TV REVIEW: The Bronx Is Burning


Because I’d finally caught up with almost everything else, over a two and a half week stretch recently, I managed to watch all eight segments of the ESPN miniseries The Bronx Is Burning, ostensibly about the New York Yankees’ 1977 World Series win, their first since 1962, despite the tension among Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, manager Billy Martin and outfielder Reggie Jackson. It was also about the .44-caliber killer known as Son of Sam, and the general decay of New York City.

I had a personal interest in this story, for I was living in Jamaica, Queens from May to September. I was hanging out partying late at night and was just a tad paranoid about Son of Sam, and I remember the screaming red-letter headlines on the New York Post when David Berkowitz was caught in August of 1977.

The production featured the actors in scenes, interspersed with footage of the era, both in the baseball scenes, and in the atmospheric segments about the blackout, the mayoral race between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo (I voted for Cuomo, BTW).

The good things about this production: John Turturro as the Billy Martin, and I say that not because Turturro graduated from my alma mater of New Paltz, but because he seemed to embody, rather than imitate, the fiery manager. Erik Jensen as Yankee captain and catcher Thurman Munson. Kevin Conway, who plays Yankees Prez and GM, Gabe Paul; he doesn’t really look like Paul, but his caught-in-the-middle performance rang true. The great background pieces at the end of each episode featuring Jackson, Steinbrenner, Yankees Chris Chambliss and Fran Healey, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, and Billy Martin’s son, Bill Jr. (Martin was killed in a one-car crash in Binghamton, NY – my hometown – on December 25, 1989.)

The so-so parts: Oliver Platt as Steinbrenner; he looked like Oliver Platt playing Steinbrenner. Joe Grifasi as Yogi Berra, who didn’t seem all that bright and was there to share Italian-American insults with Martin. Leonard Armond Robinson as Mickey Rivers, and whoever played Fran Healey were OK. The guys playing the cops in the Son of Sam investigation, featuring Dan Lauria (Wonder Years). The use of the real video, although seeing the cheesy ABC Sports logo was a hoot.

The not so hot parts: Daniel Sunjata as Reggie Jackson; it wasn’t just the look, it was the feel of the character. Most of the other supporting players, especially the women, were ciphers. The guy playing Lou Pinella looks nothing like him, while a press guy reminded me of Yankee pitcher Catfish Hunter. And most of all, the Son of Sam killings, which almost all involved a couple of Noo Yawkers babbling something to each other before they were shot by Berkowitz; they all felt the same.

So, it wasn’t great, it wasn’t awful. I’m glad I saw it because it was a good reminder of the era. If you rent the DVD, which will be out later this month, I have the sense that the extras will be more enjoyable than the core item.
***
Here’s a weird TV thing: I was watching a rerun of Scrubs recently. The original episode aired on May 10, and was 40 minutes (more like 38). But when it was rerun in the last week or two, it was in the 30 minute slot. How did this work? Cuts. J.D. and Turk’s voice-over dialogue as they were driving away. Kelso’s dis of a woman his age or younger at a convention as too old. But mostly, the whole scene with J.D. and Turk at a lecture conducted by J.D.’s pregnant ex-girlfriend was broken in half in the original, with a “Busta move” piece of verbiage, but continuous in the repeat, sans “Busta move”. I wonder if both versions will show up on the DVD?

ROG

ROG

French military victories in the Arabian Gulf

You may recall that Google was, for a time, “fooled”, when typing in miserable failure, into linking to George W. Bush’s biography; now it links to the controversy over that Google bomb.

I have learned recently that the first site that loads on Google when you plug in the term French military victories is a faked Google page offering a “did you mean?” option. Searching for Arabian gulf gives you a site similar to the defused “cannot find weapons of mass destruction” fake IE error page. (Thanks, Amanda from Charleston.)
***
Wonder Woman shows that fighting crime is not always easy.

