay Creation date: August 2001 Album cover: Picture of CD creator doing a bad flip cannonball into great aunt’s pool
Before iPod playlists and after mix tapes, there were mix CDs … and I made a lot of them. This periodic feature will look at some of those CDs and see if my opinions and tastes have lasted longer than the cheap CD-Rs the songs were recorded on. And yes, this is a pretty clear rip-off of Nathan Rabin’s Then That’s What I Called Music series.
Title: Benefits of a Day in the Sun
Inspiration: Unknown, sounded vaguely summer-ish
Creation date: June, 2000 Album cover: Promotional, artistic shot from Virgin Suicides movie, back when one wasn’t chastised for having a crush on Kirsten Dunst.
On most weekends, the sight of Sylvester Stallone sprinting in The Expendables like he was a reporter attempting the Albert Haynesworth conditioning test would be the highlight. But Edgar Wright’s direction in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World amazed me even more, especially the way he faithfully adapted content originally made for the graphic novel and gave it a cinematic life all its own.
Bryan Lee O’Malley should be the envy of any writer’s retreat the way his books found a kindred spirit in Wright. Rather than change things up, Wright trusts the material and himself to add even more visual layers of wit and humor to the festivities. In the same way that a good graphic novel uses every available inch as an opportunity to tell the story and earn a laugh, Wright does the same in his film.
Pilgrim will be a movie based on favorite moments rather than big-picture appreciation. It’s Sunday night now, and I’ve already read one listicle on why the movie “bombed” at the box office and the prospects of cult classic status on DVD and Blu-Ray. Call me old or defeated, but my energy for understanding why people might not love the same things I do has waned. Instead of converting or conversing, I want to share one of my favorite little moments that might have passed you by.
The film uses sound almost as a character throughout, with the type of video game cues that reward the knowledgeable and harmlessly fly over the head of people who didn’t own a Nintendo. Songs played by the characters’ band, Sex Bob-omb, make up most of the rest of the soundtrack. But at least one existing song sneaks its way on screen. Sex Bob-omb ends its set in Toronto, and Michael Cera brushes past his former girlfriend, 17-year-old high schooler Knives Chau. As any concert-goer will tell you, when the opening act ends the room fills with recorded music. In this case, the venue features “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” by Broken Social Scene just as Knives’ heart breaks once more.
Most of the time, the song you hear on screen could safely be assumed to be the result of a synergistic deal between production company and record label. But this band, a Toronto staple in a story that revels in its setting? And this song, with a melody so perfect and a title so apropos for the character?
Discoveries like these thrill me, because it gives hope that amid all the sound and spectacle there are other little connections to discover. It doesn’t immediately make for a great movie (though I did enjoy it), but the invitation to dive in to a kaleidoscopic world still ruled by purpose doesn’t have to be sent twice.
P.S. It bugged me through the film to try and place where I had seen the actor who plays the lead singer in Sex Bob-omb, Mark Webber. And a first glance at his IMDB page didn’t reveal much. But then, there it was: 2000′s Snow Day. I reviewed that movie for my college paper, and spent more time on Emmanuelle Chriqui’s burgeoning sexuality than Webber’s performance (sorry, I was 19).
The sports world gasped in delight last season when Omar Minaya, New York Mets general manager, called out Adam Rubin of the New York Daily News amid turnover and turmoil in the Mets front office. It was odd, it was random, and it was a sight seldom seen in a current baseball culture that treats teams like private businesses schooled in proper public relations.
It was nothing compared to what Charlie O. Finley could do.
On Aug. 20, 1961, the owner of the Kansas City Athletics grew tired of a local journalist’s scoops about Finley’s relocation efforts and secret trips to scout Dallas’ Cotton Bowl as a potential venue. So Finley organized Ernie Mehl Appreciation Day to “honor” said journalist. Let’s let authors Roger D. Launius and G. Michael Green explain the festivities:
“Finley ordered billboards that said ERNIE MEHL APPRECIATION DAY – POISON PEN AWARD FOR 1961, with a cartoon of Mehl sitting at a typewriter with a quill pen next to a bottle labeled ‘poison ink,’” write the authors. “He had the billboards mounted on both sides of a flatbed truck, which was driven around the playing field. As the truck circled the field the organist played ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’”
Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman takes a clear-headed, strongly researched approach to Finley’s time as owner of the Kansas City (and, eventually, Oakland) Athletics. The authors – both members of the Society for American Baseball Research – pepper the biography with similar colorful anecdotes throughout Finley’s time in baseball. But trying to capture the rationale behind the man is much like trying to win a race against Herb Washington, the track star and personification of a failed Finley brainstorm known as the professional pinch runner: near impossible, and potentially embarrassing.
