We’ve all been had. Spotted as marks and taken advantage of. The salesman saw you a mile away. A woman led you on to make her boyfriend jealous. Your employer promised a raise if you did A, B and C and the moment you completed C, there was a “change in company policy.” It stings because someone harmed you, but it will gnaw at you endlessly because you facilitated it. Hell, you were an active participant and often an enthusiastic one, grinning idiotically as you were picked clean. More often than not, rather than face the humiliation we just live in denial. “Yeah, the bigger engine costs more and uses more gas and I don’t really have any use for it, but I think it was a good value.” We’ve all been there more often than we care to admit, even to ourselves. Especially if we are Dodger fans.

For decades now, the Dodgers have intentionally offered a mediocre product and charged a premium price. That is simply how they do business and with a foolish enough customer base, it’s effective. The Dodger’s fan cost index is $100 more than the Angels, but The Angels have a higher payroll. When they got Vlad we got Furcal. When they had a team that were unlucky to win only one World Series, we were fortunate to win a couple of first round series. The Dodgers see their fans as suckers who will turn up, grinning idiotically because there is a beautiful stadium, a proud tradition, many transplant fans of the opposition and many other fans who just see “A Dodger Game” as a generic outing. The McCourts, as we’ve learned in court documents, bought the team specifically because they saw the opportunity in this. If the Dodger fans will pay for anything, why not cut back team salary even more than usual, up the cost of everything else and really rip off the fans? Lord knows they’ll happily bite the pillow and take it.

It’s as if there was a make of car that was favored by a few million consumers who would buy it no matter what. Let’s call it the Dodgermobile. It breaks down and never gets you where you want to be? You buy another one. It’s slow and powerless, but only takes premium and gets 10 MPG? You buy another one. It’s boring to look at and drive? It’s uncomfortable? You buy another one. And the Dodgermobile is an $80,000 car. Who wouldn’t want to own a dealership?

BBQ at Camden Yards

Look at something as simple as the food. I remember Camden Yards in Baltimore opening nearly 20 years ago. One of the things people loved about it was that it served delicious Barbecue instead of the cheapest crap imaginable. Teams across the country quickly followed suit, offering patrons quality food to enhance fan experience. Yes, the food was overpriced, but at least it was good and often unique to the stadium. Even many minor league teams have jumped on this trend and found it profitable and rewarding for the fans.

Various Stuff At Citi Field

The Dodger’s did come up with an innovation in the spirit of the Dodgermobile. They would let Pizza Hut and Carl’s Junior into the stadium, where they would sell their product for about triple price. What a unique, Dodger fan experience! Of course, the food is not exactly the same stuff you could buy anywhere in LA. An actual Carl’s or Pizza Hut makes food specific to your order, while at the stadium you chose from one of two or three pre-made options and they pull one out of the pile. Also, if the product at a fast food joint outside of the stadium sat drying out under a heat lamp for as long as the food at the stadium, they would throw it out and make something fresher. Even at the normal prices, if a Carl’s or Pizza Hut outside the stadium sold this product, it would go out of business in a month. If it charged the stadium prices, it would be gone in a week. Possibly burned down. The operation can only be pulled off if your customers are sweet, gullible Dodgers fans.

Crap you can buy for a few cents each at Vons

What about Dodger Dogs? I used to believe there was something special about them. Again, I’ve been as big a sucker as anyone. But they’re just grocery store dogs, marked up through the roof. We learned that when Farmer John started, well, selling them in grocery stores. I worked in a small movie theater as a kid and we did the exact same thing. We were adjacent to a Vons where we would send someone over to buy the cheapest hot dogs and buns that they carried. Then we’d pop them in the microwave and sell them for several times what we paid. People loved them. Some even asked where we gott them, so they might enjoy them at home.

Minute Maid Park's Fish Tacos

I can live with the traditional crappy popcorn, “malts” and peanuts. The grumpy old man in me kind of digs it. “We ate rock hard ice cream with a tongue depressor. And we liked it just fine. We loved it!” But it’s hilarious that the Dodgers successfully market the “all you can eat” pavilion as some kind of great value. The actual product costs them almost nothing. Joey Chestnut would have to smuggle Kobayashi into the stadium on a single ticket for them to eat $40 worth of that slop. The point is to extract a maximum amount of money from the fan, and it doesn’t matter that much if they sell you three grocery store hot dogs for the $20 or if they sell you four of them for the same price. Imagine you came across a sucker who really liked pennies and had a $100 dollar penny budget. Would you really care if he gave you the $100 for 20 pennies, or if he got to pay $100 to stick his hand in a jar and pull out as many pennies as he could hold? That’s the idea behind the all you can eat pavilion.

Stuffed Sandwiches at PNC Park

Yes, yes the Garlic Fries are OK. But they still aren’t fresh and it’s still just a marked up chain offering. They just seem great by comparison to the other stuff.

What really matters is the product on the field, right? Unfortunately, yes. I remember being in my car eight years ago and hearing some guy on the radio say the words, “Vladimir Gurerro is coming to Los Angeles!” I was shocked and elated. After years of frustration and boredom, the Dodgers had finally brought an MVP caliber player onto the team. I actually pumped my fist and made some retarded noise, sitting alone in the garage, which is pretty out of character for me. Seconds later, of course, it was clarified that “Los Angeles” meant “Anaheim.” It was just deflating. Like a dunce, I soldiered on through eight more years of second and third tier signings. Having to listen to people on that station claim that guys like Furcal and Ted Lilly are major additions for the Dodgers, while the MVP seasons and championships were enjoyed in New York, Boston, Philadelphia… man, it sure would have been fun to watch Vlad for that stretch. Instead I willfully chose to consume an inferior product and pay more money to do so.

