So the World Series is over and done with. Congrats to the White Sox, for escaping that "lovable loser" category they got left sharing with their cross-town rivals after last October. Not that they were ever that "lovable" in the first place, but at least they've won something since the Wilson administration. Official time of series: 22 minutes, 40 seconds. And were it not for that 14 inning endurance match a couple nights back, the whole series would have clocked in at about 13 minutes flat.
At least that's what it felt like to me (admittedly, I was only keeping one eye on it ninety percent of the time). There must be something to the idea that the older you get, the faster (and less momentously) things seem to occur. It wasn't always this way. The first World Series I remember watching - Royals-Cards '85, Mets-BoSox '86 - were titanic, drawn-out, spectacular affairs (yeah, they also both went the distance, instead of petering out in sweeps like the last two). This one...pfft. Then again, I'm much, much more of a casual fan nowadays than I was when I was ten. No teams for me to love or hate here. Strange for me to think back to that '86 Game 6, I remember being teary-eyed on my aunt's den floor, actually praying for the Mets to come through somehow. And yet none of that really stuck with me afterwards, baseball fan-wise.

Which brings me, obliquely, to my insanely tendentious pet peeve of the last few days; Fox's camerawork/directing. Especially at moments of high drama (i.e innings 7-14 of Game 3).

Now, I'm just as religious as the next guy. Especially when it comes to taking up God's precious time begging him to just please oh please oh please I'll be good I'll do anything just let this guy get a hit/strike out/make this shot/throw up a brick/etc. I know well enough how that goes.

Likewise, I think Fox does a fairly decent, even sophisticated job of telling a story, visually, especially at those critical moments in the game. You know how the shot selection generally goes; close ups on pitcher, batter, pitcher, crowd, pull out to pitcher, here's the pitch....

What I'm saying is, I know that clasping your hands together is a somewhat natural and common reaction during tense, stressful moments - it doesn't necessarily mean you're taking advantage of God's Free Nights and Weekends plan to check in and ask for something. I'm not stating conclusively that Fox directors actually instruct their cameramen to seek out good, honest, reverant fanfolk in the stands.

Wait. It's Fox. Of course that's what they're doing.

Regardless, was it possible for them to fit in any more shots of anxious fans, hands clasped, steepled, or held to their lips in a gesture of supplication?

I can't be the only one to have noticed the parade of praying fans (though if anyone else out there did, they didn't vidcap it, according to Google image search), can I?

Really. Given the Kashmiri earthquake, the hurricane aftermaths, an imminent flu pandemic and the Metros needing to hold off the Revs Saturday night, Our Lord and Savior has plenty on his plate, without having to worry about preventing Phil Garner melting down, too.

Which brings us on to point two, slightly belated but still apt. 4 first round MLS playoff games, 5 total goals - 1 of them a game winner for the Metro - and Bigsoccer is in a completely predictable tizzy.
Single table! 6 teams (and a completely insane bye week - I just don't believe that's what you necessarily want when your team's doing well)! 4 teams! The Mexican League system! Put ALL 8 teams on the field at once for a Soccer Battle Royale!

Shock of shocks, a player from one of the top seeds (both of whom ended up losing, natch) agrees with the baying hordes that the current system sucks.

Conference leaders are awarded home-field advantage in the playoffs, but the Revolution were questioning that designation after a 1-0 loss to the MetroStars on the artificial turf at Giants Stadium last night.

''That is a home-field advantage, going away to play on that surface?" striker Taylor Twellman said. ''It should be one game at the home [of the team with better record].

Nothing personal, but like a lot of the folks on Bigsoccer, Taylor Twellman needs to shut up for a minute here. After all, no team has exemplified the "sneak in by a hair, and knock off the top seeds" over the past couple years quite like New England. It's also perhaps not the most prudent time for him to speak up, after a vanishing act in Game 1 that had us thinking that instead of his Revs shirt, he'd accidentally slipped on his US jersey (made of a fragile, gossamer-like material, it's only durable enough for ten minute run-outs in mop-up time, and would come apart at the seams if he ever had to celebrate a goal). But now TT, and everyone else, is up in arms? Get real.

The argument - or one of them, I suppose - is that the dearth of goals illustrates the faults of the current system. But if the home-and-home scheme isn't perfect (and it ain't), none of the other ideas look any better to me.
What it comes down to is, American Soccer Fan wants to have his cake and eat it too - to see a spectacular, devil-may-care style of play from both teams, and yet have games that are seen, felt, and experienced as "meaningful". That happens occasionally, but not very much anywhere in the world, much less in a league where everyone is around the same basic level, yet athletic and trained well enough to play tactically. Tactics and savvy are what win series, and as a supporter of a team that's won nothing in ten years, give me dumping the Revs out ugly over going down guns blazing in the first 40 minutes of game one - we've done that enough in the past. 0-0 ties aren't going to take Joe Sportsfan's mind off the NFL, any more than they'll draw Yankee Europoseur away from "supporting" Chelsea, but you know what? Winning like Brazil '70 isn't going to make that happen in a big way, either. We, as MLS fans, are still a long way from our Alan Ameche moment.

That won't stop a lot of people from wailing and moaning about what little reward teams get for being the top dog in the regular season?
To them I say, welcome to American sports.
Besides, in the end, the differences between MLS teams in this day and age are so minimal as to not matter - record be damned. The Rev team of June is not exactly the Rev team of October; with Pat Noonan and Shalrie Joseph hurt, Clint Dempsey a shadow of the player he was in the early going, and a backline I'm yet to be convinced by, is there a substantial difference in quality between the Metros (who merely suffered their own spate of injuries and bad form throughout the season) and Revolution?

Perhaps in the future things will be more like they were in seasons 1-6, when there was more separation between great, decent and bad, and some teams truly have the quality, the game-breakers, to go out and stylin' it. But right now, things look about as even as can be.






Just for fun, here's Kasey Keller, Borussia Monchengladbach and US, bodyslamming his own team's mascot, "Junter" after a win last week. And Junter's public statement, translated at the top of an entertaining BS thread. Luckily, counseling will probably aid in his recovery from the trauma. Shame 'Gladbach lost on FSC this morning - I was looking forward to big bad Juntie trying to get Kasey the Headbanger with a piledriver or chairshot in the post-game.


In happier days:



US legend or not, KK's no Serg Delgado.

Pictures of people around the world flipping off the ultimate crass, obnoxiously unnecessary poseur driving machine: FUH2.com

In cosmic correspondence with the evergreen, ever-growing "Hot Indie Rock Girls" Bigsoccer thread, the NY Times gives us a few hipper-than-thou ladies looking all dolled-up and fashionable. Well, sort of.

I just can't get into Keren Ann. I've tried. Sharin Foo? Yes, please!

Camera toss.

Taking a cue from those who've shown that the best way to fight something is to spotlight the stupidest iterations of it, the Saudi government takes aim at its domestic fatwa industry by publicizing some of the most frivolous, nonsensical, and outright absurd examples. Courtesy the Sunday NY Times Op-Ed page, here's one for all us heretics.

6. Do not play in two halves. Rather play in one half or three halves in order to completely differentiate yourselves from the heretics, the polytheists, the corrupted and the disobedient.

Every now and then, I go through a curious phase. I start thinking "hey, I'm a bright kid. I understand some pretty complex things. I read the papers and a whole lot of other stuff. I'm no fool. If I just put my mind to it, I could make a little money - not a killing, but only because I'll never be that obsessed with it - playing around on the markets." Usually there's no cause to speak of behind this - just something seen or read along the way, perhaps a whim. When the mood takes hold, I start reading the financial pages more, start putting those nattering CNBC shows on in the morning and pretending I'm soaking in all sorts of useful info (I'm hard-pressed to wake up before the bell half the time), start looking at thick black books in the library about understanding the options markets....yeah, it's a fever, a dumb one at that, but one based above all on the thought that it's not merely a market, it's an intellectual challenge. Yeah, right - like Ulysses or Philip Glass.

Keynes once said that investment "is intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct." Well, the problem is that I do have a bit of the gambling instinct. So I suppose it's a good thing that right now, I just don't have any money to dabble with, much less throw to chance. Instead I spent a few days reading David Denby's American Sucker. I thought it would be a nice bucket of cold water, and so it was.




Denby's the film critic for the New Yorker (in case you don't know); I haven't read enough of his reviews to know, but one of the Bigsoccer posters I esteem highly regards him as an insufferable pill. Perhaps he is, as a movie reviewer; if in the book's references to Veblen and Simmel and Aristotle he occasionally does topple over into the mode of whiny, neurotic New Yorker desperate to flaunt his intellectual muscles (that's what critics do anyway, right?) that's all the more appealing to a self-conscious Northeasterner with creative pretensions and intellectual biceps sore from flexing, like me. In short, it's a dramatized chronicle of Denby's life and the market during the last days of the dotcom bubble/onset of the crash, between 1999 and 2002. His marriage having just come apart, he wanted (so he rationalizes) more than anything to keep his Manhattan apartment, and so gets caught up trying to chase the boom to the tune of a million dollars. Those were good times back then; the stock market going up hundreds of points in a day, the instant financial celebrities, the whole damn thing looking like a glorious gold mine before the shafts started collapsing spectacularly. Don't believe I didn't get swept up in it too; there I was, a freshly minted graduate, cranking out ski reports on blustery January mornings outside New Haven and bouncing stock rumors off my fellow ski bums (is THAT not a sign that something was seriously off-kilter?) clicking over to my account to see that the couple hundred dollars I'd slid into a few chancers had suddenly blown up into $15,000 out of nowhere. Pumped. And. Then. Dumped. A little later I got out of all that with next to nothing - good times indeed.

Good times, New York City at the turn of the millennium, from the absolutely enervating blast of neon-lit energy that was Times Square, upon which Denby waxes poetic and through which I traversed every day to get to work in 2000 (and fucking hated after a few weeks) to 9/11, to the Subway Series. Good, distant times. As for Denby, I'm not sure just how much of a "sucker" he really could have been, compared to some others (even me, who literally lost pocket change); after all, how many regular guys had access to Henry Blodgett, Sam Waksal, the head of the SEC, and others of that ilk? (his portraits of Blodgett and Waksal make up some of the best parts of the book, by the way). Or maybe, knowing all those guys at the heart of it, these guys with power and information, and still losing the better part of a million dollars (on paper) really did make Denby the biggest sucker of them all.

Listen to Denby with Terri Gross here

A great revelation on the subject of greed? Probably not. An interesting memoir of a person and particular moment in time? Yes it is. As a creative person, as a thinking person, I take away from it the accounts of what this greed, this obsession strips from you: your physical desire, your sense of poetry, your equilibrium, your time. All that is inefficient stuff. Get rid of it to become richer. But he whose vocation (or avocation) involves imagination - be it movie criticism, a story, a song whatever - needs inefficiency sometimes. Needs to be not thinking, not even reading, certainly not cogitating or calculating or scheming or monitoring. Need to lay back and let your mind drift. But can you do that? What's it going to be - vegetation or accumulation?