A weekly (in theory) list of opinions, links, hobbies, DVDs, unearthed records, and potentially more.
1.Pat McEnroe fills in on PTI. Sitting in the hot seat and coming up with a witty opinion about everything on the planet doesn’t look like an easy gig, but PMac held his own. He had a good partner in Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, who has been a regular guest host, but McEnroe’s tip-of-the-tongue knowledge of all sports, and his ability to articulate it at rapid-fire, was impressive. Especially for a jock.
2. Wow, Bergman and Antonioni in one day—kind of like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The movie world just got a little less titanic. Of the two Euro art-film masters, I’ve always liked Antonioni’s stoical documentary style more than Bergman’s flirtations with madness—Scenes from a Marriage was just too much. But in the last year I watched Persona for the first time since college. I hadn't been able to get my head around it when I was younger, but this time I loved every intense minute (not that I can say I fully comprehended it). It’s a pure, controlled, minimalist piece of cinema about an actress who stops speaking and her nurse. At the end, you can’t believe it’s just an hour and 20 minutes.
3. That film was made in 1966, the same as Antonioni’s breakout, Blow Up. (Moviemaking has never been more adventurous that it was that year!) How can you knock a flick that features the best rock and roll scene anywhere, and closes with the strangest, deepest, and, to some minds, most ridiculous tennis scene you can imagine (click link at top)—Antonioni was a good player himself. (If you're bored and want to see it faster, you can always go with Benny Hill's
But Blow Up was just the most famous of his films; everything I’ve seen has a cold philosophical brilliance and strong empathy with its characters (especially female characters), particularly the early Girlfriends and the Monica Vitti-Alain Delon masterpiece L’Eclisse. Antonioni was a master of long, lyrical final scenes, and you can find many of them on You Tube.
PS: Nobody did wind blowing through leaves like Antonioni (listen to it at the beginning of the Blow Up tennis scene and in the L'Eclisse scene).
4.Bill Walsh 1931-2007. Read about how he changed—really changed, for good—an entire sport in Michael Lewis’The Blind Side. Walsh invented the modern offense as the coordinator for the lowly Cincinnati Bengals in 1968. His quarterback there, Virgil Carter, couldn’t throw the ball accurately beyond 20 yards. So Walsh just created a system that didn’t require him to do that. It would become the West Coast offense, win five Super Bowls for the San Francisco 49ers, and make a humble PA kid named Joe Montana into a god. Reading this book, you realize that he owed it all to Walsh.
5.The Tour de France. See a partial explanation for the continued shenanigans in this Slate article. Don’t all these positive tests make you wonder about Lance Armstrong just a little bit more? He was beating all the cheaters without doing it himself?
6.Michael Vick/William Rhoden. The latter is a New York Times sports columnist who has hyped and defended Vick for years. A few years ago he claimed the Falcons QB would change the nature of his position. When he didn’t, Rhoden then claimed that Ben Rothlisberger leading the Steelers to a Super Bowl win proved his point anyway—mobile QBs were the future. Talk about moving the goal posts! More recently, Rhoden has partially excused Vick’s problems and behavior by saying he’s a victim of bad advice from the people around him. Isn’t the real problem that Vick himself never was willing to give up the rebel image and lifestyle?
7. The Washington Post’s Cheney files. Have you read these? They’re long but worthwhile. Love the part where Bush decides, for once, to rebel against his vice-president’s authority by nominating his friend Harriett Miers for the Supreme Court despite a total lack of qualifications. Cheney sends out his buddies to submarine her, and Bush caves.
8. Pros and wood racquets: How would that look today? An interesting, kind of frustrating attempt to find out is made at TENNIS.com.
9.“Cindy, Incidentally”: My CD player and IPod are both broken, so it’s back to the record player for the time being. That’s not a bad thing, because I pulled out this Faces song sung by a young Rod Stewart, back when he was pretty good at pretending to be a real person. As in his best stuff from that time, he reminds me there was once a word used to describe certain cool guys: gallant. Now it’s what? “Player,” “toxic bachelor”? Rod was a player, but he was likeable too. Favorite line: “Cindy, incidentally, baby I ain’t puttin’ you on.”
10.Talk to Me. This Don Cheadle vehicle will never be mistaken for Antonioni; it’s pure corn by comparison. But by the end it’s also pretty moving as far as corn goes. The real protagonist is not Cheadle’s Wildman DJ Petey Greene, but his friend and manager, Dewey Hughes, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He tries his best to take the street out of Petey, because he just can’t believe that someone, no matter where he came from, wouldn’t want to make it in the white world. Here's the real Petey talking watermelons.