Walking with a good neighbor friend yesterday, he mentioned he had just seen the newly remastered version of the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, which has been playing for a week at our local cinema on the 40th anniversary of the Pantages Theater concerts included in the film. I had just seen it myself—maybe the fourth time since its 1984 release—but it was my neighbor’s first plunge. He said he liked the movie, but found the final two songs “kind of relentless” and much preferred their earlier numbers in the show.

I love my neighbor, but he seemed to be missing the point.

Stop Making Sense isn’t “one of the best concert movies ever made”, as a recent profile of David Byrne on 60 Minutes proclaimed. It IS the best concert movie ever made, and nothing else has even come close. Woodstock? The Last Waltz? Those were dutifully documented depictions of great shows. Stop Making Sense is something else entirely: an impeccable assembly of music, lyrics, movement, cinematography, lighting and dramatic structure worthy of any classic film. And with Renaissance man David Byrne as your engaging, unpredictable, ever-innovative master of ceremonies, it remains a timeless work of art.

Similar to how a good fictional movie with a well-written story can effortlessly transport you somewhere for a couple of hours, Stop Making Sense does the very same thing. The film is credited as a directing collaboration between the late Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads, but I have to believe Demme was responsible for many of its cinematic joys. Starting with the minimalist opening shot of Byrne’s white shoes walking out to the stage where he clicks on a boom box rhythm to play “Psycho Killer” and we slowly pan up to reveal Byrne’s thin frame, focused eyes and unique, multi-range voice, everything that follows onscreen is by careful design.

Bassist Tina Weymouth then joins him for the lovely “Heaven” while crew members roll in a drum set in the background. Chris Frantz kicks those off with the rousing “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel” before fourth Head Jerry Harrison appears for ‘Found a Job” , which to me is when the movie propels into a second gear. The song is just a lighthearted story about a married TV comedy writing team, but for the final minute, the band launches into a Kraftwerky funk-jam, shot from the side with the band members moving back front and back in perfect rhythm, that never fails to make me delirious. Demme knows exactly where to place the camera in every moment for maximum visual and sonic impact; some of the best views are direct medium shots taken from mid-audience, where we see the entire band in their full visual presentation. 

From here things only get bigger and better. A full band including percussionist, keyboardist another guitar player and two wonderful backup singers joins the ensemble for “Slippery People” and an explosively good “Burning Down the House”. 

Every one of Byrne’s geeky dances, every change in his wardrobe takes the show into a new dimension, along with the lighting. “What a Day it Was” is shot almost entirely on Byrne with dramatic lamps below highlighting the veins in his scrawny neck. “This Must be the Place” is a comforting breather track, Byrne, Weymouth, and the two singers grouped around a stand-up lamp that the leader performs a short magical dance with. 

This is followed by the absolute show-stopper, “Once in a Lifetime”, a powerful mix of throbbing rhythm, profound words, and Byrne’s insanely passionate singing and otherworldly dancing—also lit from below. Demme keeps the camera solely on him except for one shot close to the end when the backup singers dramatically “rise up” in the background in a gorgeous composition.

In case this isn’t enough, there’s even a version of “Genius of Love” by the band’s “side group” the Tom-Tom Club, giving drummer Frantz, Weymouth and the singers a chance to strut their funky stuff. Byrne then returns in his signature Big Suit for “Girlfriend is Better” and the climactic jams of “Take Me to the River” and “Crosseyed and Painless”, featuring the only shots of the dancing Pantages crowd we see in the film. 

I’ve been a fan of the Talking Heads since the late 1970s, but listening to their albums is a quiet, private experience compared to the unforgettable power of watching Stop Making Sense. Jonathan Demme is sadly no longer with us, but his dynamic, genius collaboration with David Byrne is here forever for all of is to relish.

It was the first time I’d spent more than one afternoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I never imagined Alexander Girard would make it unforgettable.

