Not Dead Yet

THERE ARE MUST-WIN GAMES, and then are games like today at Yankee Stadium, when the Yankees had one last chance to resurrect a disappointing season. After dropping the first two games of a crucial series to Boston, and after trailing most of the game 2-0, the Yankees came back for a dramatic 3-2 win.

Mike Mussina had yet another quality start, giving up just 5 hits and those 2 runs over 7, and Jason Giambi provided the offensive fireworks with a pinch-hit, game-tying blast in the 7th and then the game-winning single in the 9th off Jonathan Papelbon.

That leaves the Yankees with 29 more games, 29 more chances to stave off their first non-playoff season since 1993. It starts with 3 games against Toronto, which won't be easy if no other reason than they'll be drawing the Blue Jays' 2 best pitchers, A.J. Burnett (16-9) and the Seaver-like Roy Halladay (16-9, 2.69 ERA).

The first Yanks-Red Sox game featured Andy Pettitte vs. Tim Wakefield, one of the last knuckleballers in the game, and was notable for a textbook case of home plate umpire Tim Reynolds squeezing the strike zone for Andy Pettitte. The result was a frustrating 7-3 loss, especially for one Alex Rodriguez, who started off the most important series of the season with one of his worst games as a Yankee, considering the circumstances. Alex struck out twice and grounded into two double plays, one with the bases loaded late, in going 0-5, while adding an error in the field for bad measure. Other than that, he had no hand in the Yankees losing that night.

Last night was a listless 11-3 affair where Sid Ponson continued his downward slide. I think the Yankees got all they're gonna get from him, and now hopefully Joba Chamberlain can come back from injury and take his place in the rotation. It may be a case of delaying the inevitable, but let's play the games out and see where it takes us as August turns into September.

Another day, another article critical of Yankees GM Brian Cashman in the Daily News. After Bill Madden detailed his many shortcomings on Sunday, today's piece by Peter Botte has Cashman fully accepting blame. Of course, Cashman falling on his sword at least merits him some points for honesty and accountability, but at this stage of the game blaming Cashman for the Yankees' underachieving is a little like saying George W. Bush kind of screwed things up in Iraq:

"And it was Cashman who convinced the Steinbrenners to focus on developing young pitchers such as Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy -- who've combined for zero major-league victories in injury-plagued campaigns -- rather than flip some of the youth for an ace pitcher such as current Met Johan Santana last winter."

To me, the jury is still out on that non-trade. There are at least 10 other moves I would criticize Cashman for before getting to that one, starting with the latest one: the trade of reliever Kyle Farnsworth for a well-past-his-prime Ivan Rodriguez. It was a totally unnecessary move, and somehow weakened us in two spots: the bullpen and defense.

Derek Jeter is getting hot at just the right time, adding another 3 hits today. So in his absolute worst year, Jeter is still hitting .294 with 8 HRs and 60 RBIs hitting second in the order. After getting bashed by haters like Mike Lupica all year, he's still right there with whatever numbers Jose Reyes is putting up in his best year.
Now, in all fairness, you have to give the Mets some credit for bouncing back last night in Philly after their horrendous meltdown Tuesday night. Of course it helps when it's your ace's turn to take the mound the next night and you have Johan Santana in that role, and Mets MVP Carlos Delgado hit yet another big HR to tie it late.

The meltdown in question took the form of the Metsies blowing a 7-0 lead to the Phillies, almost a funhouse mirror image of their 7-game folderoo over the last season's final 17 games. The Mets scored all 7 of their runs in the first 4 innings, following their season-long script of scoring early but failing to add runs late, then watched the Phils chip away, tying it with single runs in the 8th and 9th. Chris Coste's hit in the bottom of the 13th gave the Phils one of their most dramatic wins of the year, one that ultimately would not carry over to the next day.

The Mets have bounced back with wins after almost all of their blown games all season. Just when you thought they were going into a nasty tailspin, they right the ship. With their shaky bullpen, expect similar late-inning troubles. But that ability to bounce back, along with their patty-cake schedule the rest of the way, should bode well for the Mets as they try to avoid a similar collapse to 2007.

Ending Better Than Mending

AH, WHAT A NICE TIME of year for the pro sports fan here in New York. Baseball pennant races are ready to heat up in earnest, and in Flushing and the Bronx as well. Pro football is about to start its regular season, the U.S. Open just started here in Queens for all you tennis weenies out there, and the Olympics is finally, mercifully over. And oh what a regular human rights festival we had there in Beijing! That's just China being China, get used to it.

The big baseball questions here in New York can be reduced to two, I believe: Will the Yankees finally miss the playoffs this year after 14 straight years, and will the Mets collapse like a cardboard condo again this year? We're hoping the answers to those perplexing queries will be, respectively, Hell No and Fuck Yeah.

The Mets were on a nice little roll until this past weekend, when they lost 2 games to Houston. Yesterday's game in particular was a nasty one, with yet another stunning 9th inning bullpen collapse. The Metsies were out to a 3-0 lead early courtesy of a Carlos Beltran blast, and with Ollie Perez (who I predict will be a New York Yankee next year) dealing, I looked at the feeble 'Stros lineup and said to myself, Self, why are you wasting your time watching this? So I tuned out, only to find out later that the immortal Brad Ausmus and Darrin Erstad had dashed the Metsies' hopes on this cruel summer Sunday, taking Pedro Feliciano deep, or "going yard" as ESPN geeks might put it on Sportscenter. Then ex-Yank flop LaTroy Hawkins came in and shut the door, extending his Astros scoreless streak to 10 games. Yeah, this baseball season is not too crazy...

So after the Mets got well against the little sisters of the poor -- aka Pittsburgh (57-73), Atlanta (57-73), and Washington (46-85) -- teams with a combined record of 71 games under .500, they ran into a decent Astros team (66-64), who took 2 of the first 3 games at Shea. The two teams play one more game tonight before the Metsies pack their duffel bags and head off to unfriendly Philly (71-59), with stops in Florida (67-64) and then Brewtown (76-55) to follow. We'll see if the Mets are the powerhouse their more delusional fans claim they are or the dogs most Yankees fans hope they are.

Speaking of unhinged fans, you would think I would have my hands full with the Yankees doing all they can to keep their own heads above water. But after writing them off at least 3 times over the course of this long season, I'm ready to get back on the bandwagon. If I'm wrong, no one will remember, and if I'm right, well, I'm used to that by now.

Yanks find themselves in strange position of being underdogs down the stretch, what with Sid Ponson, Darrell Rasner, and Carl Pavano manning the rotation. Three games at home against the Red Sox kick off the last 32 games of the year. Yanks need a sweep, will settle for 2 out of 3, but a sweep the other way and it's Nellie, Bar the Door. That Yankees bandwagon will be emptier than a Mitt Romney campaign promise.

Daily News' Bill Madden gave more ammo to all the Brian Cashman haters out there, and we know who we are, in his Sunday column, as part of a longer piece chronicling the "demise" of the Yankee empire. Madden did not paint a pretty picture of the young talent in the Yankees system, nor did he pull any punches in Cashman's direction. Regarding the minor league pipeline of young players, there's just one teeny problem: there is none, and according to Madden, most of the fault lies not in our (lack of young) stars, but in our Cashman:

"It would be nice if they had a couple of young position players like the Mets' Murphy and Evans coming in the system, but they do not. They do not have a first baseman to replace Jason Giambi, or an impact center fielder, or a shortstop to spell (and eventually replace) Derek Jeter, or a second baseman who could enable them to deal the enigmatic Cano while he still has value.

The reason they don't have any of these players in their system is because they continue to do a terrible job of scouting and developing. They spend millions more in Latin America than almost every other team and yet the only position players from there to make the big club over the last 10 years are Alfonso Soriano, Cano and Melky Cabrera. The draft? An even bigger disgrace. Jeter, in 1992, is the last player they drafted who became a regular.

And the beat goes on. In this year's draft, the Yankees took pitchers with their first three picks: No. 1, Gerrit Cole, whom they did not sign because their scouts obviously didn't get to know the kid's makeup or his family situation; No. 2, Jeremy Bleich, who's going to need Tommy John surgery; and No. 3, Scott Bittle, whose arm problems were so severe they elected to pass on signing him.

