Letterman Tribute #8
Dave will leave one particular void in late night that hasn't been discussed when he goes next month on the 20th. He's the last guy on the network shows that doesn't just sell what his network wants him to sell. His segments don't have corporate sponsorships. He doesn't give away free gifts to audience members courtesy of this corporation or that one. The show's sponsors are frequently the butt of the joke.
There's nothing on TV anymore resembling the guy that slapped General Electric around for seven years back on NBC. At CBS, he didn't parade out the stars of the network's nightly news or
This Morning. You were more likely to see his buddies Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams from NBC then you were Scott Pelley or one of the
60 Minutes correspondents. He had his own theater, and the separation of several blocks from CBS in midtown Manhattan had meaning. When the "castoffs" from CBS's
Survivor were first forced on him as guests a decade and a half ago, and reality shows were becoming ubiquitous on TV, he refused to let them sit in the guest chairs. He would interview the
Survivor losers with him seated at his desk and them standing by the studio door next to his producers 40 feet away. After a couple seasons, that segment died out completely. Compare that treatment to what we see on late night TV now with the nightly parade of contestants and participants from
The Bachelor or
The Voice.
He was the last host that had enough power
not to have to do it. Since Letterman accounts for about 95% of the network late night TV that I watch, I'm unsettled when I see his competitors hock their products and buddy up with celebrities that only their bosses consider to be interesting. And I don't think I'll ever get used to seeing this either.
For a couple weeks, and now until the end, Dave has been dedicating the second segment of his show each night to some video memories of the show's glorious past, and next week I'll be watching the show remotely from New Orleans, so this is the last one of these tributes there will be on the blog. Johnny Carson was on TV throughout my father's lifetime, from Dad's age 12 to 42. Letterman was on late night for me and Aaron from our ages 6 to 40. I went as Dave for Halloween in 1991. There was one 10-year period, the beginning at CBS, where I only missed 12 episodes, total. That was before On Demand and DVR, but fortunately not before VCRs. I think I've written enough now
going back ten years to have fully made my point on the subject. The last month will just be me watching. I love you, David. I'm going to miss you. I'll probably be alright, but I have no memory of the time before you so I can't be sure.
Here's
Warren Zevon singing a song called "Mutineer" during his last
Late Show appearance. He was dying of cancer, and was the only guest on the show October 30th, 2002. His untimely death less than a year later certainly prevented him from performing this song on the show May 20th, 2015. There ain't no room on board for the insincere.
An endangered species
Chris Rock made
an entertaining video for Bryant Gumbel’s HBO show addressing black people’s fading interest in baseball. The gist of the message is that, if Black America doesn’t think the sport is cool, Young America won’t think it’s cool. He’s basically right about that, although he’s a comedian and therefore, he has exaggerated some items, such as the damage being done by ballpark organs (they are a very small part of any baseball game and can also be heard on occasion at NBA venues). Also, baseball is not, as Rock claims, dying. (Not referring to Rock here specifically, but it’s funny how we hear these arguments loudest when the Yankees suck.) The business is financially very strong, and still very much of the culture. Baseball could long outlive its competitors based on the support of only white people and Hispanics, but do we want that to be the scenario that plays out? Of course not. Black America does decide what’s cool.
The corporation of Major League Baseball does have a major problem in its promotion of the game. As Rock points out, MLB has bizarrely promoted the sport as a period piece, and at that, a period in history that black players were excluded. Beginning in the 1990’s, the ballparks and the uniforms started reverting back to “vintage” form, vintage being the era of the 1930s and 40s, and let’s not forget how this was a widely-celebrated change. Gone, or vanishing, from player fashion were the pullover jerseys, the form-fitting uniforms-- the “pajama” look basically, but those were fashion trends started by African-American players when they were at their peak population of about 20% of the total number of big league players. (In 2015, they are only 8%.) Also, the smaller, “retro” parks and the removal of artificial turf at about a dozen big league facilities reverted the game back to one of lumbering batsmen and station-to-station baserunning.