Gone thirty years now, Girard was a well-known architect, interior, textile, and furniture designer after World War II. He grew up in Florence Italy before moving to New York and becoming director of design for Herman Miller’s textile division. He was also obsessed with collecting folk art miniatures from around the globe, and starting in 1939 and continuing through the 1980s and early 90s, Girard and his wife Susan amassed more than 106,000 of these pieces. 

In Santa Fe, where he spent his final years, an entire wing of their International Museum of Folk Art is filled with over 10,000 of Girard’s marvelous miniatures, and the painstakingly detailed worlds and layouts he created for them literally take your breath away, The hangar-sized wing, called Multiple Visions: A Common Bond is more entrancing and engaging than any exhibit I’ve ever seen. Blend a model railroader with a mad scientist and you get Alexander Girard. 

Each display in the room is given a number and a corresponding description in a guidebook you pick up at the entrance. Girard wanted no words on the walls so that the visitor could wander through the exhibit and relish in pure discovery. 

And there is so much to discover! From a baptism in a Mexican church with smaller villagers in the background cleverly placed behind larger ones in the foreground to create depth. To a 19th century American town with a dinner served to odd guests glimpsed through a window. To a Mexican religious carnival. To a farmer’s market and merchants on a river that seems to go for half a block. Girard’s fanciful craftsmanship is boundless; as wonderful as the rest of the Folk Art Museum is, with its exhibits of Alaskan Native coats and Japanese ghost and monster art, the “Miniatures Room” easily blows everything else away.

I have yet to see all seven other wonders of the world, but Number Eight is sure impressive, and is a must-immersion if you ever visit Santa Fe.

The Athletic website had a great piece this morning on how to “fix” the World Baseball Classic, and I wholeheartedly agree with it times ten.

Except the aim shouldn’t be to fix the Classic—which in my opinion is already great—but to fix Major League Baseball, which has sadly become a strikeout-plagued, rule-changed, unwatchable mess. What they propose is something astute baseball writers like Joe Sheehan have talked about for a while: swap out the boring, overhyped and irrelevant MLB All-Star Game every three years with the WBC in the middle of July. Work out the finances ahead of time to give MLB an extra cut in case a star player gets hurt—which WBC-haters mope about continuously—and watch the global baseball audience absolutely explode.

Rather than interfere with spring training and March Madness like it does now, the WBC would have its own stage for the short tournament, and the international exposure, if anything, would make Americans far more interested in the USA team, which this year has had some of the least enthusiastic crowds. 

Did you watch the best baseball game in years last night between Mexico and Japan? Neither team would give in, as Mexico went ahead on a three-run blast out of nowhere by Luis Urìas, before a ridiculous three-run blast on a real good inside pitch to Masatka Yashida tied things up. Randy Arozerena of Team Mexico robbed a home run and made a few other sparkling grabs, and that was all before Japan quickly erased a 5-4 deficit in the bottom of the 9th on a Munetaka Murakami double into the left-center gap with two aboard after Shiehei Ohtani began things with a different double.

Check out this Japanese radio call and tell me that no one is into this thing: 

The mobs attending the early rounds in Tokyo were insane, with cheerleaders on the dugouts leading sing-alongs throughout, and the crowds for the Spanish-speaking teams were all boisterous and more engaged than you would find at any American All-Star “classic” ever.

Enough already. Make the WBC a real global event by giving it the full July spotlight it needs. Unfortunately, because MLB can’t seem to do anything right anymore, I won’t be holding my breath.

Yes, I watched Episode 3 of The Last Of Us (and paid for it by having “Long, Long Time” stuck in my head for well over a week), but my newfound infatuation for 76-year-old Linda Ronstadt was kindled by The Sound of My Voice, the superb HBO documentary about her that I finally got around to watching last month.

Directed by Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein, it’s an inspirational portrait of a hugely talented singer and wonderful human, told entirely through the words of Ronstadt herself and a host of other musicians and industry people. I remember admiring Ronstadt at the time of her album releases and liking a number of her popular songs, but was completely unaware of her breadth of musical knowledge, of her Mexican family heritage, and of her ability to take any song in any genre and funnel it masterfully through her perfect and astonishing voice. She may have had an innocent, girl-next-door demeanor and worn a Cub Scout uniform onstage, but the power of her vocals, which could be either raucous, sexy, or painfully heartfelt at the drop of a note, was unmatched.

