The Mets

I saw the Mets at Shea lose Tuesday and Thursday and when will it end?

I hear LoDuca won't be back. I'll miss the one guy who hates, HATES to lose. Duke is all guts, playing hurt in Friday's game after a shot to the knee from a foul tip.

All season I've been a Wright fielding knocker. There but for the grace of Delgado the Mets would lead the majors in balls thrown in the stands. Wright is an aimer, not a thrower.

Last night's performance was beyond belief. I used to tell my daughter, before the ball is hit to to you, picture what you're going to do with it. She was one of the few girls who didn't stare at the ball thinking for two seconds after she caught it.

With the bases loaded, when Wright threw home and got the ball back and didn't step on the 3B bag as he missed making the tag on the runner from second, I was gobsmacked. At third there are not too many options when the bases are loaded. Throw behind the runner and the force is off, then tag. Throw home is like a 6-4-3. How do you forget that or not know it or not plan for it if the ball comes to you?

Here's what might have confused him. Did you see the runner who was thrown out by Wright at home? The runner stopped in his tracks, turned around and looked back to third, as odd as that sounds. This might have messed up Wright's head into thinking the runner was alive, like, maybe LoDuca's foot wasn't on home. But even still, the force would have still been on at third.

No one ever accused him of being a genius off the field but I expect more from a so-called MVP.

The Met collapse has even affected my feeling about Jet football. Am I wasting my time?

Still, a day at the ballpark is always fun. My brother revealed that in 1975 he took his girlfriend to 7 Met games and the Mets won all 7. This was a .500 ballclub so the odds were 1 chance out of 2 to the seventh power of that outcome. Rolling the dice and trusting his gut, he married the girl and they have four daughters all these years later.

Why is Shea empty? I blame management. Florida and Washington are negatively promoted as third tier bronze games as they raise prices for Yankees, Atlanta, etc. I remember getting to the park at 10:30 to watch batting practice before a double header. We'd bring a big paper grocery bag of sandwiches and Sun Dews. The Mets were playing the Expos. All for $1.35. Then $1.50. Section 1 behind the plate, sit where you want "general admission." I think reserved ended around row D. Regular fans in that section included a bearded guy named Fuzzy and his cohort Nelson. I should have known that nothing could feel that good again for $1.50.

Read my other Met post this season. Could it be the same team?

Brooklyn Book Festival 2007

The Brooklyn Book Fair was held on September 16 around and on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall and in a few nearby indoor venues, including my alma mater, St. Francis College. Beep Marty Markowitz, who I see every year more than my own reflection, was the ringmaster of the event. Over 100 stalls featuring small and larger booksellers were visited by 10,000 people. Markowitz said that they want to go to two days next year.

Two stages were setup for interviews and we saw Marty at the Borough Hall stage turn the tables and interview Dominic Carter, political reporter for NY1. Carter was promoting his book and answered questions the way Bill Bradley used to answer Marv Albert, with 15 minute responses. The subject matter is rough, Carter’s sexual abuse by his schizophrenic mother and his eventual success thanks to a loving grandma and a tenacious desire for higher education. http://www.amazon.com/No-Mommas-Boy-Embraced-Future/dp/0595428398

I parted with some cash to take advantage of the bargains. At One Story, a Park Slope publisher who puts out 18 issues for $21 annually, I bought a book for a buck. Actually it was one short story, a staple bound booklet containing The 217 Pound Dog by Arthur Bradford. One Story has the novel idea of bringing back the short story and this little tale by Bradford has more chuckles in 28 pages than the last three Ben Stiller movies. http://www.one-story.com/

At Brooklyn College’s [one of my sons goes there] table I chatted with an author/professor who writes for a U.K. firm with a U.S office. As I thumbed through his book I mentioned that I had several friends at the company. He went on a rant against his editor and I thought it must be pretty bad to reveal his complaints to a total stranger, save for the facts that I told him about my son and the friends at the company.

I was surprised to find out that my alma mater, St. Francis College, had a Creative Writing Program. I spoke with co-editor and professor Terry Quinn, who kindly signed my copy of From the Heart of Brooklyn: Volume Two a collection of stories, poems, and plays by the students of SFC. Special Festival price was $10. If Professor Quinn had been around in 1976, there would have been many happier students, who when requesting a class in Journalism were given another seminar in Milton. This was a joke that speech professor John Monaghan used to crack. Monaghan eventually taught that inaugural class in Journalism and it was the only time I got to be in the same class as my brother Dennis, the accounting major. The class was way overbooked, so it was for the best that Dennis missed a lot of the classes so someone else could sit down. http://www.stfranciscollege.edu/rss/news.xml

Graywolf Press of St. Paul, MN featured some very attractively designed covers, real eyecatchers. I picked up another $10 bargain, Pocketful of Names by Joe Coomer, a novel that is “a deeply human tale about the unpredictability of nature, art, family and the flotsam and jetsam that comprise our lives.” The main character is a young woman, so when Clare Danes is finished playing Shaw in NY this year, her agent might take a flyer on this.
http://www.graywolfpress.org

Also spotted at the Festival: Michael Walker, pr maven for the AMNH, and young publishing marketer Samara Stob. These are personal acquaintances and I just wanted to let them know I couldn’t give a shout out there as I was sitting in the middle of the Marty Markowitz audience. We also saw Pete Hamill, or was it the guy from the Men’s Warehouse? Either way, he looked great in black, tieless, and seemed to be enjoying himself. Marty had the same getup on so I guess black is the new…black?

