Sunday, February 19, 2012
Good Will Hunting
This is not a movie review blog, but nevertheless, I was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling and I couldn't get this movie out of head. I never get tired of watching it and I know why. I heard Robin William's voice (I'm channeling him , I swear) saying something to the effect "and those are the really good bits, sport." He was, of course, speaking to Matt Damen's character in Good Will Hunting about the little peccadilloes that make a relationship so endearing: the farts in the night, the parts of us that we don't show openly to others, but when in love, show unabashedly to our other. Robin Williams was spot on in this role. That he won an academy award should be no surprise. That he didn't win Best Actor award is a crime. Yes, Matt Damon was the protagonist and he and Ben Affleck won the Best Original Screenplay award for an astoundingly warm and nuanced script. But Robin Williams does more than play a character, he throws his character's life, his character's total history in your face every second in every move, every question he has about himself. Yes, the script that Damon and Affleck created make that possible, but the delivery is the clue. This role is one of the great lights of American acting. Williams is so deep into this man that his improvisations speak with the characters voice. And I do not doubt there were improvisations. There is plenty of brilliance to go around here and when a script is good as this and a actor absorbs a role so deeply as does Williams, it would be a huge mistake to not let him run with his role at times and that is what Damon and Affleck do.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Jardineros
Jardineros
You have to love the Spanish word that Mexicans gave to outfielders in baseball. Jardineros. Outfielders are that. They, and not the pitchers, not the batters even, not the infielders for God´s sake...they are the heart of baseball. They plow the outfield. They nurture their space and wait patiently.They check the wind. They look to see where the sun is in the sky, where the clouds might surprise them, or where the light standards for their artificial garden don´t throw enough light on their land. They are the gardeners.
Baseball is a came of patience and one wonders how the hell Americans ever could have claimed it their national pastime. And the truth is they don´t any more. We have too many distractions. We are not who we were and I do not say that nostalgically. It's over between baseball and us. Football rules! Basketball, soccer, tennis, ...hell beach volleyball, all now have a place and there is neither the time nor the patience for baseball. And I get it.
We are a frenetic lot. When one sees how baseball appeared in the nineteenth century, I still marvel at how it took hold among us. But really the architecture created the attachment. We were looking for an organization and it provided a form and structure that settled our fears after a very frightening and debilitating civil war.
But it is also important to remember that we were a nation created at a time when modern nations were created. We came to be when the idea of the imagined community that Benedict Anderson talks about was in fact being realized in many places in the world. So to us, this little off-shoot of an English game played on stoops in front of nineteenth century American tenements, that involved an individual, but also a team's concerted effort to win in life, was our imagination of an ideal. We were gardeners, tending our fields, but trying to grow something monumental at the same time. And of course we had fucked up.
We had created a nation based on an ideal that many of us in reality did not believe in. We were a pseudo-people, who claimed one thing and did another. But the game we invented, and rounders and cricket notwithstanding we did invent it, was not a game at all in the end. It was real. It was our true creation. The Constitution enshrined slavery of individuals, Native Americans were driven from their homes, and when we stretched from ocean to ocean we decided that was not enough. But baseball knew better. Nine innings (more if you need them, but you have to pay the peanut man overtime), three outs an inning,...and three strikes and you´re out! No sudden death overtime. No penalty shots. No shoot outs. And no ties (unless it goes to the runner). It is our meme, as Richard Dawkins would say and I for one think it may be the greatest gift we have ever given to humanity.
You have to love the Spanish word that Mexicans gave to outfielders in baseball. Jardineros. Outfielders are that. They, and not the pitchers, not the batters even, not the infielders for God´s sake...they are the heart of baseball. They plow the outfield. They nurture their space and wait patiently.They check the wind. They look to see where the sun is in the sky, where the clouds might surprise them, or where the light standards for their artificial garden don´t throw enough light on their land. They are the gardeners.
Baseball is a came of patience and one wonders how the hell Americans ever could have claimed it their national pastime. And the truth is they don´t any more. We have too many distractions. We are not who we were and I do not say that nostalgically. It's over between baseball and us. Football rules! Basketball, soccer, tennis, ...hell beach volleyball, all now have a place and there is neither the time nor the patience for baseball. And I get it.
