Upcoming Teaser

I am working on a long-ish post about our recent trip to Vegas.  I would also like to write something about the Republican Primaries, except that they sadden and weary me so much that it's hard to talk about them without becoming, uhm, sad.  And weary.  But let me say that I predict not only an Obama victory but a crushing and overwhelming one.  In a way, I think that's what the party needs.  It's time for a come to Jesus moment--a real serious stock-taking, on the part of party elders, about where they are going.  They need to wander in the desert.  And there, in the desert, they should leave Rick Santorum.  And Newt.  And Sarah Palin.  And Rush.  And all the many, many knuckleheads who have made the party the sad spectacle that it is today.

But, Vegas was great, and grand, and food-orific.  I made friends with some blackjack pit bosses, embarrassed my wife by my good-natured boisterous vodka-tonic-y-ness, and somehow managed to win money playing poker AND--miracle of miracles--blackjack.  And I got to eat fried nuggets made of bone marrow.  So.  That's something, right?

The Golden Ticket Has Arrived

Next weekend the wife and I are heading to Vegas for a weekend vacation.  While there, we will eat dinner at E, a foodie mecca created by the international superchef, Jose Andres.  (The e, by the way, has an accent aigu on it--as does the 'e' in 'Andres.'  I can't make the accent appear on this interface, however).

Because I want the experience to be a surprise, I have purposefully tried to keep myself from learning too much about the food they serve at E.  I know its inspiration is essentially Spanish, and I know that it's a redoubt of molecular gastronomy.  Other than that, I'm a blank.

Still, I know its reputation (otherwise, why plan a trip to Vegas to eat there?) E is discussed on food websites in the same tone I imagine Spanish conquistadors must have once used when talking about Cibola.  E, in fact, is not even really a "restaurant"; it's really a single room hidden inside another restaurant (Jaleo, a tapas place in the Cosmopolitan).  It only has room for eight people in it, so it only has two servings per night.  A meal lasts about three hours; it's mostly single bites (as I understand it) and comprises about 15-20 courses.  Obviously the food is said to be sublime.   Andres trained under Ferran Adria, the genius madman behind El Bulli, the restaurant most foodies consider to be the best in the world.  (Considered, I should say: El Bulli closed for good last fall.  Apparently now the best restaurant in the world is in Norway.  Or Denmark?  But I digress).

To get a reservation at E, I had to stay up till midnight on the day exactly one month before the night we wanted to go, and send an email requesting a reservation.  Once we got the reservations we were sent, in the mail, our golden ticket.  So, next Saturday, the 25th, I'll hand our ticket to the hostess at Jaleo and be invited into one of the inner sanctums of American eatery.  It should be quite something.  Any damn restaurant that sends you a golden ticket in the mail--that's one I support.

Michael Jackson's Immortal

This is the letter I just sent to Cirque du Soleil.

Dear Sir or Madam

I’m writing to tell you about my recent experience at Immortal, the Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil, which I saw last weekend at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.  Let me say first that this is eighth Cirque du Soleil-related performance that I’ve seen.  I’ve seen, and enjoyed, O (three times), Ka (twice), Love, and…a touring one that had a loose South American theme (Samba?  This was many years ago).   I have recommended—proselytized, you might even say—your shows to family and friends on numerous occasions.  I essentially compelled my parents to see O against their will (they’re not big ‘show’ people).  I am, in other words, a fan.

Which made watching Immortal all the more painful.  I have no interest in insulting you or your staff.  Putting together a full-length musical performance can’t be easy, and certainly you’ve done it well in the past.  Immortal, however, was offensively bad.  It was beyond disaster.  The choreography was lame and uninspired.  The circus aspects of the show, such as there were, felt random and disconnected; my wife suggested that the show’s director had pulled out-of-work performers from other Cirque du Soleil shows and told them to do whatever tricks came easiest.  I couldn’t even close my eyes and listen to the music; the audio quality made it impossible.  It sounded as if someone had hooked up a dozen loudspeakers to a cheap stereo, shut the whole thing inside a high school gym, jacked up the volume and left it alone.  And the routines!  The dancing chimp!  The life-sized white glove, which evoked nothing so strongly as the Hamburger Helper spokesman.  The creepy insistence on foregrounding the Neverland ranch.  The shot of Macaulay Culkin in the video montage.  You couldn’t even say that the taste level of the questionable; it was only bad—irrevocably bad.

