The old fanly connection

Roger Angell, sighing

Writing in the September 21, 1998 issue of The New Yorker, as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were finishing slugging their ways across the country, stadium by ear-splitting stadium, Roger Angell couldn't help but sound a note of regret and loss. As I've remarked before, Angell rarely wrote confessedly, but always personally, with nostalgia and sentimentality held, for the most part, manfully at bay. I've been reading my way through Angell's baseball essays for a while now—the pile of his uncollected pieces since the mid-1960s is cheerfully enormous—and if there are common threads of discontent running through his fan's love for the sport they are faults found generally with modernity, not with the game itself: talent-diluting expansion; too many night games; escalating salaries; owner posturing; television's breathless, 24/7, non-news coverage of a quiet, august game that, relative to the bombast and spectacle of football and basketball, is essentially modest.

Something about Big Mac and his enormous feats troubled Angell, even as he was cheering the good vibe that the home-run record chase produced. Instinctively, he looked backward, and here perhaps nostalgia and sentimentality get the better of him. "One can’t quite blame sports television and its technical feats for our current state of total sports distraction," Angell sighs,

and perhaps we shouldn’t blame ourselves, either. Perhaps this full-court blather over the home-run record has become more important to us than the games themselves, which suggests that the function of baseball now is simply to be historic, to remind us, through feats and statistics and the unchanging dimensions of the game, that we are still connected to Roger Maris and to Babe Ruth and their times—times that may have been simpler or more vivid than our own. It’s also possible that we are preoccupied with the sideshows because we can no longer find the old fanly connection between ourselves and the extremely rich, extremely large young men we see out on the field. Back when the players stayed in place from one year to the next, they appeared to represent us on the field—not just our town but the way we would play the game, too, given a little break. Now they are lost to us, like our grown-up children-—admirable or awesome at times, and anxious to please, but members of a different species. 

Eight months later, as a new season was commencing, Angell's gloom had barely lifted. "At this hopeful time of year, we should perhaps put off further discussion of the ironbound or dollar-bound competitive imbalance of contemporary ball," he writes in the May 17, 1999 issue,

except to note that money now entirely controls the free-agent market, the amateur draft (thanks to signing bonuses), the international-talent market (how else did Hideki Irabu and Orlando Hernandez wind up with the Yankees?), and the great majority of trades. Indeed, one of the few competitive attractions this summer may be to watch what happens to the Dodgers, habitual non-winners in the National League West, who have raised their payroll to seventy-nine million dollars, the most in their league, since their acquisition by Rupert Murdoch last March. Their signing of the pallid, hard-throwing Kevin Brown, last seen with the Padres, who was the No. 1 free agent on the market last winter, showed the lordly manner as well as the depth of their ambitions. Counting bonuses and incentives, Brown will receive a hundred and five million dollars for a seven-year contract (he’ll be forty in its last season), plus twelve free private-jet flights each summer for his family, to L.A. from their Georgia home. Based on his performance last year, Brown’s stipend breaks down to fifty-eight thousand dollars for each strikeout and four-hundred and seventeen thousand dollars for each game. Like other fans, perhaps, I try resolutely not to think in these terms once the season starts—he players themselves never do—but the numbers explain why the Yankees, whose average salary of over three million dollars is the biggest in baseball, will win almost all those close games with the young Blue Jays or Twins, no matter how gallant we find them.

It is this form of denial, coupled with the: instability and anonymity of home-team lineups from year to year and the proliferation of divisions and franchises, that tells us fans how our need for records and monuments could have begun to replace our joy in the games and our eagerness for action. Don’t Wait till next year—what good will that do?—but keep us watching a little, because something new or never before seen could happen here, and we’ll be part of it. This is duller than our old passion, but it hurts less and doesn’t require as much attention. Wait long enough and Mark McGwire will hit one out or sign your wristband.

Those players out there on the field don't seem to be the same players I remember as a kid in the Polo Grounds: their bodies and wallets and distance from us are too large, too spectacular. How human, these Y2K complaints; the kid eye-rolling at Gramps Angell today will be lamenting the passing of his Good Old Days soon enough.

Maris

Abandoned, Ctd.

House and garage. West Lincoln Highway. DeKalb, Illinois.

Long-term memory, we hardly knew ye

Essayists, take note:

Roger Angell, bringing a homer back in view

In the middle of "Homeric," an essay in the May 27, 1991 issue of The New Yorker about notable longballs, Roger Angell laments the corrosive consequences of video replay. Complaining about overplayed sports highlights was hardly novel in the 1990s. Angell was 70 when he wrote this piece, but he wasn't arguing simply from old-fogeyism or nostalgia. Throughout his writing career—and throughout his career as a baseball fan—Angell has been sceptical of inevitable modern, cultural infringements on the sport, from too many televised and night games in the 1960s, to Free Agency and noisy ballparks in the 1970s, to bloated salaries and owner/player wrangling in the 1980s, to expansion and dilution of talent in the 1990s, to player/umpire egos in the 2000s. Throughout his somewhat grumbling, resentful coverage of The Barry Bonds Spectacle several years ago, Angell winced at the explosions of digi camera flashes at ballparks—and the man remembers Babe Ruth and the Polo Grounds, too. He's been around. 

He writes affectingly in "Homeric" about the potential dangers of watching too many replays, about their addictive, but treacly, agains and agains. "Like other long-term baseball writers," he reports, "I have had a firsthand view of many of the other celebrated late-season and post-season home runs of the past three decades." But, sighing: "in common with every sports fan, I have noticed that their very celebrity—in particular, their numbingly repeated reappearances in video-clip on my home screen—eventually drains them of meaning and emotion."

Carlton Fisk’s twelfth-inning shot in Game Six of the 1975 World Series now feels like Jimmy Stewart’s tearful late homecoming in It’s a Wonderful Life; and similar fabulous blows, such as Kirk Gibson’s previously cited game winner in the 1988 Series, Dave Henderson’s stunner against the Angels in the ’86 American League playoff, and Bucky Dent’s little sailer into the screen at Fenway Park which destroyed the Red Sox in a one-game playoff in ‘78, are in danger of similar Hallmarking. Only a deliberate effort of memory and imagination—a private revisiting of the scene, so to speak—can sometimes bring them back into view for an instant or two.

The blurring of these thrilling moments because of overexposure is a shame, but there is probably no help for it. Hollywood historians still bemoan the loss of hundreds of early movie classics that fell to dust because they were shot on unstable nitrate film, but I have sometimes perversely wished that our sports footage could suffer the same fate, so that we might again learn to rely on memory as an depository for our most precious games. One night at Yankee Stadium last month, when the White Sox were in town, I asked Carlton Fisk whether that ceaselessly replayed scene of his gyrations along the first-base line as he watched his Game Six homer go up and out on that long-ago night had not come to replace his own memories of the moment, and he said, “You know, I’ll bet you haven’t viewed it more than four or five times, for just that reason. I turn it off or go out of the room whenever it comes along, because I want to keep it fresh in my head. I try not to talk about it or to answer questions about it, either. I want to keep hold of the memory of what it felt like, as opposed to what it looks like on the screen. Maybe there’ll come a time later on when I can be relaxed and think about it again on my own, but right now it’s best to keep it enclosed."

Meantime, he said, he can dwell on a homer he smacked on August 17th last year—to set a new all-time record for all White Sox hitters, and simultaneously break Johnny Bench’s record for most home runs by a catcher. Making a new memory may be the best trick of all.

Nice. I like when Angell skirts perversity—it doesn't happen too often. Ironically, his perversity is closer to a kind of purity. He didn't really want the Major League Baseball cache of highlights to turn to dust, or for millions of kids to have been deprived of Mel Allen and This Week In Baseball on Saturday afternoons; he wanted to challenge himself, and us, to recall favorite moments down the years via the vagaries and pleasures of memory, filtered through sentimentality and scepticism alike. This—in the 21st century, where many fans at games are watching vast stretches of innings through their phones, recording to be able to watch later, and where instant replay in the game is controversial—is sound advice.

So, enjoy. (Repeatedly.) But watch at your own risk:

Hazlitt's Cranky, and Correct

"Mama Loved The Ways Of The World"

I have an essay in the new The Normal School about country music and the surprising dearth of songs about strippers. What gives? I touch on a couple versions of the early-70s' camp classic "Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl"—one of my all-time favorites—plus young Troy Hess's "Please Don't Go Topless, Mother" and Drive-By Truckers' "Go-Go Boots."

From the essay's opening:

In the canon of country music there are countless odes to broken hearts, depraved dalliances, and dark taverns, but precious few numbers about go-go dancers and the men who gawk at them. Consider the road toward or away from redemption walked by the man trailing hot pants and knee-high boots, his ageless conflicts between the secular and the sacred, his wallet and his God, his dancer and his wife. Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard defined a triumphant country record as “Three chords and the truth”; I’m surprised that more Music City songwriters don’t pen odes to the truths embodied in scantily dressed women who move in and out of bright lights. Bump and grind, high heels and a downcast gaze: a lurid imagination easily admits both the nude dancer and the man in the Nudie suit staring up at her. Yet the tradition of country music about go-go dancers is, well, skimpy.

~~

Some music for your reading pleasure:

Jo Anna Neel, "Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl"

Betty Jo Bangs, "Daddy Was A Preacher, Mama Was A Go-Go Girl"

Southern Culture On The Skids, "Daddy Was A Preacher But Mama Was A Go-Go Girl" 

Troy Hess, "Please Don't Go Topless, Mother"

Drive-By Truckers, "Go-Go Boots"

~~

 ~~

The Normal School currently publishes twice each year, Spring and Fall. Get a two-year subscription, or four issues for $20, here.

A backyard with nothing in it except a stick a dog and a box with something in it

The last thing the world needs now, probably, is more commentary on Jack and Meg—but a decade later, this song still sends me. Among the things I love about rock and roll is its ability to surprise, the same great songs, riffs, hooks, or melodies renewing themselves, and us, by some magic formulae beyond most of us. I still hold my breath during the opening of the Kinks' "Til The End Of The Day," awaiting Ray Davies's delirious announcement, the rush of the London club vibe circa 1965, the band's electric, stomping entrance after the opening slashing chords, as excited at the prospect now as I was when I first heard the song as a kid.

Yesterday, "The Hardest Button To Button" from 2003's Elephant came on shuffle, and the demanding, insisting thwump thwump thwump thwump of Meg's floor tom grabbed me by the neck via my chest cavity, as it always does, and I submitted, as I always do, to listening again to the twisted tale of this dysfunctional 21st Century family unit:

We started living in an old house
My ma gave birth and we were checking it out
It was a baby boy
So we bought him a toy
It was a ray gun
And it was 1981
We named him "Baby"
He had a toothache
He started crying
It sounded like an earthquake
It didn't last long
Because I stopped it
I grabbed a rag doll
And stuck some little pins in it

Now were a family 

And we're alright now

We got money and a little place

To fight now

We don't know you

And we don't owe you

But if you see us around

I got something else to show you

Now it's easy when you don't know better

You think it's sleazy?

Then put it in a short letter

We keep warm

But there's just something wrong when you

Just feel like you're the hardest little button to button

I had opinions

That didn't matter

I had a brain

That felt like pancake batter

I got a backyard

With nothing in it

Except a stick

A dog

And a box with something in it

The hardest button to button

It's the scary crash into "family" that kills me every time. He snarls the word—the assertion—and his voice sounds like regret and acceptance meeting warily in a private place, and then he and Meg push everything over with nerve and amps and every association and connotation we have with family is upended, made fun of, scorned, embraced, restated, soiled, elevated, ignored, clung to, subverted, and made necessary again. An infant with a ray gun and a rag doll full of pins. An earthquake. You think it's sleazy? Frame that at your Sears Portrait Studio. Because this family lives mostly outside the frame. You know/ignore them.

At its best, rock and roll reminds us that there's something fresh or sinister behind nearly every idea with which we've grown comfortable. It's over in three and a half minutes. Afterward, you have a new idea of "family" to deal with.

Here they are tearing it up onstage in 2004:

 Image via Interpreting the Gothic.

DeKalb, March.

Over across carry bear

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficiency verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. (José Ortega y Gasset)

The Stupefaction Playlist

I was happy to be asked by Tim Broun over at Stupefaction to come up with a playlist. I chose some of my favorite b-sides, from The Killer and Nick Lowe to Joe Tex and Hoodoo Gurus. At the site there's a Spotify playlist and some YouTube clips of the songs.

PLAY LOUD.

01. Big Blon’ Baby - Jerry Lee Lewis

02. The Greatest Lover In The World - Bo Diddley

03. Mr. Pitiful - Otis Redding

04. If Sugar Was As Sweet As You - Joe Tex

05. Sittin’ On My Sofa - The Kinks

06. Twelve Months Later - The Sheep

07. Concentration Baby - Dave Clark Five

08. I See The Light - The Music Explosion

09. Tally Ho - The Detroit Wheels

10. Feels Like A Woman - The Troggs

11. Truth Drug - Nick Lowe

12. Everything's Turning to Gold - The Rolling Stones

13. Babysitter - The Ramones

14. You're My Favorite Waste Of Time - Marshall Crenshaw

15. I Really Want You Right Now - Lyres

16. Be My Guru - Hoodoo Gurus

17. Batteroo - The Planet Rockers

18. Loyola - The Dictators

19. Jolene - The White Stripes

20. Remember The Ramones - The Fleshtones

"What is startling about memory"

Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

What is startling about memory is its willful persistence and its obsession with detail. “Hold on,” it says. “Don’t lose this." The other day l unexpectedly found myself seeing the shape of the knobs at the top of the low iron posts that stand along the paths of Central Park—a magnolia bud or perhaps an acorn—and then, long before this, the way such posts looked when they were connected by running strands of heavy wire, which were slightly bent into irregularity and almost loose to the touch. Going down a path in those days you could hook the first joints of your forefinger and second finger over the darkly shining wire and feel it slither along under your touch. In winter, you could grab the wire in your gloved or mittened hand and rush along, friction free, and make it bounce or shiver when you reached the next post and had to let go. But what’s the point of this, I wonder: what’s my mind doing back there? A week or so before my father died, in his eighties, he told me he’d been thinking about a little red shirt that he’d worn when he was four or five years old. “Isn’t that strange?” he said.

       —Roger Angell

Obsession(ing)

A Wordle of This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began, out now from Orphan Press.

Do the math.

Abandoned, Ctd.

Disused railroad bridge, P.A. Nehring Forest Preserve. DeKalb, Illinois.

Roger Angell, Cesar's Inn, Harvey: it's where baseball lives

"We have an available shuttle bus to Miller Park."

I've been on a Roger Angell bender of late, as previous posts have made clear. Along the way I've written about Angell's marvelous ability to "turn the game slightly" (after Wallace Steven's definition of metaphor) and to see baseball in large ways; what I've neglected to celebrate are Angell's narrative gifts. For decades he's been a fiction editor at The New Yorker, and in his best baseball essays he brings to bear a fiction writer's eyes and ears for sensuality, mood, significant gestures, physical description, and telling narrative details—this week my favorites are his 1996 descriptions of Joe Torre: his "rumpled face" and his "prairie mortician's gait and glumness when he headed for the mound to remove a pitcher." Angell's storytelling gifts are are pleasingly on display in "Streakers" from the November 29, 1982 issue of The New Yorker, one of his annual season recaps. (He excerpted the essay in Game Time, the most recent of his baseball books, published in 2003). My favorite parts of "Streakers" dramatize the afternoon that Angell spent at Cesar's Inn, a small bar/hotel in Milwaukee, during the World Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and the St. Louis Cardinals (the Cards won the Series in seven). At the risk of indulging what Phillip Lopate has elsewhere decried as the romanticizing of the saloon, I'll admit that, as a committed Fan Of Bars, especially of the townie-dive sort, I love the way Angell extols the simple virtues of Cesar's and of its locally-famous owner (Audrey Kuenn, wife of Brewers manager Harvey Kuenn), neither sentimentalizing the patrons nor condescending to them.