***
I went into a comic book store last week and actually bought two items: the Overstreet Price Guide (do people still call it the Overpriced Street Guide?), because my boss has started asking me about prices of old comics; and the magazine Alter Ego (July 2007), featuring a long interview with ’70s Marvel editor, and Alter Ego founder, Roy Thomas. His ascent to editor pretty much corresponded to the time I first started looking at comics again after a large gap when I had “outgrown” them; big-time nostalgia for me, I was surprised to discover.
***
There’s a new reality show being developed and I know all about it.
***
Numbers lie: I’m loving the Wall Street Journal blog, The Numbers Guy, which I write about here.
***
My monthly plug about the Underground Railroad conference here.

Yeah, I’m repositioning my own pieces from my other blogs for this post. Hey, it’s Labor Day weekend; cut me some slack!
***
Instead of watching Pedro Martinez’s pitching debut for his beloved Mets, what Fred Hembeck will be viewing (September 2). I’ll be alternating between the Mets and the U.S. Open (tennis), bumped from the local our CBS affiliate by what Fred is watching, but showing up on our CW affiliate.

ROG

ROG

Jackie Kennedy and falling apples


During our Berkshires vacation in June, we went to a place called MASS MoCA, which is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, located in North Adams, MA. Actually, we went there twice. On a Monday afternoon, we drove towards there, but , following one of those ad maps that were not to scale, thought that we had passed it, when in fact we had not. The direction “drive through a cemetery” was correct; the way we came, we passed a graveyard that was on one side of us, then another cemetery that was on one side, then on BOTH sides of us. So, by the time we got there on Monday, it was really too late to go in and get our money’s worth; the hours were 11-5 that week, though they would change to 10-6 for the summer the following week. We did, however, consume some of the ice cream made on location.

The idea of MASS MoCA really appeals to me: a bunch of old factory buildings converted into an art museum. So we returned on Wednesday, eavesdropped as a trainee described some Dutch fabric artist’s work, then went on our own.

The bulk of the time, we looked at the works of Spencer Finch, which will be on exhibit through Spring 2008, not so incidentally. The display was called Spencer Finch: What Time Is It On the Sun? Most of the pieces are very, mechanical, and I would not have “gotten” them had I not read the brochure.

For instance, for Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004), Finch mixed a variety of paints to match the color of the night sky. After weighing the physical mass of each pigment…the artist calculated the molecular ratio of each color in the combination. With 401 incandescent bulbs of various sizes, each bulb represents a particular atom… Well, all right, then.

Here’s a paragraph from this New York Times article, that described one piece for me:
Often the work promises poetry but doesn’t deliver it, as in “Two Hours, Two Minutes, Two Seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007),” a bank of ordinary white window fans stacked on top of one another. Arranged in a semicircle, the fans emit a steady breeze and an occasional gust over the time period specified by the work’s title. Mr. Finch experienced and measured these winds, using a weathervane and an anemometer, at the famous pond. It’s an interesting idea that falls flat in realization.

Lydia was getting bored. The one piece that might have been her, and thus our, salvation was the piece described here:
you first saw a square piece of green AstroTurf on the floor, upon which were scattered several red apples. Every five minutes, an apple thudded to the floor from an overhead apparatus, to make a vivid red-and-green sculpture that had a distinctly painterly appeal. Each night the apples were cleared away, so that the next day yielded a new chance pattern. Call Finch’s Composition in Red and Green a Newton machine or a mechanized rendition of an orchard in the fall, but it was surprisingly appealing to the eye. This would have captured Lydia’s attention for at least a little while, but the apple-dropping mechanism failed to drop the apples!

The one piece that worked best for both Carol and me, in spite of the impatient three-year-old, was Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy’s Pillbox Hat. Described here, it was in one small room, 100 paintings of ovals of varying hues of pink. The whole perception and memory thing came out with just the art and the title.

It wasn’t a terrible experience, as many of the pieces were intriguing. And we had ice cream again. Perhaps the adults should try to visit it again.
ROG

ROG

Next Post QUESTION

I’m curious how you folks who look at other blogs actually find them. Initially, I went through the links of the handful of bloggers I knew then, but I soon found a certain redundancy of common sites.