Beyond all the many passing failures, the show suffered from a failure of conception.  Michael Jackson was not a prophet.  He was not a social visionary.  His ideas, such as they were, were banal and unexceptional (peace is better than war, love is better than hate, the environment is important, eetc.)  And yet for reasons I can’t begin to understand, Immortal focused not on the early Michael Jackson, the singer and dancer whose work inspired us all with feelings of freedom and joy, but on the later freaked-out Jackson, the one who inspired only pity—or something worse.  Why anyone attempting to produce a show that ostensibly paid tribute to Michael Jackson would decide to take away minutes from  “Beat It”, “Billie Jean” or “Smooth Criminal” and give them to eight-minute renditions of “They Don’t Give A Damn About Us” or to a seemingly endless array of synth-drenched laments for the sorrow of the Earth’s future is more than I can understand.   At the very minimum, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the legacy and significance of Jackson’s work.

Having said I didn’t intend to be insulting, I’ve just reeled off a list of what I guess might seem like insults.  Unfortunately, there’s no other way I can describe what it was like to experience Immortal.  And frankly, however insulted you may feel reading this, is nothing compared to how my wife and I felt by the time we left the show.  We felt as if we’d been victimized, as if we’d been conned.  Because Immortal was an insult; it was an insult to Jackson’s fans; it was an insult to Jackson’s legacy; and it was an insult to the thousands of audience members who paid out hefty sums to watch this debacle.

Included in this letter are my tickets, as well as the receipt showing the amount of purchase.  I mail these in order to help your staff process my refund.  Yes, refund.  I have never before asked for a refunded ticket price for a live show.  (I’ve never even walked out of a bad movie!)  But in the case of Immortal, I have no choice.  When I pay to see entertainment, I hope for brilliance—but I expect only competence.

Immortal did not come close to meeting that expectation.   It was a tacky, cynical, slapdash affair in no way worthy of Michael Jackson’s name—or your own.  

Just A Heads-Up

I can't discuss it in any detail without feeling sad and ill, but if any of you out there are considering, even casually, attending the touring company version of Immortal (Cirque du Soleil's celebration of the music of Michael Jackson) DO NOT DO SO.  Take your money, set it on fire, and then poke yourself in the thigh with a fork for an hour.  You'll have a better time.

And this is from someone who likes Cirque du Soleil (usually) and love Michael Jackson.

The Guru Said Keep Walking

So my question about this is... well. What do you make of it?

I found it on a poker site, of all places. A blog by a fairly serious player; he talked about how he watched it every day to motivate him to train and prepare for poker tournaments.

So then I watched it and the first time I saw it I thought: YES. ROCK ON. And I decided to submit my name to the NFL combine.

By the way, the voiceover is from some guy who styles himself The Hip Hop Preacher. He has quite a Facebook page if you're interested. The video, on the other hand, is from a East Carolina running back named Giavanni Ruffin. He has a twitter feed (I looked into all this on YouTube) that is sort of dispriting and inspring at the same time.  Apparently he's trying to impress scouts in February and make the NFL.

Okay.

My point here is: I don't know, really.  I don't know if this is genuinely inspiring or just kind of...over-manipulated rubbish. I do like the way it builds, though.  And the long pauses in the audio track.  So that you really do want to know what happens to the young man who goes out to the beach.

"Most of you people would rather sleep than be successful" That's funny. And true.

And I like the way he cites Fifty Cent, as if that sort of is the ultimate trump.  If Fifty adheres to this philosophy, what more is there to say?

I don't know. I don't usually watch stuff like this--stuff with so few Muppets, I mean. But this kind of stayed with me.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

Probably worth watching in full screen.

I Am Not Issuing Another Post

Until at least five people respond to the Muppet Video below. At least watch it. And say you have.

Because I know that I, for example, rarely watch videos that are on blogs. And that I've been a bit lazy, putting up lots of non-original material.

But this is non-negotiable. Five people must post some post that indicates that they've seen it, that comments on some aspect of the video that they couldn't otherwise comment on, without having seen it. ("Mama??")

I'm through playing. Word.

I Was In A Funk Today

And then I saw this.

It gave me hope.  I wish Beaker were a friend.  I would want to spend as much time with him as I possibly could.

Tuesday, January 24

This comes from Book I of The Histories, by Herodotus:

[Persians] are accustomed to deliberating on the most serious business while they are drunk, and whatever decision they reach in these sessions, it is proposed to them again the next day by the host in whose house they had deliberated the night before.  Then, if the decision still please them when they are sober, they actd on it; if not, they give it up.  Conversely, whatever provisional decisions they consider while sober, they reconsider when they are drunk.

The first part, I can believe.  The second I doubt.

Ernest Givens Lives

For an old Houston Oiler's fan, this article on the team's notorious "Run and Shoot" offense is irresistible. It name-checks Haywood Jeffries, for God's sakes. How can it not be worth your time?