After a while, you have to wonder what fatal attraction Cashman's player evaluators have with injured pitchers. Last year, they took North Carolina State righthander Andrew Brackman in the first round, knowing he was going to miss all of this season with Tommy John surgery. And, then, of course, there's the immortal Humberto Sanchez, purportedly the key return player in the Gary Sheffield deal with Detroit, who also underwent Tommy John surgery and is still rehabbing somewhere.

Cashman keeps stockpiling pitchers who come up hurt or fall on their face when they get to the big leagues. Enough! He is banking on the offense coming back next year, even though everyone will be a year older and there is nobody to step in when the inevitable injuries come. Off the way this season has gone, with young, homegrown teams such as the Rays and Twins giving their owners so much more bang for their buck, the Yankees returning to power would be an even bigger surprise."

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As soon as I saw Osi Umenyiora being helped off the field the other night against the Jets, I knew it might be serious. If a player makes it off the field without any help, it's usually not too bad an injury. As he was being carted off, he didn't appear to be in great pain, but this one didn't look good, for the Giants at least, right from the proverbial get-go.

I'll be honest, because the alternative is to sound like a hypocrite: As a Dallas Cowboy fan, I'm happy anytime a starting player from a rival team goes down; that's just the way it is. But in my opinion, Osi is overrated. He's a good pass rusher who doesn't really play the run that well, unlike the retired Mike Strahan, who was/is a more complete player. I always looked at Osi as the black Mark Gastineau: He gets the flashy numbers, but what about all the other plays where he doesn't get the sack?

Umenyiora had 13 sacks last season and had an All-Pro year, but I don't consider him an All-Pro. Put it this way, I think Strahan was a better player than Umenyiora, but Jason Tuck has the skills to be better than Osi and perhaps even as good as Strahan. And that's coming from an objective Cowboy fan, remember.

The other guy the Giants are counting on, Mathias Kiwanuka, let's face it is still an unknown entity. Giants have already announced they are moving him back from LB to his more natural position, DE. Any way you slice it, the Giants are presently without 23 sacks from last year, and sacks don't grow on trees.

All anybody wants to talk about when Umenyiora's name comes up is that fluky 6-sack game against the Eagles last year, the one where he lined up against 3rd-string OT Winston "Turnstile" Justice, not the 4 playoff games where he had 7 tackles and came up totally sackless. A good player, one opposing offenses have to contend with, but not the major force some would make him out to be.

Something tells me Giants will be this year's version of last year's Miami Heat. That post-championship year can sometimes be a case of a team crashing back to earth, especially one that played way, way over its head.

Even if Strahan comes back, he's not close enough to football shape, and perhaps the right mental state, to be as effective as he was last year. You can take that to the bank, or at least the drive-through teller, if you're so inclined, because if and when Mike Strahan comes back, you can bet it's all about the crazy money the Giants are about to throw at him more than his love of the game. Just one man's considerably informed opinion.

Let me throw out a few crazy baseball stats, because my extensive market research tells me the kids go silly for that kind of stuff...

Going into yesterday's game, Mets had attempted only 2 steals in their last 11 games. How can that be?

Phillies' Ryan Howard, Pat Burrell and Chase Utley all over 30 HRs already, and their 95 combined HRs is more than Washington Nationals' entire team at 91 and maybe some other teams as well, but right now I'm not quite interested enough to look it up. Maybe you can find out and get back to me if you're not too busy. Oh...

Mets offense worst in baseball over last 3 innings (your 7th, 8th and 9th for those keeping score), which isn't helping their suspect bullpen put any games away, that's for sure.

Cubs' Carlos Zambrano has now hit 4 HRs this year, tying all-time record for HRs in a season with a good 6 weeks left. The same game he tied the HR record was Zambrano's 7th straight start with an RBI, which may be almost as remarkable as the HR record. Zambrano, 13-5 as a pitcher, may be the biggest two-way threat in baseball since George Herman Ruth plied his trade for the Red Sox of Boston; Zambrano has 16 career HRs.

Phillies will have already played the new Manny Dodgers 8 times after tonight, while the Mets not only haven't played L.A. since the big trade, but I'll be damned if they don't have to play them the rest of the season. There's always the NL playoffs, though...

By the way, since the trade, in 22 games Ramirez is hitting .380 with 6 HRs and 21 RBIs; while in 21 games for Boston, Jason Bay is hitting .333 with 4 HRs and 18 RBI. Pretty even...

Not a stat per se, but I have a feeling Xavier Nady is the new Paul O'Neill: professional, deadly serious, still young player in the middle of the offense for years. Counting both his Bucs and Yanks numbers, Nady has hit .328, 21 HRs and 80 RBI. Just like O'Neill, Nady switched leagues and was about the same age (29) as O'Neill when he was traded from the Reds for Roberto Kelly.

According to my sources, Mets up 3-0 over Astros, courtesy a Carlos Delgado HR. Delgado, you might remember, is the guy Mets fans booed relentlessly and wanted to run out of town two months ago. Thought he was finished? His hot streak makes him a ton of cash next year and possibly one last big contract.

Let me give you a football stat that's been eating a hole in my mental pocket the whole offseason: In their fluky, lucky win against Dallas in last year's playoffs, the Giants vaunted offense gained a total of... 52 yards. That's right, 52 total yards in the second half, yet somehow the Giants walked out of Texas Stadium with the unlikely W instead of the L they so richly deserved.

Now the offseason is winding down, the real games about 10 days away, and finally a chance for redemption, another shot at glory and the beginning of the war of attrition that is the NFL season. For the most part the Cowboys bring back the same 13-win team, with a much-improved secondary led by Pacman Jones and some high draft picks. Gone are the horrendous Nate Jones and Jacques Reeves, who gave Giants receivers so much cushion in that playoff game that they were barely in the same zip code at times.

Speaking of good offseasons, the Philly Sixers, a team on the rise if there ever was such a thing, made what I think are 4 solid moves since their season ended with a decent accounting of themselves in their playoff series against the Detroit Pistons.

First, the 76ers managed to free enough cap room to land Elton Brand via free agency, a major addition to a young team. Next, they locked up Andre Iguodola with a long-term contract, giving themselves a 24-year-old stud to build around. Then they bring back one of my all-time favorite players, Theo Ratfliff, admittedly past his prime, but perhaps capable of 10-12 minutes a night, some big rebounds, a shot block or two per game. Nice touch, Ed Stefanski. And finally I read where Jeff Ruland will be joining the coaching staff, which ought to help out the big men like Sam Dalambert. Add it all up, and why can't the 76ers be one of the top teams in the East for years to come, if not the top team? I can't think of a single good reason and, admit it, even you Knicks fans can't either.

Mean Time

THE FIRST THING you should know is that he lives with fear now. It has a hand in every public act. It is the unspoken assumption between himself and everyone else. In his mind the next violent act had already occurred and was only waiting, lurking, before it took a temporal and spatial form and became real, more real.

He starts with 100 and is huffing and red-faced but not yet sweating, all the body water sealed inside and boiling. He faces the mirror and hates what he sees, softness and confusion, fear in the eyes while he pumps the dumbbell. With two hands he grasps the bar outside the weight and pumps, curling the metal and beating it against his chest on the way up, leaving red marks on his chest, until his arms cramp up and stop midway. He smiles and feels his body through the pain for the first time in years. It becomes the morning ritual. He feels it gives him some small edge he didn't have before, a measure of readiness to confront violence, the violence that is out there, that is sure to be out there.

He sees it in the faces, in faces everywhere, in the eyes mostly. A brazen stupidity, a look that reveals the despair of lives not worth living. In the bodies of the people on the train every day, in the streets and in stores, he studies them for signs of weakness, disgusted by their misshapen forms, the bodies of those who quit fighting back.

He studies the bodies of the strong and appreciates these, and in contrast hates the great herd of bodies even more, sees the softness in their neglected bodies, like out of shape slaves. He sees the self-hate it took to quit on themselves.