The passage is so alert and fun and well-written and packed with evocative details that I'll quote the bulk of it:

I belonged to the Brewers by now, in short, and my affection for the team and the town had been secured, if that was needed, by a noontime visit I had made the previous day to Cesar’s Inn, the West Milwaukee tavern owned and operated by Audrey Kuenn; Mrs. Manager. The place is only a few blocks from County Stadium—you can see the banks of lights from the front door—so it’s convenient for Harvey; the Kuenns live in the back of Cesar’s, with their rooms separated from the bar by a Dutch door, the top half of which seems to be open at all times. The bar is a low, smoky, exceedingly cheerful room, with cardboard cartoon cutouts of Harvey’s Wallbangers stuck up behind the bottles, and the roar of Brewer talk among the patrons competing with the big, electric jukebox—a good jukebox: the J. Geils Band’s “Angel in Blue,” Alabama’s “Mountain Music,” Eddy Duchin’s old “Time on My Hands,” Smokey Robinson, the Andrews Sisters. There is a pool table jammed into one half of the lounge, and the lights on the wall are imitation baseballs, with little crossed bats underneath. Photos and paintings of Harv everywhere, of course. When I was there, the folks at the bar were youngish men in T-shirts and mustaches and old high-school-team windbreakers and emblazoned industrial caps; they mostly drank Miller’s, but one man near me at the bar was working on Hennessy’s cognac with Pabst chasers. The clientele at Cesar’s Inn turns up in bunches after the shifts change at big manufacturing plants in nearby West Allis—Harnischfeger (overhead cranes) and Rexnord (chain belts) and Allis-Chalmers. The late shift sometimes includes men from another neighborhood plant—Gorman Thomas or Jim Gantner or Pete Vuckovich—in for a brew after a night game. On busy nights, Bob McClure and Mike Caldwell have been known to slip behind the bar to help out.

            I introduced myself to Audrey Kuenn, a trim, extremely pleasant woman in blue slacks and a tan blouse, who told me that she had experienced a few moments of doubt when Harvey was named manager, back in June, because she didn’t want to lose her close friendship with the Brewer wives, who call her Mom. But it didn’t change; they all went on sitting together in Section 3, just as before, and screamed the team home. The Kuenns have been married for eight years (each was married previously), and now I asked Audrey if she’d ever seen Harvey play ball. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “It used to be the old Braves who played in this park, you know, Eddie Mathews and Joe Adcock and the rest”—the Braves won a World Championship in 1957 but abandoned Milwaukee in 1966, moving to Atlanta and leaving a very bitter feeling among local fans for their perfidy—“and I never got to see any American League players.”

            “He was something,” I said, and she said, “I’ll bet. But I don’t think I could have stood it, watching Harv—I get so excited.”

            Our conversation was conducted in fragments, because Audrey Kuenn had bar business to look after, and the phone kept ringing (the Kuenns are in the book, and one of the callers that morning was a man who told Audrey to tell Harvey to tell Gorman Thomas to keep his eye on the ball; “I sure will,” she said), and the Kuenns’ three dogs—Nicky and Jingles, the boxers, and Ugsly, the pug—seemed a bit restless, too, and no wonder. Then the bar talk and Series talk went up a notch or two when a young man and his girlfriend came in, bringing along their boxer, name of Harley, who had a half-embarrassed, dog-in-a-paper-hat look, because he had been painted Brewer blue from head to foot and nose to tail (blue hair spray, it turned out), with a tan “1” on his back and the Brewer baseball-mitt logo in tan on his forehead and a wiggly tan “Go Brewers” in script on each flank. “It’s better on his other side,” Harley’s owner told me, pointing to the message. “I got better at it the second time.” Audrey Kuenn Went out back to tell Harvey to finish getting dressed, because it was time for him to get to the park, and when she returned, just before Harvey came out and said hello to everyone in the place, and then goodbye to everyone in the place, she said to me, “When we got to the hotel in St. Louis the other day, I said to Harv, ‘Can you believe we’re here?’ and he said, ‘Never in a million years’.”

Nothing needs to be added here; I'll let the details do all of the work, as Angell does.

~~

This recent, gloomy shot of Cesar's Inn is courtesy Google Maps Street View. 1982 must feel as if it's a long way away.

Top photo of Cesar's Inn via OnMilwaukee.