Ladies & Gentlemen, Your New AARP Coverboy!

Dylan turned 65 last Wednesday. Happy belated birthday, Bobby.

Movie: Game 6

"People are dependable! Life is good!"

At the very least, Game 6's scene of Red Sox fan Nick Rogan (Michael Keaton) watching the final, fateful half-inning of his beloved team's historic collapse in the 1986 World Series is worth the price of admission. Though it's been well documented thousands of times by thousands of New England masochists (But really, is there any other kind of New Englander?) and the outcome is inevitable nearly 20 years after the fact, watching Rogan's pitch-by-pitch reaction on screen -- his manic swings of anxiety and relief and elation, to the final, it-all-comes-crashing-down horror -- during that infamous, eternally bloody Caravaggio of chokes that now hangs in The Museum of All Time Chokes, is truly a viscerally excruciating experience for any baseball-loving moviegoer. I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat the entire time, loving every second of it.

I was elated when the Parkway Theater screened this movie, not only because it's an intelligent, funny flick about art and baseball and, well, life in general, but because Don DeLillo, one of my all time favorite authors, wrote the screenplay. And it has his fingerprints all over it. The story structure is borrowed from his latest novel, Cosmopolis (Or more accurately, it's the other way around. Apparently DeLillo wrote the screenplay years ago.) -- a tale about a man who spends a large part of a single day in the back of a car (This time it's cabs instead of a limo.), preoccupied with getting a haircut. It's just that this day happens to be both opening night of Nick Rogan's new play and Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

Anyway, Nick ultimately ditches his play to watch the historic game in a bar, and a lot of things happen in between. It's not a perfect movie -- there's too much of that overbearing PORTENTOUS WEIGHT OF HISTORY smack that DeLillo likes to peddle in his work -- but, like all of DeLillo's books, the movie has that succession of pitch perfect moments, characters and phrases that steadily accumulate to forgive any flaws the work of art as a whole possesses. And if half of all American movies had a mite of the moxie and magic that this one has, we wouldn't be wondering why so many movies suck.

Rooting for Barbaro

"What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and heat of the blood that ran in them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise."

--Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

My mind has been on, among many other things, the fate of Barbaro ever since I saw that colt's hindleg bent at a gruesome, incongruous angle during the Preakness this past weekend. In thoroughbred racing, one's initial reaction, after feeling that involuntary frisson of pure horror from vicarious, bone-snapping pain, of course, is, "I hope to God that they don't have to kill him."

The New York Times recently ran an interesting, if oblivious, article asking why so many strangers would deign to care about Barbaro, or for that matter, any animal they weren't immediately connected with.

The obvious fact is that we care about strangers all of the time (US Weekly, anyone?), whether they be animal, vegetable or mineral. We're attracted to their beauty and passion and their achivement and to the fickle kleig lights of fame and fortune. Barbaro possessed all of these things in spades, drawing us to him, but ultimately his prodigious, breathtaking speed and charismatic magnificence weren't enough to prevent a small, single misstep that might just conclude his brief and brilliant life with a precipitous bullet in the brain.

It's cruel and abitrary and, well, implacably fragile.

How naive is it to think that Barbaro's story couldn't be interpreted as an immensely catharatic saga? Doesn't it fill you with terror and pity? Doesn't it move you in any way?

In this respect, Barbaro is not "just a horse." And I pray to God that he gets to live out his days walking on a repaired leg and munching on clover and sugarcubes, being the big stud he deserves to be.

Talk Dirty To Betty

Two friends of mine have transformed their old college sex column into a new World Wide Internet sex column. In fact, their motto could be something like,

"Tell Betty: The sass is back -- with 5 years of real world experience."

I can say without any reservation that it's going to be great. You need to check it out:

http://www.tellbetty.com/

High Times, 12, The New Yorker, 4

Apparently, there's a softball league in NYC comprised of the area magazines, because Gawker reports that the High Times' Bonghitters defeated The New Yorker, 12-4, in Central Park. It was the stoners' 8th straight win over the literary luminaries. Looks like the Bonghitters will take winning ways to Vanity Fair, whom they play on the 25th.

Can you imagine? Updike struggling with his limp-wristed pitching, Malcolm Gladwell collecting the dandelions in right field and Seymour Hersh exasperatedly punching his sweatstained mitt repeatedly, shouting, "C'mon, you fucking pussies! We're not even high! Let's play some goddamn softball for a change!"

http://www.gawker.com/news/softball/media-softball-high-times-smokes-the-new-yorker-172805.php

Is it wrong...

...to hope that Kyle Lohse (slant rhymes with "douche") blows his start tonight in Texas, so that he gets bumped from the rotation in favor of Liriano? Does this make me a bad fan? A bad person?

Over the years, I have given Kyle so much, and he has given nothing but excruciating exasperation and temper tantrums. And yet he still makes $4 mil a year.

Not that I want our boys to lose, mind you. Just give me a 8-6 comeback Twins win, where the boys rally from the six run-deficit Lohse (slant rhymes with "douche") gave up in 2 1/3 innings.

Then we would all win.

We Now Return to Our Scheduled Program

Okay, so the self-imposed blogging hiatus is ov-ah. Had an epic (and I mean EPIC) vacation to Philly/NYC--details on that to come--a couple of weeks ago, which fortunately spared me from watching my Twins falter through their late-April Baatan Death March, though was still constantly checking my phone for text messages of scores and updates in Brooklyn bars, much to the chagrin of college buddies and The Little Lady (I swear, this team is going to kill me. BTW, big thanks to Pauly & Ames for their vigilant, albeit outraged and deflated, messages).

Other than that, it's been a week or so of the post-vacation re-acclimation shuffle, shucking and jiving through the avalanche of paper at work, as well as chasing the muse at the dining room table, working on material for the upcoming spring/summer fiction contests.

Expect some more substantive posts very soon...