Most of all he knows they too are victims, and he hates sharing this status with them. He is in no way like them. They were victims and would be victims again. It was logical. In a city of victims, a city filled with victimizers.

The detective motions for him to sit down. He is at the precinct to look at mug shots. The detective goes to a green metal cabinet and comes back with three huge black looseleaf binders. He sets them down on the desk.
"Take your time," he says, "maybe you'll get lucky. All I ask is that you're sure. We can't pick him up unless you're certain."
He opens the first book, containing white males picked up for assault. A small radio is set to an oldies station, playing Doctor My Eyes: I have done all that I could, to see the evil and the good...

The faces in the pictures frighten him to a surprising degree. The color is startling in the photos taken at flashpoint, the expressions frozen yet animated. He forgets which face he came to look for. He takes his time with each photo, searching for some kind of meaning behind the faces. About half of the men are bleeding or scratched. Street fights, he figures; two people get into a scrape and the loser charges the other with assault when the cops come.

The faces are sneering, simpering, class clown types. They are petrified, stricken, blinded by the light of the camera and the graveness of being arrested. Eyes are bloodshot, shirts are ripped, hair is matted down with sweat or crusted with blood.

Halfway into the first book he sees a face he knows. It's an old schoolmate--no, a former teammate from little league baseball, waiting here to be discovered, to complete some shared circle. The image looks back at him, pleads its case, its reason for being here among the nameless faces, and that is enough for him to flip the page and continue.

Sometimes he goes back to spend more time with faces that haunt him, that demand another look.

He wants to find the face he came here for, but the faces are terrifying. They frighten him individually, they frighten him en masse. There are hundreds and hundreds, four pairs on each page, and page after page, book after book. Containing those who have been arrested, it hits him; not the ones who were never caught, lurking here in this borough, animals who prey on the weak and defenseless, these white males arrested for assault. Assaulters.

They are all guilty, he feels it. All of them. It's on their faces and he reads it, tuned into their meanness, their savagery, and he is overwhelmed. He pushes the book away from him and his head is in his hands, overcome by this world within a world his life his opened into.

He feels worse a day later. It has been a weak since the Incident, and the more he plays it out in his mind, the more he is sure he acted cowardly. The more he wishes he had thrown at least one punch back.

When he relives the moment, the whole image in his mind brings tears to his eyes, the senseless viciousness of it.

He is hit and screams and falls to the ground. He never sees the punch coming. He is stunned and yells at them.

It eats at him.

If he had to do it all over again, he's pretty sure he would have gone after one of them. If it had been two, or even three, but it was four of them...

He visualizes it often, the punches he would throw, the first good one and then a flurry to finish him off. He sees the naked fear in their eyes but doesn't stop, can't stop. His hands are hurting and his knuckles sore, and everywhere there's blood, but still they haven't stopped smirking, and until they do he can't stop winding up and driving his fist into the face of the one who hit him.

All he remembers is the scream, then falling, his red blood everywhere, their smiling faces as they walk on, looking back and laughing. He punches now to drown out the scream, to stamp out the smirk forever.

If the Incident goes unpunished, he reasons, then the crime is compounded.

On Sundays, he waits in front of his house with a baseball bat, hoping they will come by again, completing the circle.

Daily life, he discovers, swims on all around him, not realizing that everything has changed.

He took it with him from the precinct, this feeling he was surrounded by blissful meanness, outnumbered statistically and allegorically by wolves in men's masks. He is down and withdrawn and sunken, but the next day he keeps his appointment anyway, a blind date with a friend of a friend.

He knows he will be disappointed as he sits at the bar of a place near work, full of suits and cutout faces dancing in fake delight above them, barking out orders for drinks and smiling eerily in the dark glow.

He sees his friend come in and she is there with him, walking stiffly. She is short and dark and he doesn't like her right away. He sees the night stretch out before him and he can't imagine how it will be saved.

They go and sit and it is crowded and the music too loud for their voices to carry even the short distance across the table, and so they are saying everything twice. Names, where they work, where they live and how they know each other, what time they get out of work and what time they have to be at work. The drinks arrive and cigarettes are lit.

Her mouth is way too big for her face and it is a dumb mouth, cruel even, and her words are thankfully lost in the music as she sits across from him. They are asking him, who does this song? and though he knows he just sits there out of spite. He looks around the bar and studies the faces, squinting to make out the features better, spotting the victim types. Pink, doughy faces perched ludicrously on thin necks.

He wants to tell them of his pain but they are smiling at him when he turns back. Cruel thoughts of his own are forming in his mind as he watches her, imagining her mouth as it might scream in terror, her face contorted, her eyes frozen in a flashpoint of fear.

It is a long time since he spoke last, and they are watching him more intently now, expecting something from him he just can't give.
"He's real quiet," his friend tells her.
"I knooooow!" she says. "Are you all right?"
He picks his drink up and looks into it for just a moment before throwing it at her face. She shrieks as he expected and throws her hands up, rising halfway from her seat and stopping, statue-like.
"You're a real asshole!" she shouts, and his friend is standing across the table, pushing him.
"What'd you do that for, schmuck?"
He is the only one smiling now as he grabs for his friend's shirt, ripping the buttons open. The music continues but the bar is still now as the punch comes, square on the chin, spilling him onto the floor. He looks up into the face of his friend and then to where she is sitting, her face shaking with laughter as she hides her mouth with her hands.

-- BW

Hack For Hire

THERE ONCE WAS A TIME not too very long ago when a critic -- defined in the dictionary as "one who forms and expresses judgments of the merits and faults of anything" -- whatever he happened to be writing about, would offer his unvarnished take on the subject at hand. The critic who wanted to be respected wouldn't care if he had to ruffle a few feathers in the process; he was going to tell you exactly how he felt, because integrity, not popularity, was uppermost in his mind.

For instance, Edgar Allan Poe once dispatched of something that came across his desk with the following succinct conclusion: "The most inestimable piece of balderdash with which the common sense of the good people of America was ever so openly or villainously insulted."

Cut to today, when a certain movie critic's constant over-the-top recommendations, in the form of a gushing blurb, seem to adorn almost every film advertisement. For years now this critic has poured out his love for almost every new film released by the major studios, routinely going overboard when it comes to the most disposable and escapist brand of entertainment fare, setting back the very idea of movie criticism.

In our present, deeply unsatisfying pop culture era, any film critic worth his sense or sensibility, whose opinions are not for sale, would dislike or treat with disdain at least 8 and more likely 9 out of every 10 movies released in a given cycle. But not Peter Travers, who writes for the anachronism that is Rolling Stone magazine. So clueless, so rudderless is Travers that in his writing you can almost hear a plea to be liked, to not be left out of the discussion when it comes to the latest formulaic, marketing-driven, celebrity-promoted vehicle being shoved down the public's throats at any given moment. It's almost absurd that a middle-aged man would publicly admit to falling for the kinds of movies that are relentlessly targeted at kids who are two and even three decades younger, such that the only reasonable explanation would focus on the possibility of some sort of movie industry version of radio payola or "praise for pay"; otherwise one can only conclude, judging strictly by his own printed opinions, that Travers is just such a hapless fool as he appears to be, with the awful taste in movies to match.

What sets Travers apart from your run-of-the-mill movie industry lackey is the sheer volume of films about which he sings his never-faint-or-damning praise. Any day now there should be an Onion feature with the headline: "Comedy Movie Released That Peter Travers Doesn't Find Laugh-Out-Loud, Falling-Down, Mind-Blowingly Hysterical." Until such time, we will have to get by with Travers' own often unintentionally hilarious assertions of critical acclaim.

Let me give you a few examples, chosen randomly from whatever newspapers I have lying here in front of me, before looking a little further into just who this Peter Travers is. If, like me, you've been following Travers' career for any length of time, you know that there is a certain type of teen-oriented flick, aiming for the coveted 14-26-year-old demographic, that Travers soaks up like a pedophile at the playground. No matter how hackneyed, half-baked or unoriginal the treatment, there's a certain type of movie that will have Travers salivating. So it was no surprise that Travers, a priori, would see fit to dole out heaping helpings of praise for something like Pineapple Express, a film that will be totally forgotten in about three years, more likely a lot sooner.

