The World Series on Fox, continued

In Richard Sandomir's NY Times column yesterday he quotes Peter Macheska, the coordinating producer of baseball for Fox, on why they were late showing Koltan Wong being picked off first by pitcher Koji Uehara for the final out, based on the Fox "philosophy"  of showing anxious faces to heighten the tension!  Macheska said "Baseball isn't the quickest sport; if we stay on the field and don't give all the reactions, it's not as exciting as when we do."  So instead of seeing the beauty of the game itself, poorly televised as it is, we get endless shots of the fans and the teams in their dugouts!  This is as condescending as the canned laughter of sitcoms that make them so unbearable for some of us; network executives having said that without canned laughter many viewers would not know when to laugh, though perhaps the lack of genuine humor in most sitcoms might be part of the problem. In any case, some of us know that baseball can be at its most beautiful when nothing is happening and Fox and other networks should work at capturing that beauty instead of showing endless reaction shots of the spectators.

The Tomb of Ligeia and the World Series

In Poe's story "Ligeia" he refers to Ligeia's face as having "the radiance of an opium-dream" and The Tomb of Ligeia, like many of Roger Corman's films, has a dream-like quality.  In 1970, when I just had begun to take films seriously, I would go to see the films of Allan Dwan at MoMA in the afternoon and in the evening I would go to the Corman series at the Kips Bay Theatre, where the audience was sparse.  I prefer Corman's more obscure films, such as Teenage Caveman (evocative of the frailty of human existence) but the Poe films are very much true to the spirit of Poe's stories.  Not too long ago it was hard to see movies in their proper aspect ration, especially on VCR's or TV, but that has changed considerably now with DVD's and Turner Classic Movies and TCM showed The Tomb of Ligeia in all its wide-screen beauty, with blue candle drippings and space between actors that emphasized their emotional distance from one another.  There are certain similarities to Vertigo but the Hitchcock film soars with its Bernard Herrmann score while the score for the Corman (by Kenneth Jones) is both inadequate and inappropriate.  There has been little serious attention paid to Corman's films but Roger Corman:  The Millennic Vision (The University of Edinburgh Press, 1973) has an excellent essay on the Poe films by David Pirie.

Yes, the World Series is going on and the Fox coverage is so poor that last night they missed the final pick-off play because they were too busy showing fans in the stands! And, of course, the home run continues to play too big a part.  Mark Leibovich, in his article on Miguel Cabrera in the NY Times magazine, wrote "But while fans have been outraged over performance-enhancing drugs, they are also conditioned to expect the results."  Can't they be re-conditioned?  Maybe not.  Perhaps it is just too easy for sportscasters, who often have little knowledge of the game, to show home runs in the highlights, the beauty of a successful hit-and-run or sacrifice bunt being just too boring. My radical proposal would to make any fair ball hit into the stands an out.  Okay, maybe just make it the same as a foul ball.  But the worship of the home run has many negative effects on the game, from removing any margin of error for pitchers to preventing younger fans from learning about the complexities of the game.

why these subjects?

These are things about which I care passionately

BALLET.  I knew nothing about ballet growing up and nothing when I first came to N.Y.  If I thought anything about it I thought it was frilly nonsense.  Then a friend persuaded me to go to the NYC Ballet, I saw Balanchine's  Symphony in C and I was immediately struck by not only its beauty but its elegant complexity.  It was 1970 and Balanchine was in some ways at the height of his creative powers and I started to go to the NYC Ballet regularly, sometimes several times a week.  The NYC Ballet performed at the NY State Theatre, where even the cheap seats had pretty good views.  Balanchine had insisted on that, feeling that the ballet had to be affordable or it would become like Broadway, only available to the well-off and conservative.  Around the same time I started reading Arlene Croce in The New Yorker and she was immensely helpful in helping me to understand ballet and, especially, Balanchine; I strongly recommend Croce's two collections:  After-Images and Going to the Dance (one is still waiting for her long-promised book on Balanchine).  Eventually I started taking ballet classes, which I enjoy not only for helping me to learn about steps and combinations but for pure pleasure.

BASEBALL.  I loved baseball as a kid, rooting for the Red Sox and Ted Williams (my older brother was already a Yankee fan), updating batting averages daily, and playing often in local empty lots.  Then I turned 12 and tried out for the local little league and was rejected, finding out later the selection was fixed, based on the support of fathers (my father had no interest in baseball whatsoever).  I then lost interest in baseball until 1976, when I read Roger Angell's essay in The New Yorker:  On the Ball.  Instantly it became clear to me that I had completely missed out on the beauty of the game, something Angell described in lovely detail.  Then I started to follow the game closely again, rooting neither for the Mets or the Yankees but for the elegant geometry of the game itself.  The beauty of the game is elusive on television, as I quickly found out when I started to go often to games.  At that time the Mets were in some of their worst years so tickets were readily available and at Yankee Stadium the bleachers were $1.50 and available only on the day of the game.

MOVIES.  I was not allowed to go to the movies as a kid unless my parents took me and they had little interest in movies so that was not very often.  My parents claimed that this was because movie theatres were full of perverts (I had no idea what they were talking about!) but basically it was because my parents, from New England, did not believe that anything that gave you pleasure was good, especially if it cost money.  So I had little interest in film until I was in college in New York.  In those days a student membership at the Museum of Modern Art cost $5.00 for a year and as an art history major I spent a great deal of time there.  I knew they showed movies there but never attended until one day I had time to kill and dropped in to see a movie that I knew nothing about but had vaguely heard of, Citizen Kane.  From the beginning, the death and fake newsreel, I was totally entranced by this amazing and complex work of art and struck suddenly by the realization that I was missing out on the whole history of the art form.  Around the same time Andrew Sarris was doing a show on WBAI and I heard him praise Howard Hawks's El Dorado, having to almost apologize for recommending a John Wayne Western; I went to see it immediately and enjoyed it immensely, paying attention to the eye-level camera angles Sarris mentioned.  Around the same time Sarris's book, The American Cinema, came out, as did Robin Wood's books on Hawks and Hitchcock and I started to go to the movies every day and read about them, trying to catch up.

BOOKS.  I grew up in a town that had neither a bookstore nor a library (it has continued to vote against funding a public library) in a home that had few books other than an occasional best-seller.  So when I started earning money with a paper route much of it went to buying books on the rack at the local grocery store.  They did not have much of a selection so I just bought whatever they had, mostly pulp.  But one day they had Orwell's 1984, a book I had never heard of but which totally captivated me with its dystopian vision and compelling style.  I continued to be frustrated in trying to find things to read and was excited to find that as a freshman in high school we would be reading real books, even if they were old chestnuts such as The Microbe Hunters and Death Be Not Proud. Somewhat to my surprise this was not acceptable to many of the freshman parents; they considered that requiring their children to read entire books was oppressive!  PTA meetings were held to discuss the topic and I was pleased that the teachers stood by their guns; some parents had their kids transfer to less demanding English classes. The next year I went off to prep school where there was a wonderful library and I read widely and indiscriminately until I started to develop my own taste and preferences.  My favorite writers now include Richardson, Smollett, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Trollope, Nabokov, and John D. MacDonald.  I will be writing about them, among many others.

BASEBALL ON TV

This is as good a time as any to talk about baseball on TV.  Jonathan Mahler's piece in the Sept. 29th NY Times referred to the low TV ratings of baseball as showing how "irrelevant" baseball has become.  First of all, so what?  Baseball has its beauties that don't appeal to everyone, just as ballet does.  What difference does that make?  But I also think that one needs to discuss, as Mahler did not, how poorly baseball is televised. 

Several years ago Fox showed a baseball game as it was televised in the fifties and each decade since.  Their point, apparently, was how much better it is now, with instant replays and statistics.  What it demonstrated to me, however, was how much better it was televised in the fifties!  In those days they used two cameras, one high behind home plate and one high down the left field line, and one could see the arc of the ball and the movement on the diamond.  Among the problems with how baseball is shown today:

1. Most shots are telephoto shots from the camera in centerfield, presumably so they can show digital ads behind the batter.  Not only does this hideously distort the distance between the pitcher and the batter, it also leaves one ignorant of what is going on elsewhere on the field.  They even have to use a diagram on the top left of the screen to let you know if there on people on base, rather like the diagrams at department stores before even radio, that updated you on what was happening.

2. Too many close-ups.  Baseball is not about close-ups; like comedy it is played out in long shot.  Why constantly show close-ups of scruffy players grimacing and spitting?.  There are also too many irrelevant shots of the dugout and the stands, though at least now we are spared the shots of wives that used to be a staple of ABC broadcasts in the Howard Cosell days.

3. Related to the close-ups is the discontinuity:  we see the batter hit it and then we see a cut to the fielder making the play, completing separating the relationship between the two.  If we ever even see the arc of the ball to the outfield we see it in a replay, which brings up:

4. The lack of immediacy.  Andrew Sarris once said that the reason most baseball movies are not good is because much of the beauty of baseball is its immediacy (I will be eventually writing about baseball movies); on TV the constant showing of replays destroys the immediacy.  The use of replays has gotten so out of hand that one sometimes even loses track of whether one is seeing the actual game or a replay!

5.  These are some of the visual problems and they are not helped by the audio.  What is the point of having announcers, other than the job (which should be unnecessary) of telling you what you can't see because the camera is showing only the pitcher and batter, such as someone trying to steal a base? Do we need an announcer to say, when there is a runner on second base, that there is someone in scoring position? If anything, they should at least be explaining the things that most people don't understand:  how ERA and slugging percentage are computed, what is a hit-and-run play and what is its purpose, what the infield fly rule is, etc.

In short, baseball on TV is spatially and conceptually confusing to those who don't know much about baseball and unappealing to those who do.  I prefer baseball on the radio, where if the announcers are good (which too often these days they are not) one can see it in the mind's eye.

starting

I will be writing about why so many movies today look as if D.W. Griffith had never lived, what's wrong with baseball today, why there have been no great ballets since Balanchine died and what books I like, contemporary and classic, and why.  Among other things.

oct. 1,2013

This is a blog concerning four things about which I care passionately, but it will not be restricted to them