Friday, June 4, 2010

Whither LeBron?

We’re going to be hearing more and more in the next few weeks about Where LeBron Is Going — LeBron being a terrific professional basketball player and unashamed aspiring billionaire whose contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers has expired. There’s a lot of talk of his signing with the New York Knicks because they have lots of money to offer him and New York is North America’s biggest stage. There’s talk of his signing with the Chicago Bulls because they have lots of money to offer him and are whom Michael Jordan played for with such distinction in his prime. There’s talk of his signing with the Miami Heat because they have lots of money to offer him, and Dwyane Wade — who may not be able to spell Dwayne, but who’s a marvelous point guard — and the best Cuban food in the world, counting Cuba, where the common people, under the jackboot of tyrannical communists, must subsist on boiled plantain skins and cigar butts.

I would very much like to see LeBron stay in Cleveland, as he’s pretty nearly local (like Devo and the Rubber City Rebels, who were briefly popular in Los Angeles during the New Wave scare of the early 1980s, and The Pretenders, whose old hits the Woodstock-based radio station I listen to in the car because I can’t get NPR plays entirely too often, he is from Akron), and I think it’s wonderful when a professional athlete plays his or her whole career with lots of hometown fans in the stands for home games.

At the same time, of cousre, I appreciate that the Cavs have limited financial resources and few and mediocre Cuban restaurants, and that LeBron might want to become iconic in countries in which he's not known from Adam. If so, I’d very much enjoy seeing LeBron go to Hua Hin, Thailand, or Kuching, Malaysia. In the former, I suspect he’d enjoy being shrieked at by the local beauties, who are desperate to marry any foreigner they can get their hands on, every time he steps outside. There’s a surprisingly good Italian restaurant there where Claire and I took most of our meals when we visited in 2008, and a street full of Burmese, Nepalese, and Indian tailors who will kill for the privilege of making LeBron new suits in any style he chooses. He will be a neighbor of the singer Peter Gabriel, whose appeal I have never been able to fathom, and who owns a gigantic house right on the Gulf of Siam. The weather is beastly, but I don’t suppose Akron in August is any day at the beach either.

In Kuching, where the weather is even more oppressive (it’s on that part of Malaysia that shares the island of Borneo with a couple of countries whose names I’ve forgotten), there’s a fantastic sushi bar downstairs in the air-conditioned subterranean mini-mall where anyone staying at the local Hilton spends much of his or her time because it’s simply too hot and humid to go outdoors, at least before the afternoon’s torrential downpour. The sushi goes round and round in little boats on a sort of circular conveyor belt, and what fun it is to glimpse an especially delectable-looking piece heading round the bend toward you, especially in view of how very cheap it is compared to London or even Los Angeles.

When you venture out of the city, you’re apt to encounter locals in Osama bin Laden T-shirts (lots of Muslims, you see), but my understanding is that LeBron isn’t very political, so maybe it won’t bother him.

If he wants to stay closer to home, I’d suggest Nashville. They don’t presently have an NBA team, but I suspect one could be put together quite quickly if LeBron says that’s where he wants to play. I’d love their calling it the Nashville Cats, after the Lovin’ Spoonful song.

The main appeal of the city, of course, would be its iconic status as the epicenter of country music. Becoming country’s first bona fide black superstar might be every bit as stimulating a challenge for LeBron — who I have no reason to believe can sing — than winning an NBA championship, and would almost certainly involve fewer elbows to the nose. Michael Jordan won several NBA championships, and Kobe Bryant may wind up with no fewer, but has either ever recorded a duet with Reba McIntrye or Garth Brooks?

Think about it, Lee.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

The Bane of Youth Sports

Well, I guess that’s the end of my career as a Little League manager.

I’ve been wanting for decades to manage a youth team, but something always got in the way. In the 70s it was my abuse of various substances, and in the 80s because I was too focused on my career. Just before the 90s began, we had the Loma Prieta earthquake, and it took me the better part of the decade to get over that, and then in the new century I moved to London, where baseball was virtually unheard of, except by a bunch of beer-swilling Aussies who convened every Sunday afternoon on a nearby playing field and “chatter” in the annoying accents of their homeland, and boy, did that not sound right!