Next time there is a major free agent, listen to the discussions of pundits. You’ll hear that the only major market team consistently omitted is the Dodgers. Carl Crawford was looking at the Yankees, Red Sox and Angels. If Pujols was to leave Saint Louis, pundits figured the Yankees and Red Sox would be uninterested, since they are set at first base. That left the Cubs and The Angels. But the Dodgers, who are weak at first base and who are the second biggest team in the sport? Not even worth mentioning. Not that I think big contracts for superstars are always good moves, but sometimes they are. And wouldn’t it be fun to see a future hall of famer play for your team? Is it too much to expect that it would happen once? There was Piazza, practically born a Dodger, but he’ll go in as a Met. Rest assured, if Kemp or any of the other young Dodgers pan out as hall of fame caliber, much of their primes will be spent somewhere else. Make a list of the most exciting young players in baseball. McCutchen, Votto, Santana, Heyward. That will also be a list of players who will never be Dodgers. Unless, perhaps, their career crashes or they limp into LA in their twighlights, like faded soccer stars playing in the MLS. In other words, if the value of their names can be marketed to dupes, even though the product is inferior, then they will be perfect Dodgers. But if they live up to their potential, contribute to championships and make a run at The Hall, they will come at full market price and play for organizations that give a shit if they win.

Manny? The Dodgers got him for free and were practically forced to bring him back when fans were shocked to discover that baseball can be entertaining. I’m sure they are delighted that it didn’t work out. They got a discount on his salary and can point to the bad contract for another ten years, like they did with Kevin Brown and Darryl Strawberry in the past. “Well, we tried signing a big free agent once, though it was with a guy past his prime. And it didn’t work out that one time, so that proves we shouldn’t ever do it.” But remember how fun Mannywood was, however briefly? Even though the rest of the talent wasn’t on par with what they have in New York, Boston or Philly,  and even though it was obviously the last hurrah of his career, it was exhilarating to have an elite hitter and a superstar smashing the ball all over the park. If you remain a Dodger fan, don’t expect to enjoy another experience like that in the foreseeable future. Again, if Kemp goes off like that, kiss him goodbye. If you think that maybe this time The Dodgers will do the right thing, I’d like to invite you over to my house. I have a jar of pennies and I’ll let you grab as many as you can for only $100.

The most recent shame is the beating of Bryan Stow by a couple of the Dodger’s many gang banging fans. The team has, of course, done nothing to resist its incorporation into gang culture. And forget the “what are they going to do, ban everyone with baggy pants?” straw man. Off the top of my head, they could 1)have knowledgeable, plain clothes security in the stands waiting for fans to “represent” gang affiliations. Do it once, banned for life. 2) Ban any fan who is turned over to the police 3)Aggressively and publicly support anti-gang projects in Los Angeles. If you don’t live here, you might be surprised to learn that fewer than half of Angelinos have gang tattoos on their necks, so yeah. If you present yourself as a gangster, be prepared to show ID to check against the banned list. And no racial profiling. If you show up in a fedora, carrying a violin case, you get checked too.

You might think that, after two similar attacks in recent years, both at games against The Giants, ownership would have taken steps to prevent this entirely predictable tragedy. People have been complaining about gangs in the stadium long before this culmination. It was already a common topic on talk radio. But addressing the problem would have cost money and Frank and Jamie have really been hankering for those ivory back scratchers. That’s why, in the face of an escalating gang problem in the stadium, rather than improving their already shabby security, the Dodgers started the season with no chief of security for the first time ever. Yep, they made a conscious decision to save money at the expense of fan safety by getting rid of their chief of security and not replacing him. A penny saved is a penny earned, and Brian Stow will die, or be a shadow of himself. Either way, his family will be crippled forever. If that’s something you want to actively support with your dollar, I’m glad you’re getting such a shitty product in return.

The World's Biggest Baseball Fan!

Probably, no level of security could have prevented the blindside attack if the perpetrators were determined. Though if a couple of security guards had been within view, maybe the attackers would have withdrawn. Nobody knows. There’s really no excuse for them getting away though. It’s a fucking parking lot. An open, concrete area with only a few exits. It’s difficult to imagine a more easily monitored and policed area. The structure is about the same as that of a prison yard.

There will be more security at the games now, courtesy of the LAPD. They’ll be working over time. Tax dollars will pay for it, if not immediately, after the story dies down. The McCourts can’t be bothered or trusted to offer suffecient security for the patrons they gouge, as LAPD Chief Batch strongly implied, saying “We try to let venues take care of their own security. If they can’t, I step in. I’m going to do what it takes.”

Obviously, ownership’s negligence is not equivalent to the malice of the criminals.  But most media are letting them off the hook far too easily. They chose gamble on fan safety to save a relatively small amount of money. ‘Gamble’ isn’t quite the right word, because they “lost” and the reward money they put up is still far less than they saved pinching pennies. And as a result, they now get to dip into your paycheck to cover their business expenses. So neglecting security while knowing that the stadium was becoming more dangerous was more of a win/win proposition than a gamble, but it was a calculated decision and it’s already paying off. But I’m sure the next owners turn down free security, paid for with tax money.

The Dodgers response to the beating has been an embarrassment to everyone remotely associated with the team. Some guy who hates baseball and accidentally turned into the stadium parking lot during the off season in 1987 is ashamed to be so closely associated with the Dodgers. They finally squeezed out a few grand for the reward money on the case after several other parties had contributed, including LAs taxpayers, again, through the city council. They’ve done nothing to reach out to the family. Remember when they dedicated .00001%of hot dog sales to set up a college fund for Stow’s kids? That’s because it didn’t happen and it won’t happen. Even if Frank and Jamie were actual psychopaths, you’d think that they would understand the necessity of such a gesture from a PR perspective. At the moment, the PR staff must be grappling with the decision. So much time has passed, do we look worse helping out now and keeping the story in the news, or should we just sit tight and hope people forget about it sooner?

I mean, imagine you were a bar owner and someone was beaten into a coma in your parking lot. It might not be your fault, but how would you feel? What would you do to help? Now, imagine the attack happened after you cut back on security. How would you feel then? Now imagine you were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, what would you do to help? When you answer those questions, it’s difficult to escape feeling disgust for Dodgers ownership. After years of frustration and annoyance, finally pure disgust. Are you in the habbit of voluntarily giving money to people you find repugnant? That is what it means to be a Dodger fan.

Other than crying in my e-beer at dodgerblues.com, the only consistently great part of being a Dodgers fan has been Vin Scully.  He could soothingly describe a nuclear Holocaust and make the listener feel warm and comfortable. “And there they go… it looks like missiles have been launched all the way from Russia. They should arrive in only a few minutes, if you can believe that. Of course, our ICBMs should be the first missiles to hit their targets, exterminating all human life for miles around. Funny story about the ICBM…” It wouldn’t be his fault though. In fact, if nuclear war comes, that would be the ideal way to experience it. Vin is the link between fans and the teams of our childhoods, and the intermediary between the current team and its fans. Once he steps down, which should happen after this year, the last vestiges of any nostalgia we feel for the Dodgers can finally be put aside. What remains–a cynical business scheme based on the belief that Dodger fans are an enless well of credulity and a veneer that’s become an embarrassing symbol for gang affiliation–should be discarded by fans of baseball. If you are a baseball fan, there’s nothing there for you. If you want to gang bang and still think the Dodgermobile and the penny jar sound pretty appealing, have a blast.

Otherwise, pick another team. I don’t care which one. A scrappy, small market team that tries to compete with the big boys on a tight budget. Like Oakland. Then you can still hate the Giants. Maybe you’re sick of discussing guys like Orlando Hudson and Andruw Jones as “big signings,” rather than role players. Get on board with The Mets, maybe. At least they try to put together good teams and you still get to watch guys like Wright and Reyes in down years. Plus, you can still hate the Yankees. Save yourself years of being taken for a fool, watching boring baseball and dropping twenties to eat pig shit . Stop acting like one of the biggest sports teams in the world winning the occasional first round playoff series is something to be proud of.

Watch some games in other stadiums this year. Even if you are gullible enough to remain a Dodgers fan, make a special point to take a day trip to see them down in San Diego, where the fan experience is vastly superior, and to see at least one less game at Dodger Stadium. You’ll have a better day and you can think of it as a hit of a few hundred bucks to the Dodgers for cutting back on security and putting your life at risk. It’s not like they’d have used the money to sign Prince Fielder or something. Not to mention the fact that the Padres are one of the cheapest teams in the fan cost index, while the Dodgers are one of the expensive. You’ll save enough to cover your gas and pay for a very nice dinner or a substantial bar tab in San Diego, instead of giving the money to Frank and Jamie or whichever sleazy opportunist follow them in marketing the Dodgermibile.

If you do it once, you’ll probably do it again. If you can make it to SF, catch the Dodgers play there, where the fan experience is also superior and, though expensive, still cheaper than The Dodgers. You can have a conversation about the Stow beating and how ashamed it made you. It’ll be a great opportunity to come up with another piece of perverted logic for not abandoning the Dodgers, who abandoned you so long ago.

I’m not sure who I’ll support after this year. Possibly The Tigers, as my family has roots in Detroit. They have their own problems, but at least they have Cabrerra and Verlander. It’s another team with a higher payroll than the Dodgers, in spite of being located in the third world.  More importantly, I’ll get to wear the same hat as Magnum. In any case, I do hope the Dodgers win it all this year. It will a great way to end my fandom. Plus, if they luck out with a mediocre team like they did in ‘88, I know that they’ll trade on that single, chance victory to justify screwing over the remaining fans for another 25 years and I’ll be somewhere else, laughing at the suckers.

You do realize that Halloween is long, long over, don’t you? So why are you watching this crap?

Yes, but why not every day? Are you  so afraid? Anyway, I watched like seven movies during a spontaneous horrorgy and I felt I should give a nod to Feast because it was the only one that wasn’t terrible, besides The House of The Devil which doesn’t really count because it’s almost like a legitimate film or something.

So now, “not terrible” is supposed to be compelling?

Well… you haven’t seen Amok Train. Once you’ve been around the block a couple of times, it isn’t so easy to find horror flicks that are not terrible. Masterpieces like Halloween III: Season of the Witch come around only so often.

So what is so un-terrible about Feast?

It is set in a bar where a motley group of characters are under siege by monsters…

Sounds pretty original.

Well, it is only 90% predictable, which is pretty decent. Also, the opening attack by the monsters drew me in for about ten minutes of uninterrupted violence, and it’s cool how you don’t know which cast members are going to die. It’s like The Thin Red Line, except the best known actor is Jason Mewes. The monsters are disgusting and have as many killing techniques as there are short lived characters. There’s no denying that this is another horror film refabricated from Dead Alive, Evil Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn that tries to be clever, but it actually achieves a bit of cleverness and enough originality to keep things rolling. For example, one of the characters trapped in a bar is a motivational speaker, incapable of deviating from his script and so he figures that his pre-loaded platitudes are as suitable for monster attack as they are for house flipping. They aren’t. But, thankfully, this film has way more teeth than something like Zombieland and it never waivers from a mission to deliver the horror film goods. I mean, of course, three of the four women trapped in a rural bar at random look like models and, after being soaked to the skin in blood, what other course of action is there than to change clothes in front of everybody? Predictable can be good.

What else sets it apart?

It was financed by the Maloof brothers, who own the Sacramento Kings, The Palms and some sort of skateboarding competition. I didn’t know they were into movies too. None of this compares, however, to making the most obnoxious of all of the deeply obnoxious Carl’s Jr. commercials. Note: I could only find the mutant, Hardee’s version, but it’s basically the same ad.

Also, after a marathon of crap, it was refreshing to just watch a movie made with such simple attributes as a feeling of control and an understanding of the genre. I also watched The Crazies, which had its moments but just felt like the work of a director who wasn’t a horror guy. There was no suspense, no matter how turned off my brain was and a few, borrowed gimmicks meant to manufacture suspense fell flat. But with Feast, I was drawn in by the simple subtlety of a decapitation reducing a man’s body to an out of control fire hose of gore.