The documentary covers every step of her career, from the Stone Ponies at the Troubadour through multiple covers of Rolling Stone magazine. Ronstadt, like David Bowie and other restless artists, was compelled to go in entirely new directions, risking her core audience without hesitation. Time and again, her “experiments” proved wildly successful, like hiring Nelson Riddle to produce two albums of old standard torch songs, or playing the lead in the Pirates of Penzance opera on Broadway opposite Kevin Kline. She recorded an album of Mexican love songs her father used to sing to her and it became one of the biggest-selling Spanish albums in history. Hell, she even kicked ass singing “It’s In His Kiss” in an appearance on the Muppet Show!

Ronstadt, as we would sadly learn, inherited Parkinson’s Disease and lost her singing voice well over a decade ago, The final scene in The Sound of My Voice is both gentle and heartbreaking, as she attempts a Mexican ballad with her nephew and cousin in her living room, her hand shaking, her eyes and smile still luminous but her voice a weak facsimile of what she once had.

As soon as the documentary ended, I burned a Ronstadt playlist for my car, alternating the rock numbers with the ballads and country-swing tracks to create an hour and twenty-odd minutes of joy. (In my opinion, her versions of “Tracks of My Tears” and “Tumbling Dice” are better than the originals.) The thing I’ve finally learned is that you don’t just listen to Linda Ronstadt, you wear her songs like a warm coat you never want to take off.

I have to admit I go out to the movies far less than I did pre-COVID, but I still watch my share of them on streaming networks, and nothing I’ve seen all year compares to the tight, harrowing L.A. thriller by John Patton Ford called Emily the Criminal. Currently on Netflix, it’s my favorite film of 2022.

Aubrey Plaza, famous for playing the snarky office girl in Parks and Recreation, a host of quirky independent features and her current role in season two of The White Lotus, has never been better, and carries the film with unflappable ease. Plaza stars as Emily Benetto, a well-intentioned but troubled L.A. woman trying to dig herself out of student debt by landing a decent paying job. and soon “breaks bad” in desperate, inevitable fashion. 

After an interview with a respectable company goes south due to a past DWI charge, Emily’s friend at the high-end food delivery company she works part-time for gives her a useful job lead: a way to make a “quick thousand dollars.” It turns out to be a fraudulent credit card scam operation out in the Valley, which she is reluctant to join but finally agrees to dip her foot into. Emily has a taste for the dangerous, and every deeper dive she takes making “purchases” for her contact Youcef (Theo Rossi) brings her more cash, a fleeting relationship, and life-altering stress that finally comes to a head.

At a mere hour and 36 minutes, Emily the Criminal doesn’t waste one scene or frame of film on talky character development; all we see are Emily’s actions, reactions, and then more actions. We get everything we need to know about her feelings through Plaza’s engaging poker face and fearless expressions. Ford is both writer and director, and his neo-documentary style, masterful efficiency, and cohesiveness is evident from the first scene to the last. Using virtually no music, he creates a palpable tension in scene after scene as we experience what Emily is going through. The movie also has one of the best explorations of the sinister scam world now plaguing us more than ever, (at least the best since the incredible Adam Sandler/Philip Seymour Hoffman telephone battle in the underrated Punch Drunk Love). 

Plaza’s patented dry sarcasm is pleasantly muted in Emily the Criminal, and for once she has an opportunity to just plain act. I watched this movie four days ago, and it may be years before it’s out of my head.

I woke up sometime between 3 and 4 a.m. this morning with baseball clogged in my head. I suppose it could have been due to the four playoff games I overdosed on yesterday, split-screening two of them at once a few times and occasionally hopping to a third game on a third channel, like an archaeologist running between multiple digs at Karnak. And it wasn’t just because the games were thrilling—one of them was a rout and another an unbearable, impotent slog—but it was because the results were purely stupefying.