Observers, white and black, frequently make the case that black kids don’t play baseball anymore, and that’s probably true, but what’s also true is that MLB front offices don’t value the traits anymore that African-American players have traditionally brought to the game. The stolen base, an art form perfected by African-Americans almost exclusively, fell out of favor with the rise of Sabermetrics. Teams began to defend against it better, but also the smaller parks, and by extension, the increased likelihood of a long ball, meant that a stolen base had become an unnecessary gamble.
Now it should swing back though. Home runs are markedly down, so is scoring in general, and the new commissioner makes dumb statements like that he might consider banning the defensive shifts that are being successfully employed against pull hitters. (Why does this also make me fear that he will ultimately be the commissioner that forces the designated hitter rule into the National League?) Maybe the solution to beating the shift—and bringing some of the offense back-- is employing players that spray the ball from foul line to foul line and put pressure on the defense with speed and cunning. The latter round of “new” parks have also seen increased green space, which favors speedy outfielders over home run sluggers. Parks in Miami, San Diego, St. Louis, Seattle, and Queens, New York all would seem to warrant a new offensive and team-building approach over what worked five years ago.
Let's talk about my Cardinals as an example of the current environment. Chris Rock did. They play in a majority-black city. Among their greatest living players are African-American Hall-of-Famers Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Ozzie Smith. As recently as the 1996 season, the club had more than a half-dozen “core” black players-- Ron Gant, Ray Lankford, Brian Jordan, Ozzie, Willie McGee, Dmitri Young, Royce Clayton, and Bernard Gilkey, more than 30% of their roster. Last year they had one on their postseason roster, relief pitcher Sam Freeman. Close to zero, but not zero, as Rock claimed.
African-Americans seem to still be well-represented on All-Star teams. In our quest for retro-fitted baseball, have we reverted back to the time where there’s still roster space for elite players, but the marginal spots get filled by white players?
Sometimes I wonder with the Cardinals. First, they seem to draft very few black players. The last “core” black Cardinal before Jason Heyward’s acquisition this off-season was Reggie Sanders a decade ago.
Where does field manager Mike Matheny stand on this issue? On Jackie Robinson Day in 2013, he was asked by the local paper for his reaction to the fact that there were no black players on the Cardinals’ roster on the anniversary, one of only two teams in the league for which that was the case. His response, "I had no idea. It's just not something that enters my mind because it's not the way I view people... I guess there are people that pay attention to that, but we're just trying to find the best players we can put out there." Okay. Matheny had Freeman on the postseason roster last year, but he grounded the left-hander for the duration of October after an appearance in the first game against the Dodgers. He lost confidence in the hurler after he came from the bullpen and walked two left-handers in succession (on long at-bats each). Yet he brought in another lefty, Randy Choate, to face one left-hander in the same game and he gave up a home run to Adrian Gonzalez. Choate continued to be used through the postseason, making four appearances against San Francisco, recording only three outs of the eight batters he faced, walking three, giving up a hit, and throwing a ball away-- and a game-- fielding his position. During the regular season, Freeman’s ERA (2.61) was nearly than two runs lower than Choate’s (4.50). That game at Dodger Stadium was also Freeman’s last as a Cardinal. He was traded to Texas.
Matheny has no African-Americans on his eight-man coaching staff. In fact, he hasn’t for any of the four years he’s been the Cardinals manager even though he’s been turning over his staff by at least one or two heads each season. I’m certain he would tell you that, like his roster of players, he’s putting the “best” candidate at each coaching position, but isn’t that always how it works in America? Matheny, incidentally, was given one of the premier jobs in Major League Baseball, the one he currently has, despite having had no minor or major league coaching or managing experience. Jose Oquendo, from Puerto Rico, had been on Tony LaRussa’s coaching staff for more than 15 years, and had managed the Puerto Rican team at the World Baseball Classic, but I guess Matheny was the better candidate there.