When I say the film is controlled, I just mean that the actors, story and budget all seem to be carefully planned out, almost as though the filmmakers view making a movie as a significant undertaking. Some of the other films I watched, particularly those with Italian roots, like The Church, seem as though somebody woke up one day and decided to make a movie with their friends and the $340 in their checking accounts. I honestly think that they got half way through shooting Amok Train and they were like, “…wait, this doesn’t make any sense. Um, maybe the train could become possessed by a demon, and then have a conversation in which it explains the premise of the film to the protagonist… insofar as there is a premise.”

Having a devil train explain the premise of the movie actually sounds pretty awesome.

That’s because it is, but you have to endure the rest of the movie as well, which is so incoherent that it has to be explained by a train. Anyway, nothing like that is required in Feast. I mean, OK, in the opening of the film there are freeze frames on each character that explain the character to us in simple text, but that’s by design, son. It took days, if not weeks to write this script.

So, Novelty Deaths?

There were a couple. Probably the best is Beer Guy. He’s done for when one of the monsters pukes on him, twice. I was hoping that the puke would transform him somehow, but all it really does is burn his skin and make him sick. Then when he peeks outside for a path to escape, one of the monsters plucks out his eyeball. Finally, he is poised for revenge in the form of a suicide bombing with a Molotov cocktail, but before he can ignite the bomb, the monster does that Hulk Hogan move where it slaps Beer Guy on both sides of the head at once, but instead of “ringing his bell” this causes Beer Guy’s head to explode.

So, one liners?

“”You get puked on by a monster, and you tell me how it feels!”

Where there unexpected twists?

Kind of, but they are done without much fuss. Like the guy established as the leader in the opening is killed immediately. I also liked when one of the hot chicks was sent out to retrieve a truck and help everyone escape, she just hauls ass and leaves everyone behind. Not much is made of it, as this would probably be a pretty common response to the situation. She doesn’t get her comeuppance. She just takes off and ditches everybody and that’s the last we see of the character. The rest of them are quickly too occupied by survival to linger on it.

What did you learn?

The trailer is pretty strange. It asserts that the monsters are some sort of military project with some supporting footage. None of this is mentioned or even hinted at in the movie. It still gives you a reasonable idea of what to expect in the film, but I can’t think of another case where the trailer was so out of sync with the film.

I decided to put away a sixer of King Cobra to get the ball rolling, and for variety’s sake. It was also for nostalgic purposes as King Cobra was the official beverage of my last band in college and when we played, there was some rule where we all had to have killed a 40 by the end of the fourth song or something. Our greatest ambition was to one day have a tour sponsored by King Cobra. It sure is fun to look back on the times when you had hopes, dreams or anything resembling a will to live. However, older and wiser, I realize King Cobra is kind of a rip off and doesn’t live up to the awesome name, logo or fantastic 80′s advertising campaign.

“Don’t let the smooth taste fool you!” What a fucking slogan. “Don’t be fooled by the fact that our product ostensibly doesn’t taste like an asshole, it will still fuck you up!” But like many an ad slogan, it is fundamentally dishonest. The fact of the matter is that King Cobra does not have a smooth taste. Not smooth at all! And to claim that it does have a smooth taste is on par with the holocaust denial so fervently advocated by Earnst Borgnine and “Airwolf.” The “beverage” was first formulated for use by hunters to approximate the taste and odor of deer urine. Really, that there is any kind of malt liquor competition at all is a curiosity. Everybody knows that the whole point of malt liquor is that it’s the cheap beer with an unusually high alcohol content and nobody cares how it tastes. Nice if you are broke and/or want to pretend that you have anything under control because you only drink “beer.” So with it’s terrible taste and puny 6.0% alcohol content, why does King Cobra still have a seat at the table? You know what is also kind of funny? How it was probably some government do-gooder who decided that the % of alcohol content must be printed clearly on each product. This was certainly meant as a protection for the benefit of the poor, predicated on the belief that the working class, college students and alcoholics would theoretically pick up a cheap beer at the gas station and, after careful examination, say “wait… the alcohol content of this product is actually HIGHER even though it costs LESS? Count me out!” Anyway, let’s move on from “Same Old Malt Liquor Street” to “King Cobra Boulevard,” which is to say let’s get to the actual show.

So the first ever episode of “The A-Team.” This is the show that made a pin-on button of Mr. T pretty much the coolest thing you could wear to my third grade class.

The B.A. button supplanted even the seemingly invincible, studded leather jacket with zippers all over it, from second grade. This is serious business. But I think the most important thing about The “A-Team” pilot has to do with the fact that it has a different Face.

Quoth Wikipedia:

Tim Dunigan played this role in the pilot episode, but reputedly he was thought to look too young to be a believable Vietnam veteran,[1], and he was much taller than the rest of the cast. He was replaced by [Dirk] Benedict…

If you are older or younger and want a glimpse into the brain of someone raised in an era dominated by pop culture, who reached maturity during the generation of the internet, here are the things that ran through my head when I watched this and realized that there was another Face. Granted, I’m a bit old for the Batman cartoon but I watched a lot of episodes. The internet barely existed, leaving the sexually frustrate male in his early teens to sadly “fixate” to the animated Poison Ivy and the Pink Power Ranger after school. Anyway, here is what it looks like inside of my head.

I’m neither an anti-semite nor a believer in Jewish conspiracies. I admire many Jews, such as… Krusty the Clown, or Schindler. But I have to admit what flashed into that the remnants of the brain of a once housed reasonable intelligence, is that the height factor was bigger than the age factor. Tim Dunigan was born in 1955. He’d have turned 18 in in 1973. How preposterous that he might have been a ‘Nam vet! So Jews do unarguably dominate Hollywood. Not because of some conspiracy of lizard men, but because they earned it. So, is the whole “successful actors are often really short” thing totally unrelated to the fact that Jews are pretty short? I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. You can’t argue with Hollywood’s success. I’m just throwing the height thing out there. Another Fun Fact is that Dunigan, who wound up a Real Estate agent or something, instead of a rich and famous person, downplayed it all and claimed to agree with the decision and its ridiculous justifications, but he was probably just trying to… save face.

So the pilot is actually a two parter and kind of the classic Western scenario, borrowed partially from, yes really, The Seven Samurai. This gang of Mexican bandits, led by a man who says things like “come, we will talk! You will see that I am a lover of life! A hunter of Rabbits! A Singer of Songs!” plague a small village and shake them down for all of their money and terrorize their women, like so:

So some journalist is investigating all of this for some reason and they capture him. He works for the same paper as that chick Amy and since nobody else can help, she tracks down the A-Team, even though most people seem to regard them as an urban legend. After that, a whole ton of predictable stuff happens and none of it makes any sense. It turns out that the banditos terrorizing this small town are part of what must be a billion dollar business, smuggling crates of marijuana to The States, where it will no doubt lead to countless overdoses and cases of hard core addiction. So why are these guys, with direct ties to the military (WOOPS, I mean “gorillas” because the real Mexican army would never dabble in narcotics trafficking) call attention to themselves by shaking down a farming village for what must literally be a couple thousand dollars a year? Because, um…

When we meet Hannibal, one of the most wanted men in America he is keeping a low profile working in the movie industry. Granted, he is in a big rubber suit playing a sea monster or something, but that’s never really explained. Murdock is semi-faking his stay in the nut house and the guys get him out. I think Face is just a gigolo, everywhere he goes. B.A. is kicking it in the ‘hood and polishing his van while passing on life lessons to black youth, which at least seems like something that could actually happen. When I lived in Thousand Oaks and had just started with roller hockey I was practicing my shot against the garage and this old Canadian guy roller bladed up out of nowhere and spent five minutes or so coaching me and offered a few pointers that turned my slap shot around pretty much immediately. Then he swooshed off into the late afternoon. For all I know he could have been a fugitive wrongly convicted by the… well, Canada doesn’t actually have a military, so maybe the Royal Mounted Police. A member of the Eh-Team. The point being that at least B.A. was keeping a low profile.

So Amy goes through this whole bullshit routine and brings on the A-Team. They go down, uncover the drug ring, blah, blah, blah. At some point they use a crop duster to kill the pot crops. Amy doesn’t have enough money to pay their full fee, but they do the job anyway. B.A. converts an old school bus into a tank or something. It’s just a mess. A big part of this is Face using pure bullshit to con the staff of a high end resort into believing he is a producer looking to make a big Hollywood movie there to the extent that the concierge gets the national minister of culture or whatever to arrange for them to have a military helicopter. Nobody is ever like, “by the way, what studio do you work for because I’d like to call them.” Or, “I know this is only Mexico, but we’re still not going to give you a military helicopter.” The rest of it is really kind of boring and involves tons of Jeeps. The other really noteworthy thing about this episode is that this massive Mexican dude fights B.A. and kicks his ass! I can’t guarantee anything, but I bet that B.A. doesn’t lose a fight for the whole rest of the series. I wonder if that kind, old Canadian man is dead by now.

Tony:
Have you ever heard of a dislocated knuckle that poked through the skin before? Seems like a pretty serious injury for the most important finger on the most important arm of the most important player on the team. I can’t tell if they’re making it a more serious injury to cover for the fact that Orton left a game as a result of a glorified paper cut, or if they’re being cool about what is actually a pretty serious injury. My point is, I think Orton’s current injury situation will turn out to be a microcosm of Denver’s entire season, which is to say, no one will really be sure what’s going on but it will be a total mess. That said, the Bengals went 4-11-1 last year, Carson Palmer is already hurt, and their best player is the NFL’s answer to Kim Jong-il. Denver covers.

Sax:
This trend of hiring young coordinators is really getting out of hand with McDaniels, who lost a promising young quarterback and alienated his star wideout trying to prove what a big man he is. The Broncos’ hire looks especially suspect since everyone else plucked from the Belichick coaching tree has been an utter failure. On the other hand, the Bengals are turning into the Clippers of the NFL. Christ, what a fucking stupid game. I put this one on the slate so we could make fun of Tony’s Broncos, but now I just feel depressed. I just can’t take the Bengals under any circumstances, and they’re giving points here. I’m backing Denver.

Vikings at Cleveland +4

Dick:
The line-maker at Caesar’s must have come off a three-day bender when he made this one. Cleveland is one of the worst teams in football and their only contribution to the game over the last five years has been sending all of their first-round defensive busts to Denver expediting the firing of Mike Shanahan and helping to usher in the comedy show that is Josh McDaniels. There is no way Jamal Lewis gets more than 50 yards against Minnesota’s defense while the Browns, who haven’t played defense since 1986, will give up 150 yards to Adrian Peterson. Even though Favre is old, gray, and incontinent, he’ll be able to light these the Browns up for 250 yards and a touchdown or two.

Tony:
Is it me, or does Favre and the Vikings’ apparent sense of “finally!” make it seem like his arrival has been in the cards for far, far longer than anyone is letting on? Three truths: 1. The Vikings are going to get a lot of amazing plays and senior leadership from Favre. 2. The Vikings are going to get a lot boneheaded mistakes and old-guy poor judgement from Favre. 3. Favre looks fucking RIDICULOUS in a Vikings uniform. It makes me physically uncomfortable. Still, Favre is better for the Vikings than Hurrdurrnilus Jackson and Sage Rosenpenis combined. The Browns … have orange helmets. Vikings cover.

Sax:
Like basically everyone else in America, I can’t wait to see this Favre experiment blow up in Minnesota’s face, but we’re gonna have to wait until he gets banged up a little and the temperatures drop a bit. 4 points is an absurdly low line for Minnesota to be giving to a team as shitty as the Browns.

Chicago at Green Bay -3.5

Dick:
Chicago’s the better team, but the spread flips to Green Bay because no one knows if the Bears receivers can catch Jay Cutlers’ passes. There is no frozen tundra, there is no shitty weather, and the running game favors the Bears anyway, but this game will come down to who has a better game: Aaron Rodgers or Cutler. Cutler’s still considered a wild card because of the way he left Denver. Don’t listen to it. He makes the Bears a 13-win team and while folks in Green Bay might have been pissed that Favre went to the Vikings, the Bears landing Cutler made everyone else in the division realize they are basically fucked unless Cutler explodes on the sidelines every six plays and punches Lovie Smith in the face on national television. Don’t bet on it.

Tony:
How is Green Bay favored in this game? Brian “A Ray Lewis White People Can Be Comfortable With” Urlacher and the rest of the Windyville defense remain formidable. And I don’t know if you heard, but Chicago traded for a new quarterback. How, after finishing 6-10 last year, is Green Bay suddenly projected to walk away with the division? Yes, I know they installed Dom Capers and Capers installed a new 3-4 scheme and CHAMPIONSHIPS ARE WON ON DEFENSE, but I’m not buying it. If I were a gambling man or knew anything about football, I would say take Chicago to cover, but I’m not and I don’t, so, look for Chicago to cover.

Sax:
Who the hell is supposed to be catching all these great passes Jay Cutler is gonna throw? They have a wide receiver named Devin Aromashodu and another named Juaquin Iglesias, and look at Desmond Clark’s fucking eyes. LOOK AT THEM! I guess Chicago could end up being really good this year, they still have that defense, but they haven’t had a good quarterback since I was potty-training, so I’m gonna need Cutler to show me something before I back him on the road against a frisky Green Bay squad. I’ll probably regret this, but I’m taking Green Bay.

Buffalo at New England -11

Dick:
Tom Brady has a new knee and probably a clearer sense of his mortality on the football field after previously suffering nothing more than a hangnail. However, even with the running back situation muddled and the Patriots defense in full transition, this should be a cakewalk because Buffalo doesn’t even have an offensive game plan let alone their dreadlocked, tooth-capped running back, Marshawn Lynch, who is suspended for the first four weeks. Considering that Brady still has maybe the best stable of receivers in the game, the 11 points seems a little light considering that Dick Jauron can’t even decide what position to fuck his wife in.

Tony:
The idea of hating Boston sports fans for their lack of humility, reason, class, logic, insight, and sensibility has been around for years and can largely be considered cliche at this point. That said, every time I hear some Beantown doofus jawing about FACKIN’ TAWM BRADY, BROTHA, I want to fly planes into their buildings. Conventional wisdom says always take the Pats so long as Belichick and Brady are at the wheel, and especially against a team like the Bills of Buffalo High School. But 11 points is an awful lot, especially for week one. And the Bills apparently have some super hero receiver who does situps and eats popcorn with impunity. I’m going with conventional wisdom. Pats.

Sax:
TAWM FACKIN BRADY, BROTHA!!! Tony can eat a bag of dicks. 11 is a lot of points, but Buffalo just fired their Offensive Coordinator, TO is old, the Pats are at home, and Brady and Moss are looking to make a statement. Brady and Moss like to make statements in meaningless regular season games against inferior opponents instead of games like the goddamn Super Bowl. I would be really excited about Joey Galloway and Fred Taylor if it was 1999. Fuck, I have a bad feeling about this season. Still, I’m taking the Pats and giving the points.

(If your really must see the original article, it can be found here. )

Bond unwittingly participates in a delicate plan. An English fugitive is recruited in North Africa for dubious purposes. A man is garroted for wearing a Bond mask. The faint smell of evil is in the air. Bond maneuvers in the space between complicated stories. A part time grandmaster and full time schemer smokes during a tournament game. Bond carries a dangerous suitcase. A rug merchant offers Bond advice. The head of SPECTRE wears a large signet ring on his pinky, enjoys blood sports, is anonymous. After being told the rationale behind their plan, he replies ‘yes, all that you say may be true’ and seems satisfied. It is rumored that Bond is a guilt-ridden man. SPECTRE plans to steal an enigma machine then sell it back to the previous owners. They are not interested in their secret communiqués. The woman tasked with carrying out part of SPECTRE’s plan recoils from human touch. Bond upgrades to the bridal suite. Bond’s smirk has wounding power. The possibility of a proxy war serves as cover. Bond travels by boat through an ancient cistern. He thinks about how all the famous explorers are dead. Bulgarians and Gypsies are at odds. Bond is adopted by a Gypsy paterfamilias. Gypsy women file their nails down to sharp points, anticipating matrimonial combat. Bond’s breakfast: green figs, yogurt, coffee: very black. A cluster of operatives watch Bond have sex. A sultan imports an ablution fountain. Bond implores her to keep it technical. An agèd, blind homosexual painter teaches Bond color theory. There are whole cities underneath Istanbul peopled with Byzantine ghosts. The word of an English gentleman doesn’t mean much. Bond robs a corpse. Bond is tasked with acquiescing to the love of a possible double agent. She ignores her orders to fake love and is frank. He doesn’t because loving off the clock is a real busman’s holiday for him. Bond wants to believe. He sets part of the ocean on fire. The enigma machine remains stolen, probably forever.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka is the champion of the Humanities. He is the reason
why the Humanities must be preserved, for both the sheer delight in his
deceptively shallow prose and for his demonstration of the ability of
fiction to impart truths and ask questions which may be impossible to
articulate in any straightforward or ‘serious’ manner. The very thing
which is continually under question for any reader of Kafka is the
nagging belief that there is something at work in his writing,
operating behind the scenes, which is never announced nor proclaimed by
Kafka himself. Is it possible that he is just ‘telling us a story’,
giving us some simple prose to waste away a few boring hours, and not
demanding anything of us other than the most basic ability to read? My
belief is that only a moron could arrive at such a conclusion, but if
pressed for definitive proof, I confess that I may indeed stumble and
begin talking out of my anus.

The only reason that I can come up with as to why Kafka is so
mysterious a writer is by way of contrast with another writer whose
name is not uncommonly associated with Kafka’s — Albert Camus (and the
existentialist movement in general). In Camus, be it The Outsider, The Plague, or The Fall,
there is no doubt that he is addressing The Big Themes. He practically
yells out to the reader that he is dealing with questions of the most
utmost importance: The death of God, Man’s response to an Absurd
universe, the grounds of political action in a valueless world, etc,
etc. There can be no mistaking the ‘themes’ of Camus. In contrast,
Kafka, and whatever ‘themes’ he is trying to present, only emerge in
the mind of the reader gradually, sometimes even hesitantly. The
experience of reading his work can make one suspicious of one’s own
schizophrenia — always trying to read between the lines, placing
perhaps undue importance upon certain apparently insignificant events,
seeing continuities and connections between seemingly disparate and
unrelated situations. Another major contrast that can be drawn with
Camus is that it is possible to interpret some of Kafka’s works as
addressing the very same themes that Camus is dealing with, but without
any of Camus’ certitude – the incredulity of belief in the
transcendent, the abstract awareness that there is nothing which lies
beyond the veil of appearance, and the ridiculous pursuit of such
fantasies when the possibility of success has been curtailed at the
very outset. It is indeed possible to understand Kafka through the
filters of such themes, but there is at least the space for lingering
doubt in the mind of the reader that perhaps Kafka, unlike Camus, is
doing none of these things.

Turning to The Trial, we have what is perhaps the only
really ‘complete’ novel that Kafka ever wrote. As some of you may know,
the notorious ‘ending’ of The Castle was the beginning of another
sentence. The fact that that book did not ‘end’ in a conventional
sense, at least for me, does not even register as a negative. I mention
the relative ‘completeness’ of The Trial because it seems that if one were recommend a novel by Kafka to the uninitiated, The Trial
would be the best one to begin with; only after this novel, I think,
would my remarks about the fact of the ‘incomplete’ nature of The Castle be understandable. Now although there are significant overlaps in both the structure and the mood of the two books, The Trial
is perhaps the less abstract of the two. This is partly due to its
‘completeness’, but it is also due to the setting of the narrative
within the political-legal system of the world of the novel. At least
on the surface, the characters inhabit a world of domesticity, habits,
streets and buildings, familiar structures and the reliable
predictability of everyday life. Despite the fact that the novel begins
with the protagonist, Joseph K., being arrested by agents of the Law
and subjected to an unusual interrogation, these activities are still
taking place in a familiar environment. In The Castle, however,
the protagonist (just called ‘K’) is a foreigner to the snowbound
village and cannot rely upon any of his usual devices to help himself.
This becomes true of The Trial once the novel progresses, where
K. is forced to enter into strange and claustrophobic hideaways,
apartments and offices, but these new and unfamiliar locales are only
arrived at as a result of K’s investigations. Once he had been shocked
out of his previous life of complacency and narrow-minded
industriousness by the event of his arrest, the mission to uncover and
reveal the truth of his case and the nature of the accusation that has
been leveled against him requires him to enter into the world beneath
the surface of his previous life.

In the tradition of mystery novels, The Trial is
structured around the discovery or revelation of something and the
resultant process of unraveling the multiple layers that have been
erected around the truth behind the initial revelation. In standard
murder-mystery novels, the discovery of a murder leads the protagonist
to the gradual discovery of the truth of the case through the
successive uncovering and sorting together of the partial clues that
are accumulated along the way. The endings of such novels are almost
invariably centred upon the total, unifying vision of the protagonist
– through their eyes and with the sophistication of their intellect
they are able to link all of the preceding clues into a grand schema
representing the truth of the crime. No loose ends, not a single thread
remains left over. The Trial, however, does not begin with the
discovery of a crime or even with an implicit claim that a crime has
been committed. No, the event that triggers this mystery novel is the
event of the arrest itself. K is unable to determine what he is being arrested for, only that he is
being arrested and presumably accused as well. This reversal of the
standard model of the mystery genre becomes the one unifying theme of
the narrative, for K’s subsequent attempts to learn more about his case
lead him into even deeper and darker regions of his world. K’s
steadfast refusal to accept the accusation leveled against him by the
agents of the Law is the motivating factor behind his quest to discover
the truth.

The other most obvious reversal of the standard formula of the
mystery genre lies in the progress that K. makes through the novel.
Adopting the role of the investigator and the seeker of the truth of
his case, the progression through the different layers and facades of
the legal system does not lead towards any satisfying grand vision;
there are no epiphanies, no moments of great insight, and no sense of
even the possibility of such ‘closure’. The various people that he
encounters in the hidden recesses of this underworld of the Law –
ranging from legal advocates, experienced assistants, knowledgeable
women, portrait artists, and other accused individuals — all seem to
be able to offer K. some small nugget of information, some piece of
purportedly valuable and hard-worn advice, and through the application
of this acquired information, we readers are led into thinking that
this will make a difference for K’s case. But lest you think Kafka is
going to let us have anything of the sort, rest assured that the clues
don’t fit together, the advice does not hold any hope of acquittal, and
the disparate mass of partial observations, slanted perspectives and
inconclusive testimonies do not in any way provide a solid foundation
upon which K. can make any decisions.

One of the interpretations which are offered of this
anti-mystery mystery novel is that Kafka was offering us a glimpse of
the nature of the as-yet dormant totalitarianism that was to sweep
across Europe in the years after his death in 1924. There is a case to
be made for this view, but it rests upon an overly literal analysis of
the novel. Such an interpretation is the most obvious one to draw from
the novel. The first thing that could be pointed to in response to this
interpretation is that there is no evidence to suggest that the path of
K. was disrupted by any specific malevolent agency which was
intentionally thwarting K’s attempts to the learn the truth of his
case. What I mean here is that during the course of the novel the
impression develops that no one knows the truth in its totality. Yes,
there are those who are on the ‘inside’ of the Law who could be said to
know more about the operations of things than K. does, but like K.,
they are only privy to what they themselves experience from their own
narrow, specialized and inevitably partial perspectives.

The first evidence of this comes from the first agents that K.
encounters on the first morning: when pressed to answer questions
regarding K’s case and the nature of the accusation for which he has
been arrested, the invariable response is a confession of ignorance,
dutiful ignorance (‘These gentlemen and I are of minor importance to
your case, indeed we know almost nothing about it…You are under arrest,
that’s true, I don’t know more than that.’). If this ignorance, or more
precisely, if this partial understanding was merely a version of these
agents being lackeys of the State (‘We are on a need-to-know basis’,
etc.), then there may in fact be some substance to the totalitarian
interpretation. However, with each new encounter that K. has further
within the workings of the Law, the partial understanding and
comprehension of the operations of the Law by these other agents and
witnesses becomes the defining feature of all involved. No one is in a
position to provide a grand summary of all that is involved in K’s
case. If it were a vision of the madness of totalitarianism and
unchecked bureaucracy, then this would at least be some sort of
explanation and would hold out hope for an almost Oprah-like sentiment
of ‘closure’ (but some ground could possibly be gained by a comparison
between this novel and the madness documented in The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn). It is probably unnecessary to point out that there are other aspects of The Trial which do not fit so easily within this interpretation.

Another common perception of Kafka’s writings was expressed in Orson Welles’ 1962 screen adaptation of The Trial,
where at the beginning Welles’ voiceover tells us something to effect
that ‘Kafka has given us a vision of a nightmare’ or something like
that (I don’t remember exactly, so don’t shoot me). The idea that Kafka
writes surreal, nightmare visions of a horrifying world is another
general response to his work, and in short stories such as Metamorphosis,
there is an undeniable surrealism. However, like with the political
interpretation of his work, it seems to me that once again Kafka is
being pigeon-holed in a way that leaves many other residual themes
unresolved, in particular, the shared themes of both The Trial and The Castle
– the absence of any finality, the sense of the ominous presence of
inhuman forces lurking behind every corner, the ultimate futility of
human plans and the recurrent search for the perpetually absent
Transcendent. These themes can be dug out of the two novels, and this
links him up with the existentialists, but the lack of explicit
meditation upon these ideas, only the faintest allusion to them,
prevents him from being completely identified with the existentialists.
Also, by thinking of the novel as either a surrealist nightmare or as
an examination of totalitarianism, this can serve to undermine the
reader’s direct involvement in the novel. If Kafka were dealing with
political questions of the kind just outlined, for example, then the
possibility that he is telling us something about all of our situations is foreclosed. Indeed, the notorious French philosopher Jacques Derrida has made use of The Trial
as a model of the operation of authority and the law, and presumably
this implies that in some sense, we are all in K’s position.

So there we have it: Kafka is a poet of political terror,
Kafka is a surrealist who offers us glimpses of nightmares, Kafka
telling us the truth of our relation to law and authority, and Kafka as
an existentialist warning us of the futility of human hopes and
admonishing us for chasing illusions. There is something to all of
these charges, though none can claim to fully own Kafka. When I began
this little survey of one of the works of Herr Franz I claimed that
Kafka was the champion of the Humanities. I reaffirm my claim because
only in the world of the Humanities are such ambiguities not symptoms
of failure or of sloppy work, but of the ever-present duty to
continually re-attend those things that we slide over without ever
pausing to consider. In the case of The Trial, if questions
about the nature of justice, the nature of authority, of living without
the hope of eventual redemption, and the futility of pursuing the
Transcendent at a cost to the present are left lingering in your mind
long after reading Herr Franz, then his work here is done. As any
thinking person knows (or should know), disagreement over any
proposed answers to such questions are the signs of the health of a
culture, not its ‘decline’, and it is in this space that the Humanities
exists and prospers. When this space is sold off piece by piece and
there is no public space left for ambiguities, we are all fucked. Read The Trial and learn to love the lack of ‘closure’.

Nonfiction, as a genre that transcends modes of mass-media
communication, is taking over. It’s a not-quite-but-almost coequal
partner with fiction in popular and unpopular literature; but recently,
you’ve more likely seen the rise of nonfiction in television (and
movies, if you count the Clooneyized adaptation of Sebastian Junger’s
‘A Perfect Storm’). From MTV’s perennial ‘Real World’, to it’s recent
‘The Osbournes’, to the host of flunkifying reality-TV shows that have
been washing up and out on network television the past couple seasons,
writers have simply stopped making stuff up. If it’s not stranger than
fiction, non-fictive truth is at least as good of a story.

The granddad of this whole nonfiction thing is probably Tom Wolfe; but
granddad can be a bit crusty, and hard to relate to sometimes – so it
couldn’t hurt to hang out with the younger, less venerated but
nonetheless important uncle of contemporary creative nonfiction – Tracy
Kidder. I can’t say I know too much more about him than what was on the
inside flap of House and what others have told me in passing; but, to
get the gist of him (yeah, Tracy’s a guy), I don’t think you have to
know too much more than that.

House is the story of a house. When it begins, a young upper-middle
class family in the collegiate Arcadian hamlet of Amherst,
Massachusetts wants to build a house. They hire an architect. They hire
a builder. The builder builds the house. In the end, the family – the
Souweines – moves into the house. The Souweines are happy with their
new house, and the book ends. The real story of House is the simmering
clash of class resentments, latent anger and personality that forms a
trans-mundane three way conflict between the Souweines, their architect
and the builders.

Kidder’s talent lays in dredging the depths of his (real) characters
and bringing up subtle internal and external antagonisms that create
the real drama real people (even boring ones) really live everyday.
Even other prime nonfiction stylists, granddad included, would likely
be much more ham-fisted about it. Kidder’s talent, tragically, is
inextricable from those qualities which can make House (and lots of
nonfiction, it’s a premise thing really) a tedious read. Ultimately,
the reality in Kidder’s reality-literature can’t have the gravity of
reality sculpted for fiction plots. Unless he were to deal with, oh, a
murder, the travails of an international drug kingpin, or some kind of
spy-thriller type story – all the subtle conflict in the world can’t
compete with a made-up scenario in which the characters actually had
something to lose over the course of the narrative. Ultimately, Kidder
does a great job seeing conflict where others might overlook it, and
making those sublimated resentments breath fresh air – but, again,
ultimately, all those sublimated resentments give rise to a series of
arguments between the Souweines and their contractors over who’ll foot
the $900 for a set of stairs.

That, along with the excursions into construction history Kidder takes
and the symbolism he hints at, will be enough to hold some people’s
attention; but not everyone’s.