This is the first season MLB voted to include a dozen teams in the postseason playoff tournament. Like nearly everything they do these days, it was a choice motivated by greed. The league has a vast array of problems, starting with hitters being incapable of making contact (see Houston vs. Seattle, 18 innings), the insertion of fan gambling into the broadcasts and ballparks, horrific ball-and-strike umpiring because the on-screen technology is so advanced it now repeatedly makes them look foolish, and idiotic TV blackout rules that keep baseball fans I know in Iowa from watching games for at least three teams in neighboring states. 

I had to flip away from the Astros-Mariners marathon in Seattle about five times, because watching the home batters crush the hopes of their loyal, glory-starved fans was just too painful. Most of today’s hitters, largely obsessed with launch angles and pimping home runs for the nightly highlight shows, have lost the ability or desire to do anything else but swing for the fences. Over and over again, as the game dragged into endless extra innings, the Mariner batters flailed away at pitch after pitch purposely thrown out of the strike zone by a parade of Astro relievers, when all they had to do was shorten up on the bat and try and go with the pitch for an actual single with the winning run standing out at second or third base. When Houston finally won the game with a solo homer by a rookie in the 18th, I was immersed in another game, and happy that I was.

The bigger takeaway from yesterday was that with two more playoff teams added to each league mix, and the 162-game regular season made more meaningless than ever, MLB has unwittingly created Wild Card Monsters. Three of the four lower-seeded teams were forced to play all three of their wild card games on the road, and what it did was focus the crap out of them, enabling the Phillies, Padres, and Mariners to pull off surprising sweeps of the Cardinals, Mets, and Blue Jays. Now the Phillies and Padres have gone on to unseat the Braves, winners of 101 games, and the Dodgers, winners of 111 in the division series, with the Cleveland Guardians on the verge of another possible upset against the 99-victory Yankees. Shocking turn-of-events do make for great drama, and we’ve had that in spades this weekend.

But I disagree with the great Joe Posnanski, who wrote that in creating chaos, the new playoff system “has worked precisely as it was designed.” Are you serious? The system, with its built-in byes for the four best teams, was designed solely to put the Yankees and Dodgers in the World Series for maximum TV ratings. The last thing FOX wants is a Guardians-Padres Fall Classic where they can’t feature Aaron Judge in every promo ad. Did you notice that when Judge was chasing the American League home run record, the MLB Network showed an entire Yankee game every night for a week and a half? They could have just cut in from a different, more relevant game or their studio programming whenever Judge came up to bat, but nope. THE ENTIRE GAME was aired. Would they have shown entire Twins games for a week and a half if he was playing in Minnesota? Doubtful.

Anyway, the Phillies and Padres’ rabid fan bases became energized by this format like they never have before, the players on those teams were fueled to victory by them, and it’s likely to make the National League Championship Series a loud, memorable event. I can’t wait. Some have said the five-day layoff for the top-seeded teams worked against them in the division series round, but I disagree. It was the new playoff system kick-starting the underdog clubs into high gear. The Dodgers, who won the NL West by 22 games, didn’t have to play one crucial must-win series all season and were certainly not prepared to face the pressure of a delirious road crowd in San Diego the last two days. 

No, MLB did not get what they bargained for at all, but fans of the “smaller market” teams sure as hell have.

I don’t enjoy major league baseball much anymore. The pandemic of strikeouts has infected the game experience on every level. Hitting and fielding fundamentals have largely vanished. TV broadcasts are dreadful, two-or-three person blabfests that barely follow the action on the field. Whether they’re having a good year or not, the Yankees continue to be a shameless obsession of the national networks. The number of teams in the postseason has become absurd and is making the regular season more irrelevant, and the Manfred Man on second base in extra innings is a complete joke. Residents of Iowa, where the Field of Dreams Game has been hyped two years running, are unable to watch six different clubs on TV thanks to idiotic blackout restrictions. Finally, we have MLB’s growing encouragement of gambling on their games, making Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson’s non-inclusion in the Hall of Fame even more absurd.