I could have coached basketball, of course, except that all I know about it is that I love watching it on TV and used to enjoy playing it at Fairfax High School after my daily run around the track, even though the place was crawling with over-achieving nudniks intent on instructing me in the fine points of the game in spite of the fact that I didn’t want their instruction, and who regularly snickered, “He can’t go left.” I didn’t think I’d be much of a football coach, as I can’t draw up complicated plays or squint very convincingly, and hockey was something people played somewhere else in the solar system, somewhere very far from Playa del Rey.

My first official act as manager of the Southern Dutchess Little League’s Bouquets (the team’s local sponsors, who pay for their uniforms and what-not, get to pick their names, and we were sponsored by Hirsch the Florist, over on Route 52) was to tell them I didn’t give a damn about winning. My view is that the bane of youth sports is that parents, trying to get their kids to make up for their own undistinguished athletic pasts, fill the kids’ heads with pernicious crap like Winning isn’t the best thing, but the only thing. I told the kids that the odds of any of them getting to play baseball for a living were only very slightly better than those of their parents winning the lottery, and that if I had my way, we wouldn’t even keep score, but play entirely for fun.

The next day at practice, I was surrounded in the parking lot by four dads who were sure that their boys were destined to play for the Yankees. I hadn’t been out of my SUV for 10 seconds before they’d blackened both my eyes, broken my nose, broken some ribs, and knocked out two of my front teeth, but I couldn’t allow any of that to deter me.

When I used to play tennis rather than hoops at Fairfax after running, I’d often hear parents screaming bloody murder at their children’s soccer games. Once I even got into a little shouting match with a particularly abusive coach, who asserted that reducing his 10-year-old players to shamed tears was good for their characters. Just after I got the Bouquets job I put a little ad in the Pennysaver for a marksman, and heard from several young Iraq veterans with sniping experience. With my own money, I hired two of them to pick off any adult they observed berating a player or umpire during any of our games. We lost two dads and an uncle that way at our first game, against the Exterminators (sponsored by East Fishkill Pest Control), and you should have heard the league office, according to whom it was a parents’ God-given right to behave like perfect assholes at youth sports, and who did I think I was?

Al Capone was eventually imprisoned for tax evasion, and what really did me in wasn’t the snipers, but my insistence that at the ends of games — when teams traditionally chant, Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate (or, as a team’s smartass invariably puts it, sincerely hate)? [Other team]! [Other team!] Yay!, and then glaringly, begrudgingly touch fists with their counterparts — each of us would embrace each of them as he might a brother, and say, “Way to go, big guy!” One of the dads spread a rumor that I thus was priming my players to march in Beacon’s annual Gay Pride parade, and that was the last straw.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Coffee With Tipper Gore

Tipper Gore and I first began seeing each other in the mid-80s after I was the only major music journalist in America to endorse the Parents Music Resource Center. Even though I thought their name needed a lot of work, I — who’d become a dad myself mere months before — honestly believed it perfectly reasonable that potentially objectionable music should be labeled. I wrote a column to that effect in Creem, America’s only rock and roll magazine that billed itself as such, and Tipper wrote me a letter thanking me for my support. I’d have been more impressed if she’d written it by hand on posh official stationery of some sort, rather than printed it out on a primitive mid-80s printer, but was grateful nonetheless.

Thinking they’d publish it in the Letters to the Editor section, the boys at Creem marked up the original, and that rather pissed me off. Would it have taken them more than nine seconds to make a photocopy? My blood really came to a boil after Al was elected vice president three years later, as I imagined that the letter in its pristine form might have been worth countless tens of thousands to a collector. There was no eBay yet, at least that I knew of. I don’t think there was even an Internet.