Young African-American athletes are hopefully considering baseball as a worthy pursuit. It is fifty times safer than football. Its retirees don’t walk around crippled or dazed, for the most part. The potential for longevity and earnings can match, if not surpass, any other sport. Major League Baseball has the only union in North American professional team sports that’s worth its salt. You can get paid as you develop your talent, unlike football or basketball, where the plantation mentality still abides. You don’t get your summers off, but you’re in the fresh air for the duration of each one. You can’t be quite as expressive with your game as you can in basketball, but you can still do beautiful things with a piece of lumber or leather. You can also pick your own walk-up music. What other sport offers the opportunity for a theme song for each player?
Rock’s argument that old-fashioned rules suppress expression are largely overblown, especially when placed in the context of race. The African-
Caribbean players are still doing their thing The day Rock’s video hit the internet, a player blew a gasket on the field over a rival player admiring his own home run, and that severely-miffed player was Adam Jones, an African-American All-Star. Does football really tolerate celebrating more than baseball does? In football, there’s literally a penalty assessed when you do it. Don’t we always hear that NFL stands for the “No Fun League”?
For African-American fans, I can’t make as strong a case for investing yourself in the game. It’s the least expensive option to attend among the big four, but still too much. You also need to feel wanted, and for that, some work is definitely needed.
If Major League Baseball desires to be “cool” with the young and the African-American, and it definitely should, it would do better to bail on so much of the pro-family rhetoric. That recruits the kids when they’re 10 or 11, but then they’re rebelling against you when they rebel against mom and dad at 15 or 16. Be more subtle about it. Families need to know that attending a game is rated PG-13, but this “what about the children?” crap regarding performance-enhancing drugs has been as self-defeating as any other recent trend in the game. Football treats steroids as superficially as it thinks it can get away with. In baseball, people around the game won’t shut up about it. You have a once-in-a-lifetime African-American superslugger in Barry Bonds, and you do nothing but try to destroy him. (This week, the one charge that stuck against him was
overturned.) Compare what he was accused of doing to anything the worst football or basketball players have done. This has been in insane business strategy.
Also, enough with the flag-waving. Ever since 9-11, the goo has our shoes sticking to the stadium floor like bubble gum. The National Anthem’s not enough anymore. “God Bless America,” a joyless, targeted fuck-you to atheists and agnostics, has been added to it, and during some games, it's replaced the jovial and glorious “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I’m forced to stand for it and remove my cap even though it was written by a song-plugger hawking sheet music in the New York City Bowery. The league acts like it has to honor military heroes at every turn, but never does it honor any other kind of hero. The flyovers, the constant glorification of the warrior state-- African-Americans are our collective national conscience. They, along with most young people, see easily through this pandering plea to patriotism.
How about African-American Heritage Night at the park? The Phillies have one, to complement heritage nights for Greeks, Irish, Jews, and Latinos. St. Louis could use some ethnic heritage education too. The team had to deal last year with online videos showing redneck Cardinals fans arguing with Ferguson protestors outside Busch Stadium during the playoffs. The organization stood shockingly silent after that embarrassment, failing to make the link that needs to be made when you are representing a city on your uniforms, and both the local and national public is perceiving that you’re on one side of an issue because the racial make-up of your employees and your customers is so monolithic.
The team's corporate partners need to get on board with this too. The commercials during the game focus heavily on the white families. During last night's telecast, Dobbs Tire and Auto (the Cardinals’ official tire center or whatever) ran a commercial where the joke is that all the mechanics delay the start of their work day to listen to the National Anthem. It’s humorous, but all six mechanics in the ad are white guys. Have you been in an auto shop during the last decade that didn’t have an African-American or an Hispanic guy working in the garage? For a year, I went to a place for oil changes that was all
lesbians. The world is changing.