So what’s left for the old school fan? Vintage radio and TV broadcasts on YouTube do the trick, as so simulation games, and thankfully, a number of great new baseball books every year. Recently I finished two fine, eye-opening biographies, both spotlighting the black baseball experience of the 1970s and 1980s, when contact hitting and speed made games continually thrilling. Cobra, by Dave Parker and Dave Jordan (University of Nebraska Press) and Rickey by Howard Bryant (Mariner Books) document everything you need to know about two of the best ballplayers in the last fifty years—in completely different ways.

Parker’s book is an autobiography, covering his 19-year all-star career with six teams, mostly the Pirates and Reds—and though the tome is longer than it probably needs to be, it’s an R-rated, hilarious, and decidedly human tale of an athlete’s struggles and eventual triumph despite physical ailments, racial tensions, and the cocaine era. Growing up in Cincinnati and headed for a career in pro football, Parker realized he was also very good at baseball, and after being drafted by the Pirates, his big size and swatting skills pushed him up through the organization until his rookie year in 1973. Seven All-Star Game appearances, two batting titles, an MVP award and World Series title with the ’79 Pirates later, Parker left behind a winning legacy, and was remembered as a great teammate who would always give his all even when hurt.

Thanks to co-writer Dave Jordan’s smooth transcribing and editing, Cobra has an entertaining flow that begins with a tense drug-era memory, then flashes back to Parker’s childhood and builds through the years, taking the reader into the tight Pittsburgh clubhouse and his encounters with Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, and Dock Ellis, among many others. The “brotherhood” of the Bucs is certainly the anchor of the tale, in a time when Pittsburgh was the first team to field an all-black and latino lineup, and with its largely white fan base often having a problem filling Three Rivers Stadium. Parker never flinches from telling the reader “how it was”, and we come away with new admiration for a player I always liked but didn’t fully appreciate. Cobra is a rich, revealing ride.

Rickey Henderson, on the other hand, was the greatest leadoff hitter in baseball history, and someone whose uncanny base-stealing (1,406 all-time), and on-base abilities (2,129 unintentional walks and 2,295 runs scored) never fail to amaze me. He played 24 seasons for nine different teams. He led off a game with a home run 81 times (54 is the next highest on the list). What’s remarkable about reading Harold Bryant’s biography is how unappreciative the media and baseball world were of Rickey for most of his career. 

Long before players began pounding their chests after home runs, pointing to the sky and pimping singles, Rickey Henderson was considered a “hot dog” for merely pinching the front of his jersey when trotting around the bases. When he went from Oakland to the Yankees in 1985 and refused to spend time with the ravenous New York press in spring training, they began a five-year campaign to crap on him in the papers, label him “selfish” and lazy” and basically drive him out of town and back to the Athletics, where he instantly helped them win a World Series in 1989. Then he went to Toronto for 1993, winning a World Series there, before moving on for short gigs with seven other teams. By that time a lot more GMs were fond of him, and knew his unique skills could help their clubs.

Bryant’s prose meanders and repeats itself at times, and when he misspells Bobby Murcer’s name as “Mercer” three times in one paragraph, it made me pine for the old days when copy editors were actually employed. Still, his opening chapters documenting the westward movement of black families from the Midwest and South to Oakland—and eventually an all-star crop of great black players like Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Joe Morgan, and Rickey—makes for fascinating social history. Bryant paints a complete picture of the various neighborhoods, playgrounds, and schools that shaped these players, and what the city meant to them. It’s no mystery why Rickey signed to play for Oakland four different times. 

Since then, the NBA has clearly replaced baseball as the major sport of choice for black athletes, and far little attention has been paid to the rich, multi-racial 1970s and ‘80s. After Cobra excelled with his “brothers”, Henderson created his signature “Rickey-style” and didn’t care what anyone thought of it. Above all else, the little man had supreme confidence to match his blistering talent, and in his prime it was impossible to keep him off the bases or from stealing them. The only time Rickey struck out more than 100 times in a season was 1998, with 114 whiffs. Last year? 94 major league players struck out more times than that. I’ll take those past decades of baseball any day of the week, and reading these two books confirmed it even more.