When Tipper and Al and the kids visited San Francisco for a family vacation in June 1991 (some place for a family vacation, what with homosexuals brazenly sodomizing each other right out in the street, but judge not lest ye be judged, and it wasn’t as though I wasn’t raising my own daughter there, albeit in the sleepy, fog-shrouded Sunset, where nearly everyone was heterosexual and Chinese), Tipper phoned to ask if I might enjoy meeting for “coffee”. I was in a committed relationship with the koala keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, but my thinking was that if she could spend a weekend with Jon Bon Jovi, I could have “coffee” with Tipper Gore. Her nickname notwithstanding, I never saw her leave a server more than 15 percent, and it was commonly closer to 10.

She wasn’t really my type. You have read here many times that, while most of my friends have thought in terms of debauching large-breasted cheerleaders with dimples, I have traditionally wanted my gals pre-debauched-looking, without dimples, but with lavish eyeliner. Tip, as she encouraged me to call her, positively exuded wholesomeness. She reminded me of the sort of girl back at Santa Monica High School who was forever whining at you about your deficient “school spirit.” But she was a little hellion in the sack, and for the next couple of decades, we enjoyed long afternoons of joyful depravity together whenever we could sneak a few hours in each other’s cities.

She confided, during the 2000 presidential campaign, that Al was every bit as boring as he appeared, but good-hearted, and I’d have voted for him if it hadn’t been quite fashionable at the time to vote instead for Ralph Nader. After the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president, Al apparently staved off despair by hurling himself body and soul into researching and writing about climate change, and I began seeing more of the lonely Tip, at least until I relocated to the outskirts of London in mid-2002. She was beside herself with jealousy, though she’d made clear she had no intention of ever leaving Al publicly, and railed at me like a woman scorned in a succession of emails I am considering publishing in an ebook, but not until you’ve bought more of the already-published ones, depicted above. She began seeing an aide to the Undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare — a much younger man — and wrote me emails in which she reveled, to make me jealous, in how he didn’t yet have a single furrow in his forehead, and how virile he was.

I suspect that by now, what with the social problems that our country faces, her handsome young aide’s brow is no longer so pristine, his testes so prolific. I wonder what part he played in her and Al’s breakup. In any event, I wish them the best, every one, even Ralph Nader. I am not now, nor have I ever been, Chinese.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Jeerers at Mullets

I very nearly got a mullet earlier this year. It would have given a certain kind of person such pleasure to be able to nudge his or her companion and marvel, “Lookee there, dude’s got a mullet! It would have given me even greater pleasure to inspire that behavior in that sort of person — the kind who, in reveling in his or her own hipness, exposes his hopeless lack thereof.

As I have probably written here, I met the uncrowned king of these people in 1997 while passing out flyers for my theatre company at an Absolut-sponsored event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Thinking it would make people more likely to accept my flyers, I took at one point to hollering, “Absolut vodka shown to cause drunkenness in laboratory animals!” Quoth the uncrowned king in sneeringly declining a flyer, “Well, duh!”

Such people love to make fun of others’ bygone fashion choices on the basis of old photographs. They’ll see, for instance, a photograph of a young woman with big hair and shoulder pads of the sort popular in the mid-80s and snicker, “What the hell were you thinking?”

A very cheap shot, that, and stupid. The most exciting thing that fashion — and rock fashion in particular — does is emphatically refute that which proceeded it, and nothing’s more emphatic, and thus exhilarating, than extreme. Thus, it stands to reason that any early or especially zealous adapter of a new style is going to look ridiculous to those clinging in terror to the refuted one. All the hundreds of little Ziggy Stardust clones one saw in the big coastal cities in the early 70s looked preposterous in comparison to, say, Crosby, Stills & Nash — but infinitely cool to one another. And whose was the greater courage, the greater panache — that of the mindless unwashed in their unstyled long hair, patched jeans, and T-shirts, or the glam kids?

This idea applies transracially, of course. Show a modern hip hop kid a photograph of the Jacksons, say, circa 1973, and he’s apt to die laughing at their huge globular hair, as he certainly would at the frilly eyelinered dandies who proliferated in the wake of Prince. Or leave music entirely and think about basketball, in which the now-standard baggy shorts favored by Michael Jordan looked comical in comparison to previous generations'.

“What the hell were you thinking?” would make sense only if there were such a thing as an absolute in fashion, and I’m not sure there is. I doubt anyone could persuasively argue that women’s hair didn’t go through a dreadful stretch in the early ‘50s when short-and-wavy was very voguish, or that the (extremely!) brief maxidress craze of around 1970 wasn’t a crime against humanity, or that nearly everyone doesn’t look better in flared trousers (as they make the legs appear longer, the hips slimmer, and the feet smaller). I am well aware, though, that various New Wave trendsetters circa 1980 vilified such trousers as monstrous because they'd become icons of earlier musical movements.

The most fashionable person, of course, is the one who wear what he or she feels most gorgeous in with confidence in spite of what Vogue or GQ or Esquire or jeerers at mullets say. In this regard, we need to tip our caps to the author Tom Wolfe, who’s been wearing the same self-designed attire for around 50 years now, and always looking fab in entirely his own way.

This is not, of course, to imply that I forgive his mindless condemnation of alternative sexuality.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

More on Middle Initials and Transsexualism

I have probably revealed here many times that I was substantially premature, and spent the first several weeks of my life in an incubator. My mother told me that when I was allowed to come home, I ate quite frantically, as though I’d become accustomed to being fed impatiently. To this day, I eat more quickly than anyone I know. Do you think this anecdote makes me look fat?

What I probably haven’t revealed here is that I was one of a pair of identical twins. My dad was a struggling medical illustrator at the time of my birth, and my mother a reluctant young homemaker, and they didn’t see how they’d be able to keep both me and my brother Joseph, so they took us over to the home of their next door neighbors Wayne and Irma Schultz, who they knew had been trying to conceive, and asked if they’d be interested in one of us. Transracial adoption wasn’t nearly as fashionable in those benighted times as it is today, and Wayne was apparently bitterly opposed to having a Jewish child, but Irma prevailed, and there went Joey, as I probably would have called him in childhood.

We have spoken before about my deep loathing of middle initials when used solely to make the user appear to be of the managerial class, but I don’t think I’ve admitted to a comparable level of annoyance at women (and it’s nearly always women who do it) who call their husbands by the names on their birth certificates, though no one else on earth does. You may, if you’re old enough — and let’s not kid ourselves about your being abundantly old enough — recall that the actress and folk rock singer Cher never referred to her second husband, Mr. Allman, as anything other than Gregory, though he was nothing but Gregg to anyone else on the face of the earth.

A decade or so after that, she gave an interview in which she kept referring to her male co-star in the movie she was making as Nicky, though I have never heard the second worst actor of his generation referred to as anything other than Nicolas (Cage). It was apparently Cher’s intention to suggest that she had very special relationships of the sort you or I could never understand with these guys, and it made my flesh crawl, though all was forgiven when she strutted around with defiant sluttishness in spite of her age on that aircraft carrier in the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Va-va-voom!

I further applaud Cher — who I always thought was trying, whether she knew it or not, to sound like Al Jolson — for supporting her first child’s decision to change sexes. A lot more people than is commonly supposed spend their whole lives feeling trapped in the wrong body, which can’t be a pleasurable feeling. In the wine country, Claire and I knew a transsexual called Gina, a checker at a Safeway in affluent Marin County, who had something like six children, three of them triplets, and clearly adored them. To hear her wife tell it, though, Gina was just trying to be difficult.

I think about her often when I hear New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi refer to outfielder Brett Gardner as “Gardy,” which makes me cringe for its stupidness. But I suppose I should be grateful that we don’t in this country infantilize monosyllabic surnames, as the Brits so love to do. Wattsy, you see, or Jonesy.

Be all of that as it may, I realized I had an identical twin only after I got heavy into Facebook around 18 months ago and Joe sent me a friend request. His profile photo showed him to look a lot like me, but without the artificially blond hair and the deep furrows that care has etched into my once-handsome punim. He’s some sort of middle manager in a corporation, and uses his middle initial — D — in what he blithely admits is an attempt to appear more promotable. When we met for lunch, he turned out to eat very slowly, and all we could surmise is that he’d somehow been less premature than I, though of course we were born mere moments apart.

The S in Harry S Truman didn’t stand for anything. You’d have thought a US president wouldn’t have felt it necessary to try to appear more promotable. But those, of course, were simpler times.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

Monday, May 31, 2010

Johnny Saves the American Pastime!

In theory, I really do love the World Cup. I love that in the opening rounds, we’ll see such matchups as Serbia against Ghana, Paraguay against Slovakia, the Netherlands against Cameroon, and South Korea against Nigeria; I’d venture to say that a large percentage of the players wouldn’t even have heard before the so-called group draws of many of the countries against which they’ll be playing. I love that the whole world watches, and that it isn’t the richest countries, or those with the largest populations, that commonly win, but the likes of the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Brazil.

What I wish I liked a lot better was actually watching the games.

There’s no question that extraordinary athleticism is required to be a great player of what we call soccer and the rest of the world calls football. You need quickness, agility, balance, stamina — and courage. A great player can do remarkable things with his feet; just watch someone like Lionel Messi of “Argentina” (he’s been a virtual Spaniard for something like a decade, playing for Barcelona) “dribble” through and past half a dozen defenders. Just watch another great player perform a 180-degree bicycle kick, Many of the skills involved closely resemble those required in basketball, but in football there’s no place for lumbering behemoths of the sort you see in the NBA. Tiny men (Messi’s nickname is The Flea) are at no disadvantage whatever to much bigger ones.

But how very boring the game can be to watch. Honduras, say, kicks the ball way the hell down the field, but a Swiss defender intercepts it before a Honduran forward can reach it, and kicks it way the hell down the field, where — you guessed it — a Honduran defender intercepts it and…kicks it back down the field. And so it goes for 20 minutes, for 30, for a whole game. This isn’t to say that there isn’t lots of deft passing, but rather that actual scoring threats are as infrequent as they are thrilling. The rest of the world loves a 1-0 game. Americans nod off in the 32nd minute.

When I would discuss the differences between basketball and football (soccer) with my former British neighbors, they’d scoff at the idea of a 120-116 basketball game. I acknowledge that, just as you might argue that the scoring in the one is too infrequent, you might argue no less persuasively that in the other it’s entirely too commonplace. But I’m here today to assert that there are actually far more moments of great excitement in a basketball game, more more requited (that is, score-changing) feats of athleticism, than in a football game.

I propose to prove this with the help of a team of neutral scientists who will measure how many times in the respective games spectators get thrilled, as indicated by galvanic skin response and other physiological tests. Five bucks says that there are at least twice as many major thrills in the average NBA or even major college basketball game between nearly equal teams as in an international football game.

Teams of neutral scientists may contact me at johnmendelssohn@gmail.com. This is a non-compensated, temporary position.

It’s late on a Saturday night, and I’ve just enjoyed two episodes from the second season of Friday Night Lights, and also have a wonderful idea for baseball, which I used to live and breathe as a child and teenager, but which I now find numbingly boring. In the American League, there are already designated hitters. I propose that both leagues also institute a designated defender — chosen by the other team. I suspect in most cases, a team would elect to require the opposing team to play its most inept fielder at shortstop, the key infield position, and what a lot of laffs would surely ensue!

It’s fun to watch terrific defensive plays, but not so much fun at all to watch moderately difficult ones executed with the day-at-the-office competence that characterizes major league competition. Forcing every team to take the field with its own latter-day Marv Throneberry would solve all that in a hurry. A lot of traditionalists will pooh-pooh the idea, of course, but in an age when the modern ball park resembles nothing so much as a gigantic penny arcade, with endless music and zany mascot cavortings and gaudy video, they haven’t a leg to stand on.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]