ANOTHER TRADEMARK of Travers' blurbs is that they're almost never about the movie itself, but instead purport to tell prospective viewers the effect the movie will have on them, as if we are all hapless blank slates existing only for the movie industry to write all over our compliant, pliable minds. In any ad for Pineapple, you'll find at the top Travers' name in big letters attached to the blurb that proclaims the movie is "Hardcore hilarious. It slaps a big, fat, goofy smile on your face that lasts for days." Imagine the type of person smiling like a moron for days after seeing a mainstream Hollywood comedy!

Of course, these blurbs are just a few sentences cut out of an entire Travers review, but his reviews are invariably blurb-worthy because he writes in the kinds of simplistic, sound-bite-like cliches that fit nicely on a poster. His reviews are almost never about anything the director is doing technically, for instance, but are instead solely reliant on his likes and dislikes, typically comparing the film in question to two or more previous movies. That's the Travers formula, along with invariably throwing in some youth "jargon" that Travers is at least 10 years too old to have any business using, which makes for a lamentable stew that breeds the following:

"For you to grasp the true essence of Pineapple Express, let me paraphrase the immortal gibberish that issues from the mouth of Franco, who delivers a sidesplitting tour de force as the sweetly profane Saul: This is like if Superbad met Midnight Run and they had a baby and then meanwhile that freaky Quentin Tarantino talk from Pulp Fiction and True Romance met that freaky Judd Apatow TV stuff from Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and they had a baby, and by some miracle those babies met — and fucked — this would be the funny shit that they birthed."

If you're not utterly mortified by the thought of sharing DNA with this twit Travers, you too are beyond contempt, and would do well to remove yourself with all speed and alacrity to something like the People magazine website, which not uncoincidentally was Travers' former employer. Rolling Stone and People... the fact that Travers intersects both publications tells us an awful lot about the depressing state of the culture and of media. Instead let's alleviate the depression with a few more choice Travers blurbs.

Ben Stiller has made a few watchable movies in his life, and his new one, Tropic Thunder, received mixed reviews even as it breaks records at the box office. The Village Voice hated it, for instance, and found parts of it offensive. Speaking of blurbs, the New York Times critic called it "a flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry." And Armond White, whose weekly reviews in the New York Press constantly demonstrate his encyclopedic knowledge of film history as well as appreciation of the power of a truly great film, found a lot to like about Ben Stiller's direction of Tropic Thunder and his inside-Hollywood jokes. There are still critics who come to their viewpoints honestly and deliver them with intelligence, and isn't that preferable to wasting time with a lapdog sellout like Travers? I mean, how can you trust someone's opinion on anything if he likes everything? The answer, perhaps, lies in yet another shameless Travers plug:

"Think of all the ways you can hurt yourself laughing, as in fall down, split your sides, bust a gut, blow your mind. You get it all in Tropic Thunder, a knockout of a comedy that keeps you laughing constantly. It's also killer smart, lacing combustible action with explosive gags. Major props to Ben Stiller."

Here we have the quintessential Travers. It's all there: what the movie is going to do to you when you see it (hurt yourself laughing), the tried-and-true movie review cliches (bust a gut, split your sides), the youth slang (killer, props) that is already by its nature passe if someone like Travers has caught on to it. Further in his Rolling Stone review for Tropic Thunder, Travers relates the following in lieu of an actual critique:

"Stiller took flak for the other three movies he's directed: 1994's Reality Bites was allegedly too soft, 1996's The Cable Guy too dark, 2001's Zoolander too airy-fairy. Confession: I liked them all. And I'm nuts about Tropic Thunder, with its dynamite script by Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen." ("I liked them all," he confesses, because Travers sees something to fawn about in almost every movie ever made at any time by anyone.)

Travers then proceeds to demoralize readers even more, if such a thing were possible, suggesting by way of analogy that Tropic Thunder is like "Apocalypse Now as conceived by Borat." He gets paid for these penetrating perceptions? It is Rolling Stone we're talking about here, not exactly the same counterculture periodical where truly groundbreaking work by writers like Hunter Thompson was published. Talk about "long ago in a galaxy far, far away"!

HERE'S AN EXPERIMENT you can try at home: Open up any newspaper you have lying around and turn to the movie section. Your eyes can't help but run across more examples of Travers' ponderous musings. Ah, here we go, an ad for the new Woody Allen movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Everybody seemed to pan the movie, but Travers found something to like about it: "Penelope Cruz is a stunner." Okay, but we knew that already; what does it tell us about the film, Pete?

Same page of last week's Village Voice, an ad for Bottle Shock. Never heard of it, but here's Peter again: "Hugely entertaining! There's magic in it. Rickman is droll, dazzling perfection. Be on the lookout for Bottle Shock. It's a winner." First of all, who the hell talks like that ("droll, dazzling perfection")? That sound you may hear is me crossing Bottle Shock off my list of must-see movies. Thanks, Travers, you have no idea what a service you provide.

Now moving to last week's Onion, an ad for a movie called Hamlet 2, which looks like a complete waste of time, starring the likes of David Arquette and Steve Coogan. But Travers could hardly contain himself yet again. "Comedy Heaven!" his blurb shouts in huge letters, and Travers' work is done here. You see, Hamlet 2 is a new film from the makers of South Park Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Team America, World Police, so Travers has to be out front and oversize in his approval, lest he risk being branded out of the youth culture loop. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. The Great American Movie Industry keeps churning out unctuous, noxious effluvia, and Travers is first in line to sniff all the fumes and rave about how you it smells like perfume from his killer front row seat.

Travers' Wikipedia entry is not very informative and quite sketchy on the bare facts. No date of birth for starters, although by the photo he's got to be late 40s, early 50s, which makes his singular obsession with mindless teenage films all the more disturbing. The entry says something which I didn't know for certain but have long suspected: "According to efilmcritic.com, Travers is the most blurbed film critic." That sums up his career perfectly, not the Most Influential or Most Respected, but the Most Blurbed. Almost the definition of hack journalist, is it not, and a fitting epitaph for Travers when the projector stops running and he takes his rightful place among the "no longer screening" at the Big Cineplex in the sky.

See also:

Just die

No senses

Sorry Michaels

Missing George...

But not Don

Imus-Free AM's

Radio Babel

A real Klosterfuck

LAMEs

Worst Of Times

Boy, you miss a week around here, you miss a lot. The world doesn't wait around for me to catch up like it used to.

We've got a brutal little war going on involving the Russian Bear reasserting itself, rampaging through Georgia like it's Hungary '56 or Prague '68. The Russian Army is conducting itself with a savagery reminiscent of those good old Cold War days, or whenever the last atrocity was committed in Iraq. The fact is that America has no moral high ground to tell other "civilized" nations how to act. We lost that right after the last eight years of misrule by the neoconservative element that has taken power.

That didn't stop Bush from using his pulpit today to call out Russia, accusing it of unduly harsh treatment of its breakaway republic. In a classic case of projection, the architect of two disastrous preemptive wars said that, "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century. Only Russia can decide whether it will now put itself back on the path of responsible nations or continue to pursue a policy that promises only confrontation and isolation." Only a human being as cut off from reality as George W. Bush could fail to see the irony in those statements.

Bush once famously looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and declared he got a sense of the Russian leader's soul. That observation was made before 9/11, and long before Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's more or less hand-picked successor, saw fit to use the might of the Russian Army to keep order in one of its former provinces, creating a huge humanitarian crisis in the process. It's hard to get accurate casualty figures, but it appears to be at least 5,000 dead.

But don't worry. Condi Rice is on the scene, ready to work her diplomatic magic. It's nice to know that winning the Cold War has made us all so much safer. That peace dividend has really made the world a better place. The planet has never been more dangerous, after billions and trillions of taxpayer dollars spent on every weapons system devised. What a mess, what a waste.