Much more to report but my editor says I’ve exceeded the 500 word limit where most people lose interest and go back to their AIM or email or surfing porn, so that’s all from me from the festival. We had a great time and look forward to the next year.

From the IFC: I WANT SOMEONE TO EAT CHEESE WITH

Jeff Garlin has written, produced, directed and stars in I WANT SOMEONE TO EAT CHEESE WITH, a new comedy about a comic actor, James, who makes a living acting and performing improv in Chicago. His unsuccessful love life and overeating are the running themes. Garlin is best known as the guy who stars in CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM on HBO and looks like fellow Chicago improv actor George Wendt (CHEERS). Wendt by the way, recently said that people tell him on auditions they’re now looking for a “Jeff Garlin­–type.”

James lives with his mother in a MARTY–like setup. I found it hard to believe that a performer who constantly works with other performers in improv had any trouble meeting a lot of women, regardless of his appearance. [Garlin is a little heavy as James but looked less heavy than on CURB and in recent appearances promoting the film.] He meets Beth (Sarah Silverman), who is kooky sexy. She throws herself at him, diverging from the MARTY plot [she has a dirty line about hoagies that could enter the language], but there’s a another lady in the plot, Stella (Bonnie Hunt), his niece’s teacher, who catches his eye. John Sayles­–lookalike David Pasquesi provides strong support as his brotherly best friend Luca. I enjoyed their portrayal of fraternal friendship, a brother from another mother.

Jeff Garlin has created a character distinct from “Jeff Greene” in CURB but I found two of the similarities to CURB distracting: the interstitial jaunty French-sounding accordion music and one particular sentence construction, “big bowl of…,” used in both projects. I was jolted into the CURB world of Jeff Greene when I heard it.

As a producer of CURB and former member of Second City, Garlin must know most of the good working comic actors in the business and the gang’s all here, including Roger Bart, Dan Castellanata, Tim Kazurinsky, Richard Kind, Wallace Langham, and so on. Special mention to the excellent Mina Kolb as James’ mother, loving but not sloppy about it.

Iif you’re looking for a warm fuzzy, this isn’t it, except maybe for the last scene. Even though the trailers are setting you up for a romantic comedy, it's really about a man who has peaked in his profession and is treading water, a successful loser in a career that others would envy--that's how hard it is to make it. He's working in show business but he's living with his mother so maybe he's not really making a living.

EAT ends too soon at 80 minutes and that's better than 2-1/2 hours of flying cars or guns, guns, guns. I would like to have seen a little more at the end, but like good literature the discerning reader has to fill in the gaps. The last scene must be less than a minute long but gives a lot of information so quickly that you'll have a lot to chew on as the credits roll.

From the IFC: PIERREPOINT

PIERREPOINT is an excellent film based on the true story of one of the last hangmen in the U.K. Timothy Spall plays Albert Pierrepoint, a delivery man turned hangman, following in the family business. We get to see what happens before, during, and after a hanging and the way Pierrepoint does it is efficient and respectful. He takes pride in his work and his reputation becomes such that Monty asks him to hang the Nazis convicted of war crimes after WWII.

Napoloeon called Britain a nation of shopkeepers and Pierrepoint invests his earnings in a pub at the urging of his wife, the business-like Annie (Juliet Stevenson). She bets there's plenty who'd like to have a drink with the man who executed the Nazis and she's right. I'm giving away too much plot so let me just say that the film is artfully done with clever camera work to show time passing, internal strife, and horror. Is he Jekyll and Hyde or the same man in and out of the execution chamber? His friend Tish (Eddie Marsan) helps him sort this out, as does the anti-execution movement of the mid-1950s.

I enjoyed the portrayal in the first scenes of middle-aged courtship and love and it stands in contrast to the bloodlessness of the execution room. They get married and like a good Mafia wife, she doesn't know where he goes on his business trips. Eventually she figures it out. It made me think of Mrs. Lovett's reaction to learning Sweeney's bloody hobby. "Seems an awful waste," she sings. All those dead bodies and her needing meat for her meat pies. Spall, by the way, will play Beadle Bamford in SWEENEY TODD (Chrsitmas 2007 release) the most highly anticipated project for me since the time I saw Rodney Dangerfield at Radio City.

Timothy Spall is one of those fine actors I knew I'd seen before but couldn't place the movies. I jogged my memory online and remembered him from WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART, TOPSY TURVY, and HAMLET (1996). I was also delighted to find his appearance on RED DWARF.

Go see this thoughtful look at an era that's over in Britain but not in the U.S. It's one more reason for them to feel superior to us, but hey, I don't think we were ever hanging people as they did for stealing a buttered scone or passing bad paper.