A sample:

The run-and-shoot was supposed to be dead, at least in the NFL. The offense (at least one form of it) was conceived by Glenn "Tiger" Ellison back in the 1950s, while Darrel "Mouse" Davis developed its modern form throughout a four-decade coaching career that has touched nearly every level of football imaginable. The offense had its moment of glory in the NFL in the early 1990s. Back then, the Detroit Lions, Atlanta Falcons, and Houston Oilers (and the Seattle Seahawks, extremely briefly) ran the 'shoot, which featured four wide receivers and one running back on every snap. The offense used no fullbacks and no tight ends.1 These teams had mixed success. The Lions won 12 games in 1991; the Falcons won 10 and made the playoffs twice during their 'shoot days. But the NFL team that most exemplified the run-and-shoot, in both its glory and its shame, was the Houston Oilers. The Oilers made the playoffs in seven straight years with the run-and-shoot (and fielded a top-10 offense in each season), and quarterback Warren Moon blitzkrieged defenses with his four-receiver aerial assault. But the Oilers never reached the Super Bowl, and they managed to be on the wrong end of the greatest playoff comeback in NFL history. Against the Buffalo Bills in the 1993 wild-card round, Moon threw four first-half touchdowns, but he wasn't able to burn the clock and the defense collapsed in the second half of a 41-38 loss. The Oilers became part of an even more ignominious moment the following year, when Buddy Ryan, Houston's defensive coordinator, punched the team's offensive coordinator in the face.  Ryan was no fan of the run-and-shoot, which he called the "chuck-and-duck." 

Eventually, a consensus formed around the league that a team couldn't win championships with the run-and-shoot, and teams abandoned the offense. Without a tight end or fullback, they said, the 'shoot was "finesse only" and lacked the physical element necessary to win.3 But not everyone agreed. When Hall of Fame safety Rod Woodson heard Houston had given up on the offense, he said: "Tell the owner thank you, and tell the front office thank you. The run-and-shoot got the Oilers where they are, and I think defenses all over the league are going to be very relieved when they hear about it." 

But the run-and-shoot went out of fashion for a reason. In a modern NFL full of tight ends and multiple formations, an offense that limits itself to one personnel grouping — whether it's four receivers and one running back or two running backs and a tight end — can't be successful. The run-and-shoot forced the Oilers, Lions, and Falcons to protect their quarterback with six players; without multiple looks, today's defenses would develop schemes to destroy those protections. Indeed, what killed the run-and-shoot wasn't the playoff failures or the perceived lack of physicality, but rather the zone blitz, which was designed to defuse the kind of six-man protection schemes that run-and-shoot teams used on every down. For a while, at least, everyone around football seemed to agree that the run-and-shoot had died and would never come back. 

But the run-and-shoot never left.

For My Wife

Who will love this.  So do I.  I laughed out loud watching it.  It took me a few seconds, after it started, to figure out what was going on.  But then I got it.  And it's pretty damn brilliant. Recommended in full screen.

"that, in fact, I think, is the great use of suffering"

One of the pleasures of reading Poetry magazine are its excellent critics.  This month's issue features two outstanding critical essays, one by Clive James on the relationship between poetry and craft and another, by Adam Kirsch, on the recently-issued second volume of T.S. Eliot's letters.  I've read four or five reviews of the letters so far and Kirsch's, I think, is the best.  

Of course, Eliot himself is the star of the review (as he should be).  I love both of these excerpts--the first for the power of the imagery ("regarding the world placidly through the fumes of an apertif"), the second for its wisdom and insight into human experience.  In two quotes, you see why Eliot was such a great poet (and why Kirsch is such a good critic).

"...it has often been noted how much Eliot had in common with Henry James—he noted it himself in his self-justifying letter to his mother. Prufrock, one might say, is a younger version of Lambert Strether, the protagonist of James’s novel The Ambassadors—a sexless man of letters, the editor of a mild New England literary magazine, who comes to Europe in late middle age and realizes that he has wasted his life. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” Strether famously exhorts, and it is a mistake that Prufrock fears he cannot avoid: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”

What made Eliot a great poet was the fact that in the crucial moment, he did find the strength to force a crisis. One of the most valuable and exciting achievements of theLetters is to document that moment, which came in the summer of 1915. After studying at Oxford, Eliot was expected to return to Harvard and finish his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. But as he wrote to his college friend, the poet Conrad Aiken, the prospect weighed on him like spiritual death:

I dread returning to Cambridge . . . and the people in Cambridge whom one fights against and who absorb one all the same. The great need is to know one’s own mind, and I don’t know that: whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children’s future; or save my money and retire at fifty to a table on the boulevard, regarding the world placidly through the fumes of an aperitif at 5 PM—How thin either life seems!

He was willing to do anything, even wreck his life, in order to save it, as he hinted to Aiken in an earlier letter:

Does anything kill as petty worries do? And in America we worry all the time. That, in fact, is I think the great use of suffering, if it’s tragicsuffering—it takes you away from yourself—and petty suffering does exactly the reverse, and kills your inspiration.