Remember all that "one superpower" hegemonic nonsense that the Richard Perles and Doug Feiths of the world were preaching after 9/11: America has never been stronger, and like Rome she should use her might to build an empire rather than react to every dangerous situation in the world. Someone forgot to tell the Russkies that they were finished.

So Bush and Cheney are leaving us in quite a state as they exit the scene. Record energy prices. The housing market in alltime disarray. Thousands of American soldiers dead, tens of thousands gravely wounded thanks to an unnecessary war initiated by a cabal of miscreant sociopaths. Millions of jobs outsourced overseas. The healthcare system a bureaucratic nightmare increasingly out of reach for working class Americans. Millions living paycheck to paycheck. Millions more borrowing or living on credit cards to get by. Millions more out of work or working for poverty wages. And they leave an even more corrupt, treacherous Washington than what they found when they moved in January of 2001, telling everyone how they were looking forward to putting government back on a moral course after the Clinton years.

Around the world, those who loved America couldn't believe the nation they looked up to could elect, twice, a person singularly unqualified to hold any leadership position whatsoever, a man so proudly and smugly ignorant and lacking in compassion that to this day his entire time on office seems like a bad dream to literally hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

*********************
Another very recent development since we last met, what used to be called breaking news, is the sudden breakup of sports radio's version of the Odd Couple. As of last night, the Mike and the Mad Dog Show is no more. Chris Russo is taking his act solo, moving to satellite radio, aka Oblivion, while Mike Francesa continues on WFAN. No last show, no swan song, just an announcement that the Dog wanted to try something new after 19 years as part of a team.

First Imus left, now Russo. There's not much left on the FAN when you come down to it, unless Steve Sommers floats your boat, and if that's the case, I feel sorry for you and your boat. I think they will find a partner for Francesa, because as much as he loves the sound of his own voice, sports radio works best when there's friction of some sort. We already get that Mike Francesa knows everything there is to know about sports, but another personality, maybe a woman, to create some sparks, get the station some buzz.

The morning show on WFAN, with Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton, or whatever that fool's name is, is literally unlistenable. Like most morning radio, it's a complete waste of time. Then from 10:00 to 1 pm, it's Joe Benigno and Evan Roberts, with more hideous banter. Only shut-ins, cabbies or the mentally ill would even think of listening in. 1:00 used to bring Mike & the Mad Dog, but as of today those days are over. Nights on WFAN you get Mets game or the aforementioned Steve Sommers. If a host is judged by the types of listeners he attracts, then no host in the history of radio gets more deranged callers than this sorry Sommers. If you're fortunate, you've managed to stay clear of his show, a real insane asylum of the airwaves, with overwrought Mets fans calling in droves to vent their paranoia on a nightly basis. Usually not having a life is a bad thing, but in these callers' cases, apparently it's not even an option.
*************
On the field, the Mets are fresh off a sweep of the absolutely woeful Washington Nationals, of which the 2008 version is without question one of the worst baseball teams to ever don caps and cleats. If you can name two Nationals, you should either be serenaded or sequestered, I'm not sure which. Now the mighty Mets face the not so powerful Pirates. Talk about your challenges. But the Mets will be there all year, along with the Phils and Marlins, when it comes to the NL East title.

Not so for the other New York Nine, the Yankees, who are coming off an atrocious 3-7 road trip. They face the pesky Royals for 3 games at the Stadium, then head out on the road yet again for a short trip. Just 42 games remain in the season and the Yanks trail the first-place Tampa Rays by 9.5 games. In between is the Red Sox, 5 games ahead of New York in the standings. I don't see the Yankees catching either team, or even overcoming the Twins, which would mean missing the playoffs for the first time since 1993. But as a sports fan, I know a good story when I see it, and if the Yanks don't make it, you know I will be rooting hard for the Rays to fend off the Sox and, if it comes down to it, to beat them in the playoffs. That and rooting against the Mets will have to carry me into the football season, which is mere weeks away, believe it or not. But that's a post for another day. Everything in its place, my mom used to say. Then she would see my room and realize I was a lost cause and a hopeless case. Kind of like the rest of humanity.

Funny Like That

THAT OLD BASEBALL ADAGE about the best trades being the ones you never make? Try telling that to the teams involved in all those big deals leading up to the deadline last week. I'm not into fantasy sports, at all, but a look at the numbers shows that almost every player is thriving under his new circumstances.

Let's start with the big Yankee-Pirate trade, the one that sent Xavier Nady VI and Damaso Marte to the Yankees for a few prospects and a few major league arms. That's how most observers, myself included, saw the deal: one-sided in favor of New York. Raise your hand if you thought the biggest news out of this trade would involve the two lights-out starts by P Jeff Karstens? First he shut out the Cubs, then goes to Arizona and takes a perfect game into the 8th inning! He's given up no runs and just 7 hits in 15 innings. How can you not root for a guy like that with all the injury trouble he's overcome, including the Julio Lugo line drive that broke his fibula in April 2007 ?

Nady has also not disappointed, unless a .357 average with 4 HRs and 11 RBIs somehow falls short of expectations. But Marte, the other player in the trade, the lefty specialist, has been awful, even atrocious. His ERA with the Yanks is 9.53, and he may have pitched even worse than that number would indicate.

Another ex-Pirate, Jason Bay, is lighting up the scoreboard in Boston, hitting a sizzling .423 since the Manny Ramirez trade, with 11 RBI in just 26 ABs. As I immediately pointed out when the trade was made, Bay's righty bat is a great fit in the Red Sox lineup. He's been everything Boston fans could possibly have expected.

Manny Ramirez has taken to Hollywood almost as much as La-La Land has fallen for him. In 23 at-bats, he has 4 HRs, 9 RBIs and is hitting a mere .565 with a slugging percentage of just 1.130. My only regret is that none of it has come against the Mets, but hopefully that will change. How about a nice Manny bomb to knock New York out of the playoffs? Call me a dreamer, but it's the stuff dreams are made of.

Mark Teixeira was traded from Atlanta to the Angels, and he's already won a game for them with a late-inning grand slam against the Yankees. He's hitting .286, and the Angels may only have him for the rest of the year, but it's the playoffs where the Angels will be looking for Teixeira to make a huge difference.

Only Junior Griffey, moving from Cincinnati to Chicago, has failed to make an impact. No homers yet, only 4-16 at the plate, and I wouldn't expect much from him down the stretch either.

LaTroy Hawkins, exiled from the Yankees for his penchant to do things like give up hits, walks and runs at an alarming rate, has found a new home in Houston. He's struck out 6 and given up only 1 hit in 4 appearances. Everyone deserves a second chance, even Hawkins.

Yankees in midst of a brutal 10-game road trip. They split the first 4 games in sweltering Texas, where the gametime temperature for a 7:00 start was 101 degrees the first game and then 98 last night. They play Anaheim the next 3, then Minnesota, and they will have to get by for at least 2 more weeks without Joba Chamberlain, not only their best pitcher but hands-down their most exciting player period. And it's not like there's a lot of time to waste now, what with only 47 games left in the season and the Yanks at 63-52. Time's a wastin', with Tampa and Bosox well ahead of them in their own division and the Twins right there in the wild card mix.

Problem is, the pitching matchups are all in favor of Anaheim this weekend, as you would expect from an Angels team that stands at 71-43, 12 games up in their division. Once-heralded Ian Kennedy (0-4, 7.41) returns to the Yankee rotation tonight versus Jered Weaver, and then it's John Lackey (9-2) and Ervin Santana (13-5) going Saturday and Sunday for the Angels. But Yankees fans needn't worry, as New York is countering with Sid "The Squid" Ponson and Dan "Wise" Giese. Actually, Ponson has been much better than expected, and Giese has pretty good numbers coming out of the pen for his 32 innings.

This has been a season of attrition for Yankee fans like few other in history. Not only all the injuries to key players, but we lose another old legend, Bobby Murcer. I'm not breaking any new ground by telling you how their history has been marred by more tragedy than most other baseball teams combined. From Lou Gehrig to Thurman Munson, on-field success has almost always been balanced by off-the-field heartache. Almost like we're seeing some life lessons being mixed in by a higher power who may or may not be a Yankees fan. If you've got a better explanation, I'm all ears, metaphorically speaking of course.