Trading for Jason Heyward with an eye towards making him a core player on your club for years to come becomes a shockingly important priority, business-wise as well as baseball-wise. To those so many white Cardinals fans that say the team make-up should be color-blind, like their manager's outlook on life, I say what so many wise men have been saying recently about similar statements: that pleas for color-blindness, when the concept is nowhere near a reality, is just another example of white privilege. Race does matter, and that’s what Rock is saying to Major League Baseball when he points out correctly that black people don’t need baseball, but baseball needs black people.
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4/24/15- This kind of thing would help.
California water wars
Our trip to Southern California was lovely, and I look upon it like I look at a trip to Venice: See it while you can. Both locations will become inhabitable, possibly within my lifetime. In Venice, the water level is coming up and the city is sinking. Throughout the American West, they've been living like Easterners, but the desert is slowly returning to claim its own.
The pioneers of the frontier west have done just about all the irrigating they’re going to be able to do. The mountains and the dams have provided the water supply for generations, but the climate is getting hotter and drier. The snow in the high altitudes of the Sierras is now coming down as rain, and the rain dissipates. It doesn’t offer the gradual replenishment through the spring and summer months that the melting snowpack does.
In Central and Southern California already, nothing is green that isn’t being farmed, and there’s hot political debate over the governor allowing the farmers to continue irrigating while the sprinklers have been ordered off for everybody else into the fourth year of the state's epic drought. The bottled water we drink in the rest of the United States comes largely from California too, so
their thirst is being aggravated by ours, by capitalism and our reluctance to drink from the tap.
I won’t feel bad for the conspicuous and idle rich when these drought conditions become the norm, when drought becomes fire, but the poor, as always, will feel the effects first and suffer the most—the poor in south central Los Angeles, the people that rely heavily on fruit and vegetable production in the farming and ranching areas. The economic stratification of the region will become even more stark as water becomes more scarce. That industrial divide has been a blemish on the region since the founding of modern Los Angeles. In 1974, Roman Polanski and Robert Evans made a dramatized noir picture about the William Mulholland water hustle of the early part of the century. The movie was called
Chinatown, and it's in the National Registry now. The water has always been limited, and the land generally uninhabitable (or unsustainable) for more than a few humans, let alone North America's second-most-populous urban area, but the moneyed interests behind Mulholland saw to it that what existed was piped to where the moneyed interests lied, away from the farming lands of the Owens Valley in eastern California into the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles proper. Then after Owens Lake was dry, Mono Lake was the next to drain. Now
the best solution anybody has for the current and everlasting shortage belongs to Captain Kirk. Actor and sage William Shatner wants to beam the water in via a giant pipe from Seattle, a city eleven hundred miles away, as far to the north of Los Angeles as Midland, Texas is to the east. The wet stuff will have to come from another region for sure. During the last century, vegetation has died in the Owens Valley, the lake remains a dry bed, and the valley's been left with frequent alkali dust storms. That valley has always been akin to a pair of those two-by-fours that hold up the phony building fronts on a Hollywood studio set-- the reality behind the perception of magic. The other side of paradise.
Non-aggravating felonies
It’s good news any time somebody is spared the threat of state-sponsored murder, but something tells me that non-uniformed citizens of the great state of South Carolina have not been granted the same courtesy that police officer Michael Slager has been granted when confronted with video evidence of the murder they committed, as well as evidence of their attempt to cover up that crime and lie to police. Prosecutors say Slager won't be considered for a lethal shot of poison because there were no "aggravating circumstances" in his shooting of an unarmed black man suspected of a tail light infraction. Aggravating circumstances in the state include items like rape, robbery, kidnapping, other felonies, but not other felonies, apparently, like planting evidence.
It’s still good to be a cop in this country, protecting the 1% from the 99%. Should we now doubt the eventual likelihood of a conviction in the killing of Walter Scott? Remember that it wasn't just Slager that lied. Before the video surfaced, the North Charleston police reported that there was a tussle between Scott and Slager and that Scott gained control of the officer's taser and attempted to use it against him. Also, why was Scott pulled over to begin with? It's not a traffic violation in the Palmetto State to drive with only one workable tail light. At most, this should have been a courtesy stop.