We are a frenetic lot. When one sees how baseball appeared in the nineteenth century, I still marvel at how it took hold among us. But really the architecture created the attachment. We were looking for an organization and it provided a form and structure that settled our fears after a very frightening and debilitating civil war.
But it is also important to remember that we were a nation created at a time when modern nations were created. We came to be when the idea of the imagined community that Benedict Anderson talks about was in fact being realized in many places in the world. So to us, this little off-shoot of an English game played on stoops in front of nineteenth century American tenements, that involved an individual, but also a team's concerted effort to win in life, was our imagination of an ideal. We were gardeners, tending our fields, but trying to grow something monumental at the same time. And of course we had fucked up.
We had created a nation based on an ideal that many of us in reality did not believe in. We were a pseudo-people, who claimed one thing and did another. But the game we invented, and rounders and cricket notwithstanding we did invent it, was not a game at all in the end. It was real. It was our true creation. The Constitution enshrined slavery of individuals, Native Americans were driven from their homes, and when we stretched from ocean to ocean we decided that was not enough. But baseball knew better. Nine innings (more if you need them, but you have to pay the peanut man overtime), three outs an inning,...and three strikes and you´re out! No sudden death overtime. No penalty shots. No shoot outs. And no ties (unless it goes to the runner). It is our meme, as Richard Dawkins would say and I for one think it may be the greatest gift we have ever given to humanity.
Whitney Houston and Why One Note is Worth a Thousand Words
I went to hear her sing at the Park West, as did many others I knew, sometime after the first album had come out. After that tour, no venue was big enough. I doubt that a singer in Chicago, or for that matter any musician in Chicago, hadn't heard that record and sung or played half of the tunes. Many were there that night. The one criticism I remember of that album (though I didn't totally buy the criticism) was that it sounded too tame, too controlled, that somehow they didn't let her sing. The arrangements were, no doubt, pop. The Michael Masser production was evident everywhere: lush strings, simple grooves, and yeah..not too much extemporaneous licks from Whitney. Maybe there was some truth to those observations. After all, she came out of the church. She had to be able to just let go. When you heard her in Lincoln Park that night there was no doubt she could cut through the music like a knife through butter when she wanted to.
But she also did have another, very subtle side to her voice that you could hear on the album - a texture that I had never really heard before in my life. It was a clear, bright, airy sound that she could twist in perfect intonation and leave in your ears, while she wandered off somewhere else, and she had the ability then to slip in and out of it at will. It was evident that night at the Park West, a venue that allows for more finesse, while still offering a room where a singer could belt. And that night she did belt. Man...did she. If there were any there who hadn't thought she could, they got taken to church real quick. You could feel the waves knocking people' s hair back (even what I had of mine back then). That is what people had said they didn't hear on the record. My theory, and I'm not the only one who thought this, was that maybe they (Masser, Clive Davis or whoever) just didn't want to take too many chances. She was young and they wanted to make sure this album stuck in the ears of everyone. They wanted to be sure Whitney was a pop star from the beginning. Well, they got their wish. I don't know if she got hers.
In the end it isn't that record that now rings true to me. She was always much, much more than that and what she gave everyone that night was something you cannot ever replace in music..the memory of a performance that you can still hear in your ears over twenty-five years later.
But she also did have another, very subtle side to her voice that you could hear on the album - a texture that I had never really heard before in my life. It was a clear, bright, airy sound that she could twist in perfect intonation and leave in your ears, while she wandered off somewhere else, and she had the ability then to slip in and out of it at will. It was evident that night at the Park West, a venue that allows for more finesse, while still offering a room where a singer could belt. And that night she did belt. Man...did she. If there were any there who hadn't thought she could, they got taken to church real quick. You could feel the waves knocking people' s hair back (even what I had of mine back then). That is what people had said they didn't hear on the record. My theory, and I'm not the only one who thought this, was that maybe they (Masser, Clive Davis or whoever) just didn't want to take too many chances. She was young and they wanted to make sure this album stuck in the ears of everyone. They wanted to be sure Whitney was a pop star from the beginning. Well, they got their wish. I don't know if she got hers.
In the end it isn't that record that now rings true to me. She was always much, much more than that and what she gave everyone that night was something you cannot ever replace in music..the memory of a performance that you can still hear in your ears over twenty-five years later.
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