Yankee fans would take a split of the upcoming 6 road games right now. Then it's home to catch their breath with 3 games against the Royals, before another 6-game trip with stops in Toronto and Baltimore. For a team that has been counted out multiple times already, even by hardcore fans, we'll know a lot more about their playoff chances by then. Time is funny like that.

Brett's A Jet

LET'S SEE... any big sports news today? Well, in baseball yesterday we almost had a perfect game pitched, Joba Chamberlain went on the DL and the Tampa Bay Rays won yet another dramatic game. You've got the China Olympics starting. Yawn. And oh yeah, didn't someone in football find a new team in an unlikely place?

Actually heard about it late last night just before setting the alarm on my clock radio: Brett Favre is coming to the Jets for a 4th round pick, that could escalate to a 3rd rounder if he gets 50% of the snaps, could be a 2nd rounder if he gets 70% of the snaps and Jets make the playoffs, and could even be a first-rounder in the unlikely event Favre leads them to the Super Bowl. I would say Packers are looking at a 3rd round pick here, but stranger things have happened. No one knows, but at least now it's a football-related question as opposed to the soap opera circus of the last few weeks.

One thing that won't happen is the Jets turning around and trading Favre to the Vikings. According to the terms of the trade, that little maneuver would result in the Jets forfeiting 3 first-round draft picks to Green Bay. Talk about your poison pill!

This is huge news for the NFL, to have a marquee player in the Big Apple for the start of a new year. I'm sure Favre is eager to erase the bitter memory of last year's NFC championship game loss to the Giants. Anyone with eyes knows that Brett Favre was the main reason the Packers lost that game in Overtime, throwing one of the most ill-advised interceptions in league annals. But that's not how some see it. Already the Brett apologists are out in force. ESPN's Max Kellerman this morning came out of the gate spinning. Kellerman, a Columbia graduate, obviously didn't major in Logic, saying Favre "had a good game versus an excellent Giant defense that day," and that "if Favre played so poorly that day against the Giants, then why did it take one of the great games of all time from the wide receiver position in Plaxico Burress to beat the Packers?" I wish I was kidding, but the bad joke is on us: this guy has his own daily show weekdays on ESPN radio.

Favre was 19-35 for 236 yards with 2 TDs and 2 INTs that January 20 in frigid Green Bay. Admittedly, those numbers don't look immediately horrendous, but remember that 90 of those yards came on the TD to Donald Driver, a pass which traveled about 3 yards in the air. Take that one pass away and he's 18-34 for 146, which begins to tell the story. But it's that godawful pick in OT, giving the Giants the ball in Green Bay territory, that cost the Pack the game. It's also a play that is all too representative of Favre's inability to get it done recently in the postseason, and in my opinion was the overriding factor in the Pack finally severing ties with their legendary QB after 16 seasons under center.

But if you're a Jet fan this morning, or even this afternoon and later tonight, you're thrilled about the upcoming year, even as former golden boy Chad Pennington is shown the exits. Favre had a better regular season in 2007 than anyone could have expected, and once he learns the system will give the Jets their best QB play since the magical season Vinny T. gave them in 1998.
Pennington will be unemployed less than 24 hours from when he's given his Jets release, and as a Cowboy fan I wouldn't mind seeing the cerebral signal caller land in Dallas backing up and tutoring Tony Romo. Pennington would be a big improvement over current No. 2 Brad Johnson. But I think teams like the Chiefs, Vikes and Bucs might beat Dallas to the punch and, more importantly, offer Chad the opportunity to win a No. 1 job.

Everything is overhyped in New York sports, and this will be no different. Remember when the Knicks got Zach Randolph and everyone said he and Eddie Curry will make the Knicks unstoppable. I think you know how that one ended. Signing pitcher Johan Santana was supposed to make 2008 a cakewalk for the New York Mets. Check your standings today to see how that's going so far. The Rangers win every offseason spending big bucks for big names and then the games begin, the season ends and it's another team hoisting Lord Stanley's Cup.

But Brett can still play, he can still lead, and may be just what the Jets needed, at least for one season. Putting the development of Kelly Clemens on hold, and turning the franchise over to a 39-year-old whose best days are behind him is a win-now move that smacks of some desperation. That doesn't mean it can't work out if everything goes right. In a tough conference, I see the Jets winning 9 or 10 games, not enough to make the playoffs as a wild card.

One thing's for sure: The AFC East just did get a whole lot more interesting today with the arrival of #4. You've got the Patriots geared up for another Super Bowl run and Miami with Bill Parcells at the helm, making their own recent headlines at the QB position after bringing in ex-Cowboy Quincy Carter. (Just heard that Dolphins are in talks with Pennington!) Even Buffalo, 7-9 last year, looks to be improved talentwise. It's not loaded top to bottom like the NFC East, but at least New England will have a game on its hands every week. I'll even go out on a limb and say I don't see the Pats getting out to a 15-0 start again, unless coach Bill Belichick used the offseason to perfect that mind-reading of opposing coaches he tinkered with last year.

Not What Zorro Meant At All

I'M WARNING YOU AHEAD OF TIME that I'm not feeling inspired, so you're not going to get my quote/unquote "A" game today, but I feel oddly compelled to weigh in nevertheless, given how particularly disappointed I am in recent developments involving what can loosely be termed Humanity.

When I sneak a peek outside my narrow confines at the greater world at large, folks, what I'm seeing hasn't been at all pretty, unless you want to call it pretty gruesome. The behavior I'm seeing out of my fellow humans is not all that encouraging, what with reports of multiple beheadings -- so final an act of revenge that the accepted spectrum of normal murdering is just not quite getting the job done. When removing someone from the ranks of the living via a run-of-the-mill stabbing or shooting doesn't do justice to your special brand of crazy, where else can you go except entirely severing the head from the rest of the body?

Just like committing suicide, the means of murder are fewer than you might think, if like me you've given this sort of thing some thought. I think I've given some thought to almost everything, such is the frequency with which my mind wanders afoul of the course of normality during the waking day.
The first decapitation in the news took place July 30 on a Greyhound bus rolling across Canada of all places. In a surreal touch that sounds like a cross between Carl Hiassen and Quentin Tarantino, "Some of the 37 passengers were napping and others watching 'The Legend of Zorro' when Chinese immigrant Vince Li attacked Tim McLean, allegedly stabbing him dozens of times. As horrified passengers fled from the bus, Li severed McLean's head, displaying it to some of the passengers gathered outside the bus, witnesses said. He then began hacking at the body." Witnesses said the attack "appeared to be unprovoked," and if like me you're a student of aberrant behavior, you're saying to yourself right about now: Boy, you'd hate to see what this guy would do when he IS provoked. O Canada, good luck with getting any shuteye on a bus for about, oh, the next thousand years.

Later, this Vince Yi character, according to one witness, actually starts eating the unfortunate McLean fellow, but that's cannibalism, which is a whole other sphere of human dementia outside the narrow purview of this present post.

But let's not absolve the media of their fair share of culpability in this matter, having reported the atrocity in the first place. Just like the sensationalist news business to focus on the one bus ride that ends in a bloody beheading instead of all the occasions passengers are transported safely to their destinations without seeing one of their own savagely decapitated on the way.

Our second unfortunate episode occurred last Sunday on the small Greek island of Santorini, where an enraged man is accused of beheading his now ex-girlfriend in a rampage that sounds like something even the Coen Brothers would have turned down as too gory if they came across it in a movie script. Police have not released the name of the accused madman, but perhaps a more definitive legal term than "accused" should be employed in this case, as the man "drove around the village of Vourvoulos exhibiting the woman's head," according to the AP report. That's the kind of thing that is unlikely to endear you to your prospective in-laws, and Greeks should know better, being of a culture where family is so important. Somewhere the guy, who worked at a local restaurant, went all wrong, accused of killing his ex's pet dog in the same heinous manner.

Again, most disagreements between a man and a woman do not end with one party deliberately hacking off the head of the other. Yet is it me or does the media not seem obsessed with featuring the few where a bad argument ends not with hurt feelings and a few well-timed curses, but with major, irreparable artery damage to the head and neck area.
No need to point out that no Americans were involved in these savage acts of carnage, but I'll do it anyway. And another thing that nobody else will bring up, the white elephant head in the room, if you will, is that beheadings are deeply terrifying and yet comical at the same time. Gallows humor by definition is black and morbid, and you have to believe the French Revolution stand-up comics working the Guillotine circuit had the masses howling for more with their Robespierre imitations and puns about keeping your head while everyone around you is losing theirs. What is it about lopping off someone's noggin that brings out the funny like few other means of murderous mayhem? I mean, take crucifixion... please. I don't know one good crucifixion joke, and you probably don't either. Death by stabbing, burning, hanging, poisoning, head bashing, drowning -- all room clearers if you're thinking of holding court at the next cocktail party. But with the right crowd, the mere mention of disembodiment and the mood is set for merriment.

Yet even decapitation takes a back seat to an even more frightening species of head chopping, the lopping off of Mr. Happy, a la Lorena Bobbitt. There is a whole Website of jokes devoted solely to that '80s touchstone moment when she took their marital problems into her own hands.

I'm sure sudden penal removal has its own storied history, but let's cut away from that for a while and consider for a moment the history of human beheading. Terms like capital punishment and capital crime derive from the Latin word caput, meaning head. The Bible is rife with references to beheadings, most famously John the Baptist, who lost his while preaching the Word to a really tough crowd. And in a development which says a whole little about the so-called progress of Man, savage political violence in the form of beheadings is alive and well these last few years in Iraq, the crade of civilization for those of you keeping score.

Someone with even more time on their hands than me could write a treatise or two about how this sordid history of decapitation throughout the ages, as well as in various religions' mythologies, is embedded into who we are as a species. I mean, even in cartoons this kind of stuff is more than prevalent, it's elemental, from the old Looney Tunes to Ren & Stimpy and Itchy & Scratchy to whatever it is the kids are watching up there in their rooms with the door shut these days. Is it all an accident that these beheadings get the biggest laughs from children -- perhaps even buried deep down is a nervous laughter: the primeval satisfaction that it's someone else getting his head chopped off, not me, and that makes it pleasing in the most basic human way. Why else are we not immediately horrified by the image? And when we do seek horror or terror as mass entertainment, a good old beheading via chainsaw is just what the box office ordered. Perhaps that same instinct drove the Ancient Greeks to incorporate bloody stories like the one where Perseus, after pursuing Medusa to the ends of the earth (talk about your frequent flier mileage) , cuts off her head, then sticks it in a bag and carries it home. Exhibit A, perhaps, of an elaborate insanity defense on behalf of mankind.

Letters Into Words

THROUGHOUT RECORDED HISTORY, and what other kind is there, even the Great Ones are periodically afflicted with what has come to be known as writer's block: the sudden inability, when called upon, to improve upon a blank page. One way some writers work try to work past it is through the sheer act of typing a piece of literature that they really admire. This allows a writer to get inside the scaffolding of a story, to kind of see how the sentences were constructed word by word and letter by letter. Frankly, I never understood how that could possibly help writers get over their slump. And it won't do much for that bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome either.

What seems to help me is typing up some of my own old stuff. Besides being a constructive form of procrastination, it's kind of like a songwriter warming up by playing a few of his old songs on the piano. In fact, typing and playing the piano have many similarities. They both employ forms of muscle memory, as well as provide a good way to keep all 10 fingers out of trouble, and how often can we say that during the course of a day.

So in that spirit I'm going to post some of my decent old stories up here on the Internets, while saving my "better ones" for the trades, if you get my drift. Soon I'll have run out of old material and will be forced to create new stuff to put in circulation. It's the famous circle of life you might have read about.

Anyway, this is a tale about my liquor store days. The story has no real ending; it just kind of stops. And no title either, if you're looking for one.

We were putting the miniatures away on Monday afternoon when he came in the first time. Hulking and sulking, he looked like trouble right from the beginning.

Tim was at the back of the store, leaving me alone to confront this scowling madman. The guy smelled of smoke and small places. His beard was to put it kindly unkempt, his eyes raving and popping and somehow vacant in unison. When he put his big dirty hands on the counter and leaned forward, I noticed the BORN TO RAISE HELL tattoo on his left forearm, and my eyes instinctively snuck down to where we kept the small souvenir Mets baseball bat for protection.

"Hey pal, let me get some water for my dog," he said, and he wasn't asking. I didn't see a dog, but through our front window I saw a small woman and a big dog, looking equally forlorn. So I said sure and called out to ask Tim if we had any kind of bowl. He said no but then I remembered seeing one in the back, so I went to look, leaving old Scowlface alone at the front of the store. "Tim, go watch the counter and lemme get rid of this guy," I said.

Tim and the guy were eying each other suspiciously, even maliciously, when I returned balancing a full bowl of water a minute later. I couldn't figure out why Tim was so upset with this guy. I mean, yeah, he's a pain in the ass, but it was obvious the guy was homeless, along with his wife or whoever outside.

The big guy waved the woman into the store, and she and the dog entered. The dog went straight for the water and lapped it up in like 8 seconds, and then they were gone, the three of them, and it was a whole day before we saw them again.

Tuesday was my day to open the liquor store at 10:00, but on this day I was about a half-hour late, and outside waiting was the usual collection of 3 or 4 bums and alkies in haggard array. I knew exactly what each of them would buy -- Ray: a pint of Gallo Port, Tinker: pint of Night Train, Crazy Jack: half-pint of Lemon Gin -- because in the 2 years I'd worked there it never varied. What was once pity and then sorrow had turned into utter contempt for their weakness and immutability.

The old store was crammed snugly between a dry cleaners and a pizzeria, in a neighborhood where Uptown seemed to mingle with Upper East Side, where very rich and very poor alike met here on common ground, all needing a good stiff drink to make it through another New York day.

So it was no surprise to find some patients already in the waiting room, a captive audience watching me as I unlocked and opened the gate, itself possibly as old as the ancient store, whose wood at times could be heard creaking like an ancient ship straining to right itself. I made the bums wait outside while I turned on the lights and got the money for the register from the back, where it was hidden inside one of the cardboard liquor boxes. Then I put away last night's receipts, as they watched me impatiently from the other side of the glass, never taking their eyes off me as if it would make me go faster. I was just about to open the door and let them in one at a time, but I had forgotten a roll of quarters in the back. On the way I turned on the clock radio, and it was less than 30 seconds when I was heading back toward the front door to let in my clients.

I was averting my eyes from their eyes, focusing on the lock I had to turn, and never saw him there now first in line, filling the door frame with six and a half feet and 300 plus pounds of unblinking meanness, staring down at me with the most blatant, unmistakable look of scorn and contempt ever mustered. I could only imagine what he would have looked like if I hadn't given his dog that bowl of water last night.

"Go ahead, take care of them first," he said, leaning back against the champagne rack and folding his arms. "I have to talk to you."
The bums filed in sullenly, paid for their bottles with pocketfuls of scrapped-together change, and then left to tear them open and think about getting the next one. As soon as we were alone he pushed himself off the wall, rattling the expensive champagne bottles and shaking the other shelves.
"Listen, I need a favor. I got a check coming tomorrow, from the Veterans Administration, but i need a few dollars till then. You think you can help me out?"
"Sorry, man. I'm broke myself until pay--"
"When's payday?" he shot back before I could get the last word out.
"Payday is next week," I said, even though it was tomorrow. I was hoping he'd move on by next week.
"What day?"
"Monday. But you'll have your check by then anyway."
His face relaxed at that point into a smile, but his eyes still looked angry, as if he knew I was lying but appreciated that I could think on my feet like him. "You sure you can't do anything for me, pal?"
"Naw, sorry."
"Five bucks."
"Can't do it."
"Look, I'm out on the street with my wife..."
"I'm sorry about that."
"Can't you borrow it from the register? Your boss won't notice."
"No, he'd know and I don't have it to replace."
"Five bucks."
"Sorry," I said, thinking maybe I should give in, but knowing I'd never see him or my money again and that there was no check coming. Yes, he was homeless and probably a Vietnam vet and that sucked, but my pity meter was on off lately -- having been suckered and beat and conned over with two years' worth of sob stories. There were homeless people and then there were bums and drunks and street crazies, and differentiating between them was something I had little alacrity for. Giving a quarter to the latter group was like supporting a habit. And as we were the only store in the neighborhood that sold the cheap rotgut they preferred, we got our share of their business.

Looking at the giant before me, with his stained red bandanna, dungaree jacket and motorcycle boots, I had little reason to doubt most of his story. And yet I couldn't be certain and so wouldn't bring myself to help him out, just wanted to get rid of him.
"How about a bottle then, on credit, till tomorrow?"
"Okay, that I can do," I said. "What do you drink?"
"Beer."
"We don't sell beer here. It's a liquor store."
"You don't sell beer!" he thundered, and now he was grinning widely.
"No. In New York state you can't sell beer in a liquor store. Where are you from?"
"From? I ain't from nowhere but I used to live in Carolina."
"What part? North or South."
"Charlston."
"Oh. W ell, what do you want then?"
"Give me some Jim Beam then."
"Okay, and tomorrow you're gonna take care of it?"
"Yeah, tomorrow, sure. 'Preciate it, pal."
"Sure." I reached down to a bottom shelf and got a half-pint and slipped it into a small paper bag. "If I'm not here, just tell whoever's behind the counter your name and take care of it. What's your name?"
"Jim."
"Okay, Jim, it'll be on the register." I hit NO SALE on the cash register key, tore off a receipt and wrote: Jim, 1/2 pint Beam, $2.70. Then I taped it to the side of the old register. Jim made a point of shaking my hand and thanking me, then twisted off the cap of the bottle and was about to take a swig when I caught him.
"Yo, you can't drink in the store, dude."
"Okay, Okay. I'll see you then. And thanks," he said.
"Right," I said, sort of liking him but nevertheless very glad that he was about to leave. It was almost 11:00 and I had to call in orders and change prices on all the wines, so I told him I had to get back to work. I knew I'd never see him again, but I could explain away the bottle. My boss would be pissed, just on principle, like any small business man, and he might take it out of my pay. There were already about 20 such slips of credit already taped to the register, waving like little white flags of surrender every time the door opened and the wind blew in. What was one more?

Tim worked nights and was due in at 4:00. We would work together for an hour, pricing and then putting away new stock. Then I'd take an hour off for dinner before returning to work until closing time at 11.

I was going to Hunter College and Tim was gonna be a cop, and this job was easy enough to get some reading done in between customers, provided it was slow. But many a time did I have occasion to slam a book down on the counter when, upon reaching a particularly interesting passage, some sad-faced wino would push through the door. At those moments I hated people for their feebleness and found it hard to be pleasant. Invariably I'd glare at them if they requested something extra or just wanted the bottle cold. Then I'd stomp back to the refrigerated case or to the stockroom, making little effort to hide my scorn.

Tim would kid me about my temper, and my boss would get on me for it, and I would later reproach myself for getting so worked up. Coming home on the subway I would sometimes regret treating someone so rudely, and vaguely pledge to try to be nicer to people, who after all just wanted to be waited on courteously when they made a purchase, not too much to ask looking at it objectively. I could grasp that, but I was powerless to change and would revert back to my sullen ways the very next day. I had to be the most insolent store clerk in all of New York.

I had only a semester to graduate, and the nearer it drew, the ruder I seemed to get. My boss noticed it, and that day when he came in at 3:00, he warned me for what he said would be the last time to treat his customers with respect.
"I don't want to have to tell you again. If I get one more report from them, from anyone, you're gone the next day. That's it, no ifs, ands or buts. Understand?"
I told him I did, and of course he was right. He was always upfront with me, but he was seriously underpaying me, so I was forced to supplement my income via a process known as "hitting the reggie." I wanted to stop, at least I think I would have if I had gotten even one raise. But every time I asked he went right into his "business is bad" line.

I liked my boss but didn't respect him, a small man in his fifties who looked great for his age and was always dressed up when he came by the store to check on things. We disagreed on almost everything, from politics to sports to how to run the store efficiently, but he had that stubborn streak that clings to someone who has always run things his way, as if changing something would somehow repudiate all that came before.

Instead of just telling us what was on his mind, the owner of the store preferred to communicate by leaving written notes taped to the refrigerator door. If the delivery bike was left outside overnight, it warranted a note, as did forgetting to turn off the green neon LIQUOR STORE sign. But it was also occasion for a written missive if, for instance, a pen was missing. All the pens in the store were on strings tied to the desk or to the counter. These notes became an inside joke at the store, particularly when Don wrote something particularly clueless, and some were outright classics, such as the one he wrote after a perplexing rash of missing pens: "What are you two, cannon ball people?!" -- suggesting that perhaps Tim and I were cannibals who had consumed them.

A few nights later, as expected, there was a note asking "Who is this Jim?" stuck to the fridge. And even though I was probably in the store when my boss wrote it, he expected me to read it first before we discussed it. But instead out of spite I just ignored it this time, mainly because I hadn't yet readied a good excuse. Of course Jim had never returned to pay for the bottle of Beam, and so I'd end up paying for it myself. Store policy.

Out of character, my boss left without bringing it up. He might even forget all about it if I took the slip off the register tonight and threw it away. My policy.

But it wasn't even 5 minutes later that the guy comes in again. Tim was at the reggie and I was taking a crap when I hear some yelling, so I wipe my butt, wash up quickly and hurry out, a magazine still stuck under my arm, to find Jim and Tim going at it, in each other's face over the counter.
"You gonna pay for this fuckin' bottle or what?" Tim was screaming.
"That's none of your business, punk!"
"It is my business. I work here!"
"Hey, cool it now!" I say. "Chill out!"
Both of them back off a little at this. but now my heart is beating a mile a minute. The last thing i want is a fight in the store. Sure, it would be two on one, but Jim was a volcano capable of major damage should he erupt, and in a small, cramped store full of bottles, damage was inevitable.
"Tim, go to the back," I said.
"Make sure he pays his--"
"Go to the back!" I yelled, my voice loud but not too authoritative. I saw Tim was hurt that I had raised my voice at him and wasn't taking his side. He gave me and then Jim a dirty look and went to the back, where he leaned against the desk and lit up a cigarette, waiting to see how I would handle this.
"You better tell that punk to watch himself," said Jim. "He doesn't know who he's talking to."
"I know who I'm talking to," shouted Tim. "Another fucking bum!"
"What did you say, punk? You little--"
"Hey," I said. "Tim, cool it, and you, c'mon, what can I do for you? Did you get your check?"
"No, didn't get it yet."
"Well, I can't help you then. I can't give you any more credit."
"His check!" Tim scoffed. "What did he tell you, he's getting a check? And you fell for it! Don't you know you can't get welfare unless you have an address they can mail it to?"
"It's not welfare, you little shit," Jim bellowed.
"It's not welfare, Tim" I said. "It's a VA check."
"That's right, it's a VA check. While you were here jerking off in your diapers I was over in fucking Nam protecting ungrateful little shits like you."
"You weren't doing it for me," Tim shot back.
"I was protecting you!"
"Man, I never asked you to go. You weren't protecting me." I couldn't believe Tim was provoking this guy. If you called up central casting and asked them to send over one deranged, ready to freak Vietnam vet, Jim was that guy. Now he was slowly walking toward Tim.

Tim was giving up about a foot to Jim, but if he was at all intimidated it didn't show. His father was a cop, brother too, and toughness just ran in his Irish blood. It was gonna get ugly, and yet I stood where I was behind the register. I glanced at the window to see if any customers were coming in and saw Jim's wife peering back at me. The dog was on its hind legs, paws pressed against the glass, wearing the same beaten look as the frail, dull-haired woman to held its leash. Behind them the river of traffic poured down Second Avenue.

--BW