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Is there anybody out there whose hand you would not shake? Where I’m from, you’re taught to extend your hand if somebody extends theirs to you, but certainly there are some political figures whom I consider corrupt—a great many of them actually—that would cause me to hesitate before reaching for a hand. This list is more or less the list of the lawmakers that have criticized President Obama for shaking hands with Raoul Castro last week.
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Obama’s second term has seen some valuable progress made towards warming relations with Iran, a country with a large percentage of Western-educated citizens and, not that long ago, one of the Middle East’s most progressive countries. Unfortunately, some in Congress fail to understand that the launching of a war is a
failure of diplomacy, not a variation of it. The flip-out in Congress over the Iranian nuclear deal should show us definitively how strong and long the tentacles are that extend from the anti-Palestinian lobby in Washington.
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Fortunately, on this Jackie Robinson Day, the Cardinals are not the focus of the news stories regarding the scarcity of African-American players on Major League Baseball rosters. Thanks, Jason Heyward.
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Quote of the day: My wife, to me, as I walked out the door Monday night en route to a condo association meeting, "Don't talk too much. Let other people talk."
Letterman Tribute #7
The day following David Letterman's 68th birthday, CBS unveiled
an extensive list of names that will comprise the final guests ever on Letterman's
The Late Show. Dave is beginning his final five weeks as host of the show this week. His run on CBS began in August of 1993, and his career in late night television goes back to February of 1982. His last night will be Wednesday, May 20th. Adding some of the names that have already made final appearances, this list doesn't appear to stray far at all from
the one conjured on this blog 12 months ago. Mine's still a little more thorough, but let's see how all of the holes get filled. Anticipation.
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And then there was
the night that Cybill Shepherd came out dressed in only a towel.
Xanadu
Our trip to California this week included a tour at William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon. You'll be interested to know that the citadel of the long-dead American fascist is in the possession of the state of California-- not the Hearst family or the Hearst Corporation-- and yet there is no mention of the film
Citizen Kane on the tour.
Of course Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz's main character Charles Foster Kane in the 1941 picture was based on Hearst, and Kane's "Xanadu" was based on San Simeon, even though the castle of
Kane is located upon the spurious "deserts of the gulf coast of Florida." The movie that taught filmmakers how to make movies- and audiences how to watch them-- surely warrants a mention at the site, especially when the tour guide is expounding upon subjects like Hearst's mistress Marion Davies (the film's infamous phrase "Rosebud" was reportedly chosen because it was Hearst's pet name for Davies' clitoris), his media empire, or his vast collection of stolen historic items (what the film's iconic opening "newsreel" refers to as the "loot of the world"). When the guide at San Simeon is telling tales of Charlie Chaplin and Dolores Del Rio cavorting at the tennis courts or in the Neptune pool, she could certainly throw in a reference to the Oscar-winning Mankiewicz, who had been a celebrity visitor there himself during the 1930s when he witnessed many of the real-life scenes that would become iconic additions to the screenplay, such as Davies deciphering jigsaw puzzles on the floor of a vast, mostly-empty room. In the movie, Kane remarks at one point about the castle's grand scale, "I think if you look carefully in the west wing, Susan, you'll find about a dozen vacationists still in residence."
Citizen Kane was a vicious assault upon the original residents of Hearst Castle, but what a glittering, towering assault!
Hearst descendants are still able to visit and use the grounds of "the ranch" when they wish to retreat. That was a condition of the estate's transfer of the property to the state in 1957, but shouldn't California (and their millions of taxpayers) be able to demand a presentation of history on
their property that is without flagrant omissions.
Citizen Kane, after all, is
itself a product of California of which its residents can justifiably boast.