The baseball fan’s memory overlooks .500. Sure, if you’re 80-81 on the last day of the season, beating up on a September call-up will give the season the benefit of a nice, round number that squares away successes and failures. But most seasons, that means no big pennant push, no World Series dreams, and no lasting memories. Great teams provide memories by the bushel, and bad teams manage to store their stink in the deep recesses of your mind (plus, there’s probably some good seats available come September). Authors write books about the great teams, the second fiddles, and even the catastrophes clad in stirrups. (The best title in the latter genre? Probably this one, which I want to read mostly for the David Clyde debacle). But .500 and just a team filling space in the standings between first and last? There is no inherent story worth writing or reading in that.
Hovering around .500 also has a snowball effect, which means that future generations will skip right over a pre-birth time period if there’s not much to learn about a favorite team. I was born in 1980, which means I have more than enough literature to teach me about the 1960s St. Louis Cardinals and the valedictory prose from the stellar 1980s squads. To the victors go the book deals. But the 1970s? Besides pictures of Joe Torre’s mutton chops in his (first) autobiography, the Cardinals didn’t offer much reason to venture back to that decade (for the decade, the team went 800-813, which is a figure worth aspiring toward only for current-day Pirates fans).
Pregame: I don’t want to overstate this, but I was privileged to be a part of the greatest parking coup of all time. The only thing that could have topped it would be the Yankees agreeing to reinstate the bullpen car and using our vehicle as Mariano Rivera’s chariot of choice.
We encountered expected traffic after an uneventful cruise along the New Jersey Turnpike. My previous trip to the old Yankee Stadium in 2003 involved me staying in Flushing and taking the subway to the game. Though I knew the new stadium stands close to Ruth’s rehabilitated old haunts, I had no idea what surrounded the stadium. Would there be parking garages? And how many first-born children would it cost for an afternoon game against the intracity rival?
Pregame: So many things look good on paper. In this way, I share a lament with Omar Minaya (but at least I don’t have the Bartolo Colon trade on my resume). Planning a trip requires at least the vaguest hint of an outline, lest ye be spending quality time in Not-So-Quality Inns. Trip instigator Nick made so many wise moves, picking the right games as the right times to make travel manageable and delegating accommodations to each of the four participants. He tried to add in one non-baseball-related event to the itinerary, bisecting the trip between Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania through the fertile crescent of burgeoning quarterbacks. And this is where the trip first changed course.
Pregame: Problem No. 343 with more than a decade of losing could very well be the lack of a strong rival. Every baseball team is happy to see you on the schedule, and every fan gives strong consideration to handing off the season tickets and taking care of that overdue oil change whenever you come to town. Anyone who has made the drive between Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania (a group we soon would join) knows that central Pennsylvania creates quite the chasm between the Phillies – owners of a pretty sorry record of their own before the last couple of years – and the Pirates.
Division rivals like Cincinnati don’t offer much, and most Cubs games result in an infestation of road warrior fans wearing Cubbie blue. But what about Cleveland? A relatively nondescript drive from Detroit to Pittsburgh revealed the relatively short distance between the two cities. It certainly isn’t considered one of the benchmark rivalries of interleague play. But maybe it should, for no reason more important that somehow there will be three wins gained between the two downtrodden teams during the series.
Pregame: The road trip began without me. As much as there might be some romance to starting a road trip all at once, there is something to be said for sleeping the extra hour and getting picked up at 6 a.m. to hit the road. The trip consisted of Nick (a college newspaper friend who I sadly inspired to work in journalism) and two of his hometown friends, James and Elmer. I had never met the two, but after having witnessed their skill in wolfing down a few dozen Dunkin Donut holes, I knew I was dealing with professionals.
Two factors resulted in the early start time: entering a new time zone and a 1:05 p.m. first pitch. But, as on any trip, the excitement of starting a journey made the first few hours fly by as the navigator in the rented Dodge Charger switched between the Sirius/XM hip hop, Alt Nation and decade stations with the speed of a hyperactive hummingbird. We breezed by the somewhat nondescript Indiana and Michigan landscape, only stopping to pick up an assortment of beverages, a collapsable cooler, pretzel chips, a football and a frisbee. You know, the essentials.