So, my favorite thing to do became using the Next Blog feature on the Blogger sites. However, I’ve been trying it recently and finding it increasingly unsatisfactory. I keep finding, every fourth or fifth hit, a sex site. And not just a sex site, but one site nearly identical in spite of mild permutations. It’s always a white background with a title of the video, which may be fairly innocuous – “David Beckham’s first MLS goal”. But on the right is a list of:
Related Top Posts that include – and I’ve eliminated more than a few:
# PAMELA ANDERSON AND JENNA JAMESON BOTH IN ONE SCENE!!!!(772)
# Sexy Chopper Biker Girls Naked(708)
# hot girls part 3 – the russian(445)

Of course, the non-sex sites I find are uneven. Either, I can’t understand the language or it contains information such as: “Well let me just say this, Zac Efron totally hotty! Danngg!” What’s a Zac Efron? (OK, I DO know about High School Musical.)

I do find some interesting places, but, where it used to take me about 10 minutes to find three commentable sites via Next Blog, now it takes a half hour, because among other things, the porn sites have disabled the Next Post button, so I have to go back before going forward. (They’ve also taken out the Flag Blog feature, not surprisingly – is there a way to report them to Blogger some other way?)

So, as I asked initially, what do YOU do to seek out new sites?
***
And speaking of Disney and sex, Mark Evanier, writing about the demise of a Disney digest, writes: Once upon a time, Playboy sold seven million copies per issue and now it sells three million. This is not because of a declining male interest in beautiful nude women or because the women aren’t as beautiful or as nude as they used to be. The phraseology, for whatever reason, cracked me up.
***
Geico Uncovers Secrets About Flintstones, Clampetts – the commercials will almost certainly be better than the upcoming Caveman series.
***
Starting this Monday: Changes in the comic strip For Better or Worse.
***
Two guys named Ken:
Levine – and his readers – on movie theater etiquette (or the lack of same)
Jennings (August 30) on separated at birth
***
I had asked who won the Democratic debate in Iowa on ABC-TV’s This week a couple weeks ago. I got five voters, four of whom picked Dennis Kucinich, and one who selected Barack Obama.
***
Karl Rove and now Alberto Gonzalez are both gone, and I’m not feeling the happiness I thought I would. It’s like the letdown I got when I would rehearse for a choir piece or a play; the event would go off well, but I’d be left with a mild melancholy. At least now I know why they left when they did.

ROG

ROG

Chuck and Di and Teresa

Like many people, I was up early the morning of July 29, 1981 to watch at least part of the royal wedding. I wasn’t much of a monarchist, but it was one of those world events I felt I should watch.

On a very cold Saturday, January 16, 1982, my friend Jessica, who was a performance artist, poet, and from England, herded her friends to Emmanuel Baptist Church in Albany to do a mock re-enactment. A number of frigid people played members of the royal family and the Spencers. Jessie played Di, I played the Archbishop of Canterbury. Many pictures were being taken and most of us had no real idea to what end.

A month or two later, at the 8th Step Coffee House, then located in the basement of the church I now attend, Jessie did a slide show of the royal wedding, complete with biting narration. It was amazingly funny! In fact, it was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Of course, the real royals got very weird, Chuck and Di split and, 10 years ago, Diana and two others died in Paris.

Not only did I watch the funeral, I got my wife the soundtrack to the funeral – she and Diana were very close in age, and she related to her death largely on that basis.

I’m reminded, too, that Mother Teresa, a Friend of Diana, also died 10 years ago this very week. Her death was practically lost in the headlines over the royal funeral controversy so well played out in the movie The Queen, which I enjoyed last year. Teresa made headlines recently when papers that were released revealed her doubts about her faith. Yet, she did her good works anyway.

Two women, seemingly quite disparate, both of whom had enormous impact in their own way, died a decade ago, and I feel the need to note this, surprisingly to me in the case of the younger one, who I helped to mock years earlier.
***
Richard Jewell died Wednesday, and I was IMMEDIATELY reminded about what one of the, well, accused Duke rapists said: that in HIS obituary, he will be described as “One of the accused Duke rapists”.

ROG

ROG
Ramblin' with Roger
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial