Two for the Road: Reinventing the Double-Bill (2002)

Inside every rock critic, there's supposedly a frustrated musician. Those who can, do, and those who can't, write about it. This commonly held view is buoyed by the number of critics who made the transition from writing to performing: Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Ira Kaplan, Neil Tennant, etc. Greil Marcus once addressed the issue by pointing out that far from wanting to be a musician, his own secret ambition was to be a DJ. What Marcus was saying, I think, was that given the choice, he would rather test his ideas and his tastes by choosing and organizing music made by others--setting up juxtapositions that would highlight surface connections and, the real attraction, uncover hidden ones--than by trying to create his own.

Speaking as someone who used to host an all-night radio show on the University of Toronto station, it is a rush when you discover one of those perfect matches, even if accidentally. I remember a show where, in the midst of counting down my favourite 100 songs, the lingering last note of Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" gave way to Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine," then still new and climbing the charts. Their proximity wasn't planned, but as one blended into the other, it immediately occurred to me that they were essentially the same song separated by 20 years. Thinking about that segue 15 years later, I now realize that their singers, in some rather unattractive ways, were also essentially the same person.

There's an obvious parallel that can be drawn between rock critic-turned-musician and film critic-turned-filmmaker, again supported by a number of real-life examples who travelled in the same direction (most prominently from various French and British film journals of the late '50s: Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Anderson, Reisz, etc.). And again, an intermediate alternative presents itself, one that affords almost as much room for self-expression and mischief-making as filmmaking itself: programming a repertory cinema.

The independent repertory house, whether a neighborhood theatre running a Pam Grier festival or a museum-sponsored program resurrecting forgotten Soviet films from the early '60s, is the last outpost for that long-ago saviour of the film industry, the double-bill. A product of the depression ("It was the Depression-era moviegoer who first insisted on a complete three-hour plus program for his or her money," according to Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn's Kings of the Bs), by 1935 double-bills were the standard at 85% of America's motion picture houses. For the next decade-plus, until television and anti-trust legislation killed them, double-bills were paired according to a strict economic hierarchy: an "A" movie at the top of the bill, bearing the imprimatur of a major studio and featuring name stars, and a cheaply produced genre picture to fill out the program. Unlike the main feature, where box-office receipts were split between the distributor and the theatre, "B"s were rented out at a fixed rate; this built-in ceiling on profits kept the majors away and left production of "B"'s to such "Poverty Row" studios as Monogram and Republic. In retrospect, many of those "B" space-fillers were later reevaluated by auteur-leaning critics as being superior to their "A" counterparts, but at the time, putting a double-bill together was simply a matter of cut-and-paste overseen by management. Freed from any obligations beyond the simple fact of availability, however, programming a double-bill can be an exercise in film criticism in and of itself--a chance, as with the creative DJ, to construct a dialogue between films, genres, and eras. But any good repertory programmer needs to be able to answer one basic question--What makes a good double-bill?--and answer it in a variety of different ways.

Far and away the most common pairings favored by today's rep houses are those chosen according to director or leading player (often, as with the collaborations of Ford/Wayne or Wilder/Lemmon, both). Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, Psycho and The Birds, The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player--such double-bills are staples of repertory houses, and for good reason. It would be welcome if a little more attention were paid to second-echelon stars and role players: a night of Patricia Neal (A Face in the Crowd and Hud), Piper Laurie (The Hustler and Carrie), Murray Hamilton (The Graduate and Jaws), or even John McGiver (approximately three unforgettable minutes in each of Breakfast at Tiffany's and Midnight Cowboy) would be a welcome departure from the standard Brando/Dean/Eastwood fare. My favourite bit of acting lore is Anthony Hopkins' claim that he based the cadences of Hannibal Lecter's voice on Katherine Hepburn, intriguing rationale for a Silence of the Lambs/Hepburn double-bill. Happily, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner's clunky mediocrity excuses it from consideration.

The other most common programming strategy is genre, and again, such double-bills require little explanation: The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity, Casualties of War and Full Metal Jacket, Rock 'n' Roll High School and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Genre pairings generally bring together films of comparable vintage, with a window of ten years or so. My own ideal rep theatre would loosen the parameters of chronology. Sexy Beast looks well past Reservoir Dogs for its antecedents to various heist films of the '50s (The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing), while every metaphorical death-of-the-western of the post-Wild Bunch era, from the elegiac (The Shootist) to the murky (McCabe & Mrs. Miller) to the perverse (Dead Man), makes a good match for the much earlier stirrings of genre self-consciousness found in The Gunfighter, High Noon, and Shane. (Just as Red River's stirring cattle drive--"Take 'em to Missouri, Matt"--has its nightmarish companion 15 years later in Hud's wholesale cattle massacre.) A programmer can do almost anything within the realm of genre, especially subvert it altogether. David Cronenberg's The Brood finds its ideal complement a quarter-century earlier in Forbidden Planet, but only within the boundaries of horror/sci-fi; as Cronenberg himself has pointed out, however, The Brood was really his version of Kramer vs. Kramer, a fascinating contrast in the mechanics of domestic disintegration.

Moving beyond director/performer/genre, unexpected points of narrative intersection make for some offbeat pairings. Bergman's Wild Strawberries is an obvious partner for either Harry and Tonto or The Straight Story, but when Victor Sjostrom and his entourage give a bickering middle-aged couple a lift, one is immediately reminded of Helena Kallianiotes ("I've seen filth that you wouldn't believe") and Toni Basil in Five Easy Pieces--taken together, a cautionary double-bill about why it's not a good idea to give rides to strangers. (Or, to take the point even further, a double-bill of Wild Strawberries and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.) Pairing an art-house favourite with its low-rent shadow is almost invariably a good idea waiting to happen. Besides Wild Strawberries, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre also matches up well with either Godard's Weekend or Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain: to paraphrase Barbara Streisand, people who get eaten by people are the unluckiest people in the world. And instead of The Seventh Seal alongside a Bresson or Dreyer, why not Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, in which Candace Hilligoss is stalked by a grinning, malevolent spectre not unlike Bergman's corporeal Death figure? All that's missing from Harvey's ultra-creepy shocker are the chess boards.

Bob Rafelson's lesbian hitchhikers in Five Easy Pieces were likely an explicit homage to Bergman, another illuminating means of pairing films that cut across time and geography. When Gene Hackman observes in Arthur Penn's Night Moves that the Eric Rohmer film he once saw "was like watching paint dry," an opening is created for a double-bill with My Night at Maud's. Likewise Ozu's Tokyo Story and Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, wherein Richard Edson assures John Lurie that Ozu's Tokyo Story is a "good one" (improbably so--Edson's character was born to do little more than read "Archie" comic books).* In the case of On the Waterfront, Raging Bull, and Boogie Nights, homage is passed from one film to another like a relay baton: first Scorsese has De Niro recite Brando's famous could-have-been-a-contender soliloquy, then Paul Thomas Anderson pays tribute to Scorsese by having Mark Wahlberg reenact De Niro's recitation. So Raging Bull works well with either film; the more esoteric approach would be to take Scorsese out of the equation altogether.

Boogie Nights is also a natural partner for Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, thanks to Anderson's meticulous recreation of the latter's elaborate poolside tracking shot; Kalatozov looked to Lenin for inspiration, Anderson found his in Eric Burdon. A few other double-bills suggested by the duplication of specific shots or images: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye finishes with a variation on The Third Man's final shot; Warren Beatty's dreamy, snow-entombed death in McCabe & Mrs. Miller echoes Charles Anzavour's similar end in Shoot the Piano Player; there's a strong evocation of Jules and Jim in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes when the three principals go bike-riding; both The Shining and Barton Fink (maybe even Michael Snow's Wavelength) pair well with Polanski's Repulsion, all of them ending on a slow zoom into a photograph or painting; and Spielberg clearly had Vertigo in mind when devising his spectacular zoom-in/track-out on Roy Scheider during the second shark attack in Jaws. Vertigo also makes an excellent match for Michael Powell's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, where the casting of Deborah Kerr in three different roles--an elusive image of beauty that haunts the film's two principals though three wars--anticipates Hitchcock's use of Kim Novak 15 years later.

Sometimes points of overlap that are almost certainly accidental open up other affinities between two films. In Wilder's Fedora (at first glance, an obvious partner for either his own Sunset Boulevard or Fassbinder's Veronika Voss), pages and pages of manuscript are discovered on which the putative title character has written "I am Fedora" over and over again. It's an image that had me automatically thinking ahead to Nicholson's "All work and no play" breakdown in The Shining, at which point the way that both films play around with notions of identity, isolation, and madness came into focus. Kubrick, working from Stephen King's novel, may not have been thinking of Fedora when he had Shelly Duvall discover Nicholson's demented handiwork, but the scene serves as a gateway into a meaningful double-bill.

Not surprisingly, remakes and sequels are routinely paired together at rep houses. There are also films that match up so well they function as de facto remakes in disguise. The Sweet Smell of Success, Alexander Mackendrick and screenwriter Clifford Odets' corrosive expose of Walter Winchell, has its perfect companion in Wall Street, Oliver Stone's liveliest and least heavy-handed film. Each is anchored by its era's iconic symbol of greed, ruthlessness, and the rot of power (Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker, Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko); both tyrants have lapdog apprentices in tow (Tony Curtis and Charlie Sheen) who eventually become dismayed enough to strike back at their masters; and both films waver between fetishizing and shrinking back in revulsion from the material trappings of success within their respective worlds (a table at 21 in Success, overpriced art and a DIY blood-pressure gadget in Wall Street). There's a temptation to want to pair Success with Diner, in which a zombie-like teenager recites Lancaster and Curtis's climactic showdown word-for-word, but Levinson's mild nostalgia piece would evaporate alongside Mackendrick and Odets's bile. Allowing for a few nuances of language, however, Hunsecker ("I want that boy taken apart") and Gekko ("Ollie, I want every orifice in his fucking body flowin' red") were made for each other.

Trying to find the ultimate pair of movie villains is subject enough to keep any rep theatre going for a year. My own pick would be a double-bill of Marathon Man and Blue Velvet. Much was made last year of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, especially the way his entrance was preceded by a grand build-up like the one given Hopkins' first appearance in The Silence of the Lambs. The unannounced arrivals of Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man and Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet are much more disturbing, however--Olivier and Hopper take over the proceedings so suddenly and inexplicably, their first scenes leave you numb and disoriented. Each character even comes equipped with his own unfathomable mantra: Olivier's "Is it safe?", Hopper's "Don't you fuckin' look at me."

George C. Scott would be on my short-list of greatest movie villains for his work in The Hustler, which has, besides a few surface similarities to Raging Bull, a more esoteric link to Scorsese's film: the real Jake La Motta has a 15-second cameo (and one line: "Check") in The Hustler as a bartender. Any Sam Peckinpah film makes a good double-bill with the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the then-obscure director appears briefly as a meter reader. And Joe Dante's Matinee, a fictionalized account of gimmicky shock-director William Castle, would play well with Rosemary's Baby: besides producing Polanski's film, Castle has a cameo as the man outside the telephone booth whom Mia Farrow initially mistakes for Ralph Bellamy, one of the film's tensest moments.

I'd also pay close attention as a programmer to the much harder-to-quantify subject of mood. Within a few years, Wes Anderson's Rushmore will probably become a staple of rep houses, invariably finding itself double-billed with The Graduate. A sensible match--there are numerous points of intersection between them narratively, visually, and musically--but Rushmore takes even more in terms of its wistful ambience from some lesser-known films of the same vintage: The Sterile Cuckoo, Goodbye, Columbus, The Heartbreak Kid. A program of Anderson's film and The Sterile Cuckoo would capture the lingering influence of a side of '60s American cinema existing far outside the Bonnie and Clyde/Scorsese/Tarantino lineage. American Beauty and The Piano, which both won major awards while simultaneously becoming targets of critical backlash, would make an odd but compelling double-bill. Seemingly worlds apart, the two films converge in the mysticism of voice-over soliloquies by Kevin Spacey and Holly Hunter in their final scenes, impressionistic reveries on beauty, acceptance, and the great beyond (from where Spacey is definitely speaking; there's some ambiguity whether Hunter is alive or dead). Ambiguity itself is a mood that suggests certain pairings. With both Last Year at Marienbad and In the Mood for Love, I found myself completely mystified as to whether the principals had an affair or not--if you're someone who likes to leave a theatre befuddled, such a double-bill would be nirvana. (I think it was Richard C. Walls who once observed in Creem that "ambiguous," "delirious," and "claustrophobic" were the highest forms of praise from an auteur critic, and that the ideal auteurist film would be the story of a schizophrenic miner told from an uncertain point of view.)

I'd like to see a double-bill of Joseph Losey's Eve and either Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street or Kubrick's The Killing--Stanley Baker's abject subservience to Jeanne Moreau in Eve puts him very much in the tradition of such hopeless pushovers as Scarlet Street's Edward G. Robinson and The Killing's Elisha Cook Jr. (Losey also makes expressive use of Billie Holiday's music in a manner that anticipates the post-Scorsese soundtrack, marking it as a good match for Sidney J. Furie's workmanlike Holiday biography Lady Sings the Blues.) In Michael Ritchie's The Candidate, a few seconds of chaotic footage inside a daycare centre, shot and rejected for a political ad, is played for laughs; Frederick Wiseman's riveting (and at times blackly humorous) three-hour documentary Welfare would pair well with Ritchie's film. I mentioned The Straight Story earlier in connection to Wild Strawberries; Lynch's film has another logical partner in Ichikawa's Alone on the Pacific, two versions of improbable journeys undertaken by obsessive, troubled outsiders. Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard belongs with Max Ophuls' Caught, a noirish treatment of a millionaire recluse modeled after Howard Hughes, while Breakfast at Tiffany's and Darling mirror each other uncannily, right down to their la dolce vita parties and the appearance in each of Jose Luis de Villalonga as the epitome of diplomatic elegance. Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, which appeared within two years of each other, would make an instructive pairing. Matters of budget notwithstanding, I've never been able to figure out why Malick's film was (and remains) widely admired, whereas Heaven's Gate led to Cimino being virtually run out of the industry--they're basically the same big, empty pretty picture of obscure corners of American history 20 years removed from each other. Finally, some double-bills should almost defy explanation. I'd love to program Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich with the aforementioned Fedora, a bizarre house of mirrors that could be subtitled Being Michael York. You'll just have to see the Wilder film yourself to understand why.

My own nomination for the ideal double-bill goes to a couple of personal favourites that dovetail perfectly on a number of levels: Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Michael Radford's Nineteen Eighty-Four. First off, they're two of the most unjustly overlooked films of their eras. Spy appeared in 1965, a time when the influence of Andrew Sarris's auteurist writings was starting to take hold; Sarris had already relegated Ritt to the lower reaches of his hierarchy (inexplicably so, on the basis of Hud alone), and although Ritt developed a critical champion in Pauline Kael, he never had anything close to the cachet of such '60s auteurist favourites as Sergio Leone or John Boorman. Nineteen Eighty-Four had the unfortunate burden of its gimmicky release date, and it was also a second attempt (following a by-then-unavailable 1956 adaptation starring Edmond O'Brien) to film a novel that many critics considered unfilmmable in the first place. Ritt's and Radford's films did garner good reviews upon release, but they've since been shunted to the margins of official film history.

Although Spy is in black-and-white and Nineteen Eighty-Four in colour, they aspire to and achieve a common texture--visually, they're among the bleakest films ever made. Ritt's director of photography, Oswald Morris, captured perfectly the dreary Cold War landscape of John Le Carre's novel, a clandestine commute between London and Berlin navigated by aging, shabby, worn-out spies, while Roger Deakins (later to become the Coen brothers' favourite cinematographer) brought to George Orwell's vision of post-war London a blanched, bombed-out decay redolent of privation and hopelessness. The look of each film is eloquent expression of their shared descent into worlds ruled by faceless tyranny: in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, in the guise of Big Brother (ubiquitous throughout as a fixed, oversized visage staring out from whatever monitor happens to be nearby), and in Spy represented by the duplicitous loyalties and meaningless allegiances of mid-level espionage flunkies doing the bidding for higher-ups well out of view (a shadowy arrangement that must have had special resonance for Ritt, who spent part of his career on Hollywood's blacklist). Indeed, as the many about-faces of Spy's labyrinth narrative start to accumulate, one is reminded of Nineteen Eighty-Four's darkly comical "We have always been at war with Eurasia" bromide. There's even a kind of parallelism between the Berlin Wall in Spy and Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four, implacable symbols of oppression and control, where Agent Leamas (literally) and Winston Smith (spiritually) are ultimately killed.

There are other points of similarity--a doomed love affair, the numbing routine of nine-to-five drudgework, the presence of Cyril Cusack--but above all else there is Richard Burton, cast as Leamas in Spy and O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Spy catches Burton entering mid-career at the peak of his talents--a year before Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf would elevate him to a new level of public visibility, but well after he first established himself in 1959 with Look Back in Anger--while Nineteen Eighty-Four was his final film, a grace note on the heels of an alcoholic wilderness marked by such lowlights as The Medusa Touch and Circle of Two. Burton already had the disgust of middle-age attached to him playing young Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and in Leamas and O'Brien he gives that side of himself (was there any other with Burton?) full rein. The two characters supposedly carry out their maneuvers at opposite ends of the moral spectrum--Leamas fighting the good fight, O'Brien the bureaucratic arm of totalitarianism--but Burton so naturally exudes resignation and self-loathing in any context, both convey the same message in the end: "This is all a corrupt, meaningless charade, but it is what it is and I'll play out my part till the sorry conclusion." (The O'Brien of Orwell's novel comes across as more of a true believer than in Burton's shaded portrayal.) The subtlety and authority of both performances are astonishing. Screened together, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Nineteen Eighty-Four serve as bookends to a career that, although largely squandered, had moments of brilliance on par with the best work of Olivier or Brando.

The multiplicity of connections between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Nineteen Eighty-Four would be my ideal as a repertory programmer, a seamless blend of the visual, the thematic, and the art of performance. Every dedicated filmgoer finds his or her thoughts overtaken on occasion by the backlog of fragments and half-formulated theories one accumulates from a lifetime of watching movies. It's like carrying a rep theatre around in your head, just waiting for someone to give you the go-ahead and make it real.

(Originally published in Cinemascope)

We're Just Trying to Be Friendly (2002)

2001 Year-End Ballot

1. "Around the World," ATC: This stood in stark relief to everything else on pop radio in 2001. Destiny's Child, Alicia Keyes, Jay-Z, all that interchangeably dismal Staind/Creed/Incubus piffle--everyone's a showstopper, dramatizing and declaiming over every square inch of song, self-appointed legends the moment they get a record on the air. (No less true of at least a couple of the people below, but I found myself fleeing from a greater percentage of radio swagger this year than at any time in recent memory.) "Around the World" was the only music to satisfy my new rule that the best song in any given year must be touched by the hand of "You Showed Me" by the Byrds: mysterious, luminous, melancholy, evanescent, serene. ATC's singer spends much of the time explaining her inability to explain anything ("I don't know what to say--oh not another word, just la-la-la-la-la..."), but precipitating her speechlessness is one of the greatest subjects of all for pop music, a disruptive but liberating encounter with "the radio playing songs that I have never heard." In the first verse she hears them, in the second she sits in an empty room waiting to hear them again. No matter how cataclysmic the effect, there's never explicit verbalization of what is better left to the *la-la-la-la-la*s and their matching Europop synthesizer flourish. Even the big Martha Wash/Robin S voice that pops up at the end, which 10 years ago would have been front and center, is mixed way into the background. A deceptively complicated record that is as pure in its way as the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" or the Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner."

2. "Get Ur Freak On (Nelly Furtado Remix)," Missy Elliot: In another year, in a different frame of mind, this would have topped my list. The regular version is the most bizarre mainstream hip-hop I've heard since Busta Rhymes' "Woo-Hah!", the remix (easily identifiable by the helpful line "Reeeeee-mix!") weirder still. As freak artifacts go, this one conjures up Tod Browning and the Mothers of Invention as much as it does Chic.

3. "Round and Round," Hi-Tek: Good title for an R&B trance-out. The round-and-round at first refers to voices in the singer's head, then settles into a break-up-to-make-up kind of round-and-round. Towards the end there's a dramatic announcement that "Today I made up my mind to get away," but nothing's ever resolved and the song trails off still going round and round. Not the Ninja Turtle group from the late '80s, which was Hi Tek 3, unless it's one of those remnants-of-the-Drifters-type touring companies.

4. "Days of the Week," Stone Temple Pilots: It's pretty funny how this group is so entrenched on both "hard" and "modern" rock stations, the two commercial radio formats that are the most sanctimonious about their closed-off worlds. If either listenership ever clues into the fact that they're harboring the new Monkees, I'm sure excommunication will follow immediately. For what it's worth, I don't know anyone who operates on the calendar described in "Days of the Week." "Back from the dead" on Monday? It's been a long time since these people held real jobs.

5. "Since I Left You," Avalanches: A bookend for Hi-Tek above, insofar as it's exactly the kind of half-remembered reverie I imagine as the inspiration for "Around the World." Like Barbara Mason's "Yes, I'm Ready," which the vocal reminds me of and which always makes me swoon when I hear it today. It takes a lot of technological ingenuity to get such authentically faraway ambience out of some spliced-together samples. I wish it were an actual song, especially one I'd gotten to know off the radio, instead of from a mixed tape made by a friend. I guess those things matter to me, which is partly why I connect with "Around the World" more deeply.

6. "The Plumb Song," Snow: To introduce the concept of probability to grade-school kids, you begin with familiar vocabulary applied to everyday examples: it's unlikely, though far from impossible, that we'll see any snow in April, but it's extremely likely, though not 100% certain, that we'll get some in March. If you'd asked me three years ago about the probability of Snow in 2001, I would have placed the likelihood well towards the low end of the spectrum. More improbable still, he's added one of those airy, magisterial highway songs to my country's national canon: Gordon Lightfoot's "Carefree Highway," Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Roll on Down the Highway," Tom Cochrane's "Life Is a Highway"...well, maybe it's a two-song canon. "The Plumb Song"'s most brilliant line comes right at the start, where Snow pays homage to his Hendrix/Allman/Clapton roots by asking someone to "hand me that guitar." And thus the legend can finally be told: Deep down in Jane and Finch, across from Albion/Way back up in the woods among the evergreen/There stood a few apartments lined up in a row/Where lived a country boy, went by the name of Snow. Etc., etc.

7. "You," Lucy Pearl: "Nephew Snoop," as he's referred to here (by somebody clearly much younger than he is--confusing), is about thirty times scarier in John Singleton's otherwise clumsy Baby Boy than Ben Kingsley's affected Frank Booth imitation in Sexy Beast. Kingsley has a big 20-minute buildup and a shaved head, and he more or less nags people into submission (he's more annoying than frightening); Snoop's got the look. On "You" he takes on a much more difficult supporting role as a marriage-minded romantic who advises "time brings change."

8. "Purple Hills," D12: I'm not sure if Eminem's supposed to be an actual walking timebomb, liable to say or do something indefensible at any given moment, or whether he just plays around with that idea in order to ridicule anyone gullible enough to believe it. I'm a year behind, that was 2000's big question--lots of close analysis that tried to figure him out, just like everyone used to try to figure out Axl Rose--and to that end, "Purple Hills" was probably insufficiently self-involved for critics fascinated by all the Slim Shady legerdemain. But I'm convinced that "Purple Hills" has it all over "My Name Is," "The Real Slim Shady," and "Stan" in one department: it's full- bodied and instantaneously catchy, musically alive in a way that Eminem's usual plinking around isn't. Eminem's isn't even the most interesting voice here, which belongs to the Humpty Hump soundalike who turns "sumpin', sumpin', sumpin'" into a perfect vocal ellipsis. As far as Eminem's neuroses go, one of my favourite lines in Ghost World was Thora Birch's explanation of why she chose to do a portrait of Don Knotts for her summer art class: "Because I like Don Knotts." I do too. Now *there* was a guy with "issues."

9. "My Way," Limp Bizkit: The first Fred to make my year-end list since Right Said Fred in 1991. This Fred's a few evolutionary steps backwards in terms of cartoonishness, a leap back to Freds Grandy, Flintstone, and Mertz, but "My Way" always caught my attention, and sometimes even nailed my mood, in whatever setting I heard it this year. It has an odd minor-key coloration that's almost beautiful in spots, making the standard soft-part-now-here-comes-the-loud-part gimmick seem not so hokey as a result. Another highway song, only here the highway is where you're banished to if you don't accommodate Fred Durst's every last wish. And I'm sure that at this point in his life, Durst is a guy who faces no end of resistance from the people he surrounds himself with on a day-to-day basis.

10. "Family Affair," Mary J. Blige: I have a daily thing in my class where we spend five minutes commemorating the birthday or death day of somebody famous, or the anniversary of a famous event. On Chuck Berry's birthday I always play "Come On," with some or all of the lyrics written on the board, and I talk about how in his other songs he'd sometimes make up funny words like "botheration." This year, that prompted Shauna to point out that Mary J. Blige sang about "hateration" in her new song. Well, she probably had Chuck Berry in the back of her mind when she wrote that, I said, a bit of blufferation on my part--"Family Affair" mentions 8-Tracks, too, so for all I know its rhymes owe more to Chuck Barris. Perhaps we'll revisit Mary J. Blige's influences on March 15, Sly Stone's birthday, and I'll tell the class all about the mud and the blood and the importance of punctuality.

I'm casting a bonus vote for my Dad, who recently asked if I was "still writing for the Village People." It was his greatest malapropism since my parents were apartment-hunting a few years ago and he mentioned a place as being "$850, including utensils." I was enjoying the moment too much to really answer him, so yes, Dad, I am, now and again, but I try to save all my best stuff for the Silver Convention.

Over, Under, Sideways, Down (2001)

Writing in his annual Baseball Book after the '94 strike, Bill James identified four players whose Hall of Fame chances he felt had been most adversely affected by the shortened season: David Cone, Jimmy Key, Will Clark, and Gregg Jeffries. His reasoning was that they were all marginal candidates in the midst of career years (or, in Clark's case, a return to form), and that by season's end they would have positioned themselves as having a credible shot at Cooperstown.

Even at the time, I thought he was wrong about Cone. The strike actually helped Cone, I thought, by stopping the season at a point where it was hard to make a logical case for anyone other than him winning the Cy Young. The vote was probably closer than it should have been--Cone edged Key 108-96--but he did win, and who knows whether he would have been overtaken by either Key or Randy Johnson had the season been played out. So even though the strike did cost Cone a few career wins and a 20-win season, the Cy Young that it guaranteed him was a better-than-even trade-off in terms of his HOF resume.

With the benefit of hindsight, I imagine James would agree that in the end, the strike didn't much affect the chances of the other three, either. Key and Clark remain borderline candidates after their retirement--Key better than borderline, Clark a lot less--and whatever they would have done for the remainder of '94 wouldn't have made much difference either way, including a Cy Young for Key. Jeffries declined rapidly after '94, and he was out of baseball by the time he turned 33. The timing of Jeffries' deterioration makes it tempting to wonder if the strike had some deeper cataclysmic affect on him that went beyond the 60 lost games, but I don't know what that would have been.

Ever since James's comments, I've gotten into the habit of looking at each season as a kind of market indicator on various players' HOF chances. (If you've ever been silly enough to get caught up in card collecting, a world in which a player's entire being eventually rests on whether or not he makes it into Cooperstown, you'll appreciate that "market indicator" is meant in the literal sense.) By July, as I scan the newspaper's stats page every Tuesday, I'm guided by an awareness of which players have solidified their HOF candidacies, who's in trouble, who's on cruise control, who's barely hanging on, and who may be warranting a serious look for the first time. It's like each name is shadowed by little arrow in the margin, pointing up, down, or sideways.

Some thoughts coming out of the 2001 season.

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WHO HAS IMPROVED HIS HOF CHANCES THE MOST THIS YEAR? Jim Thome. Thome had the foundation of a HOF career going into 2001--233 HR at age 30, four 100-run and 100-RBI seasons each, excellent career SA and OBA, and a surviving mainstay on one of the three best teams of his era--but it had all been accomplished in the shadow of Belle, Ramirez, and the rest of the Indians' revolving big-name cast. But he's going to come out of 2001 with a) an excellent chance at 500 HR (somewhere around 285 at age 31), b) a 50-HR season (not the benchmark that it was 10 years ago, granted, but still a formidable plateau), c) a possible MVP (though I'm pulling for Alomar myself), and d) a career OPS (on-base + slugging) that was already in the Top 20 of all time and now moves into the Top 15. If he can continue playing well for another seven or eight years, I'd say his HOF prospects are very good.

I don't think anyone else has broken through as convincingly as Thome, although I can see a few cases where 2001 has gotten some players back on track. Juan Gonzalez seemingly had room to spare on his HOF resume going into this season, and to that extent his bid for a third MVP is just another exclamation mark to a career that was already a lock. But after his desultory year in Detroit--similar to his falloff in '94, the key difference being he was 30 last year instead of 25--I sensed he was at a potentially critical juncture; if he had not come back healthy this year, or if he had struggled through another off-year, I could see where it might have been the beginning of a slow drift into Canseco-like instability. Barring catastrophe, though, Gonzalez again looks like a first-ballot cinch.

Craig Biggio has rebounded well from his shortened 2000 season, and it again appears that he'll get some overdue attention with induction into Cooperstown. He's doing most everything he was doing year-in and year-out before last year's injury: he's going to finish the year with a .300 average, 100+ runs, and 20 HR, and the Astros look to be going to the postseason. He's not hitting as many doubles as he used to, and he doesn't run anymore, but he's probably about 85-90% of the way back. If he can keep going for another two seasons at this level, he should be fine.

Edgar Martinez and Rafael Palmeiro have strengthened what were fairly solid HOF bids already. Statistically speaking, both are having subpar years by their own standards: Edgar will likely finish with his lowest batting average since '94, while Palmeiro's season will join '97 as his least productive in the past decade. But just in terms of bulk numbers, they both keep piling it on: another .300/20 HR/100 RBI season for Edgar, another 40 HR and 100 RBI for Palmeiro. Maybe even more important to Martinez is the fact that, Ichiro notwithstanding, he is finally the Mariners' resident superstar, and in a season where it just happens that they're going to win 110 games. If Seattle continues their dominance in the postseason, Martinez's candidacy will be that much stronger.

Mariano Rivera is starting to look more and more credible. He'll finish this year with 210 saves before he turns 32, giving him a pretty good shot at 400 if his arm holds up (with a pitcher, a little like saying if he continues to jump out into traffic without getting run over). His career E.R.A. may drop below 2.60. But impressive stats are commonplace with relievers--statistically, you could probably make almost as good a case for Rob Nenn (exactly one day older than Rivera), who has a higher E.R.A. but an extra 50 saves. Rivera's edge is that I keep thinking they're going to have to induct at least a couple of core Yankees from the late '90s dynasty, and past Jeter, Rivera's emerging as the next best candidate. I'm still not sure how history will view Bernie Williams, who held his ground this year; coming out of the era of gargantuan offensive numbers, Williams will probably suffer in the end for being too well-rounded and not eye-catching enough in any one of the big Triple Crown stats. I've seen Pettitte's name put forth by New York-based writers, but his surprising staying power aside, I just don't see a Hall of Fame career taking shape.

Fred McGriff and Jose Canseco may have done the bare minimum to revive their fading chances, which is essentially to buy themselves the two more years they each need for a shot at 500 HR. McGriff was having a very good season in Tampa Bay, but he's struggled since joining the Cubs; for the year he should end up somewhere around .285/25/90, leaving him with 440 HR at age 37. I'd be surprised if there's another 60 HR left in him, but if he's playing full-time somewhere next year, he's still got a shot. Canseco, meanwhile, has been playing well across town; he'll finish with 460 HR with a year's jump on McGriff, so his chance of reaching 500 would seem somewhat better if he can hook up with somebody for next year. I'm not sure it matters, though; Canseco could very well end up being the first guy to hit 500 HR and not get elected anyway. If it happens, he won't be the last.

WHO HAS HURT HIS HOF CHANCES THE MOST THIS YEAR? In the space of a year, I think it's easier to help your chances than hurt them. Anyone who goes into the season as a decent-or-better HOF candidate is already putting together a career that should be able to withstand an off-year. Especially with players in mid-career or earlier, there's always time to bounce back--again, Gonzalez's 2000 and 1994 seasons being good examples. So I wouldn't make too much of Frank Thomas's write-off season at 33; he did so much so early in his career, he just needs to get back in the lineup in 2002 and put in another four or five reasonably productive seasons. (Thomas is managing to turn a ten-lap lead into a photo finish. At the time, I didn't think his two MVPs would ultimately have much bearing on his future stroll into the HOF, not when it looked like he'd be going in as competition for Ruth and Williams as the most statistically imposing hitter ever; it now looks like those two MVPs might actually save his candidacy in the end.)

Having said that, I think there are three or four guys who took a hit this year. The most obvious--though you may have forgotten about him already, not having played a game in 2001--is Albert Belle, whose chances for the HOF went from probably 90% to something approaching nil. Coincidentally, in the year of Kirby Puckett's induction, Belle was forced into retirement at a point virtually identical to Puckett. If you compare the two, their batting lines give a huge advantage to Belle. But the '90s weren't the '80s in terms of offensive levels, Albert surely wasn't Kirby in the public relations department, and Belle will instead join Joe Jackson as the greatest hitter not in Cooperstown.

Mo Vaughn and Harold Baines, who were pretty marginal candidates anyway, are both close to officially dead. Vaughn will presumably be back next year, but he'll be 34 and still sitting at 299 HR. He's got a decent shot at 400-450, but that won't be worth anything down the road. Harold won't be back, so he'll finish about 100 hits shy of the 3,000 that, as with Canseco, might not have put him in anyway.

Among guys who actually played this year, I sense that Mike Mussina took a step backwards. He's pitched pretty well: his numbers aren't all that different from Clemens'--better SO/BB ratio, comparable E.R.A. and H/9--but Roger has gotten all the run support, giving him a 17-1 record as opposed to Mussina's 12-10. And that's the point: in signing with the Yankees, I thought that it would have been Mussina having the flashy season where his W-L record exceeded his (generally excellent) peripheral stats, that it would have been him going 22-4 and finally winning a Cy Young. He's not out of the running yet--he'll go into 2002 with 160 wins at age 33, and a career winning pct. still close to .650--but he's going to need a couple of those flashy seasons soon; he hasn't won 20 even once.

WHO'S ON CRUISE CONTROL AT THE MOMENT? Everybody else, I guess. Cruise control is a good thing. Griffey, Piazza, Bagwell, and Pudge all had varying degrees of subpar years, but they're in anyway, so I can't see that 2001 will make any difference. Ditto, to a lesser extent, Glavine. I'm sure some people would go with Alomar over Thome as this year's breakthrough candidate, but only if you haven't been paying attention. Alomar's been a leading HOF candidate for years, and the biggest question remaining with him at this point is how high he'll end up on the all-time hits list; eighth, I'd say, behind Yaz but ahead of Molitor. (Alomar also has a reasonable chance to become the first second baseman ever to total 5,000 career bases; he rates a 28% chance using James's "Favorite Toy" formula, and a 47% chance of eclipsing Hornsby's current record of 4,712.) Luis Gonzalez, Curt Schilling, Moises Alou, Shawn Green, and Jason Giambi have all been terrific this year, but I still don't see any of them as even longshots yet--Giambi, maybe. As for the two Colorado guys, Walker and Helton, I'm sidestepping them altogether. I just don't know how much weight future HOF voters are going to give to the freakshow aspect of Coors Field. 2300 AB into his career, Todd Helton is sitting on the fourth-highest slugging average in history, behind only Ruth, Williams, and Gehrig; at home he's like an even better version of Ruth, on the road his career stats are close to Fred McGriff's. So I don't know what standard a player who spends a substantial part of his career in Coors will be held to--Galarraga will be the first test case a few years from now. Mind you, if you spend half your career as Babe Ruth and half as Fred McGriff, obviously you're in.

In The Politics of Glory (1994), James compiled a year-by-year chart of how many future Hall of Famers were then active; from 1946 through 1968, the normal figure was about 30 players in any given year. Using that as a barometer, here are my 30 from this year's pool:

PITCHERS -- Clemens, Maddux, Johnson, P. Martinez, Glavine, Rivera;

POSITION PLAYERS -- Piazza, I. Rodriguez, McGwire, Bagwell, Palmeiro, Thomas, Thome, Helton, Alomar, Biggio, Ripken, Larkin, Jeter, A. Rodriguez, Garciaparra, C. Jones, Henderson, Gwynn, Bonds, Griffey, Sosa, Gonzalez, Ramirez, Guerrero.

HITTER -- E. Martinez.

I cheated--I've got 31. I'm deferring to the widespread assumption that Larkin's as good as in. I've always thought that the large amount of time he's lost to injuries will make his case shakier than suspected, and I might be inclined to reserve that spot for someone out there just starting to make a case for himself: Albert Pujols, Tim Hudson, somebody like that. One of the monthly card magazines recently ran their own projections and had John Franco as a sure thing...huh? 400 saves or not, has Franco ever been included on anyone's shortlist of the game's premier pitchers? If Franco gets in, I'm personally going to lock myself to the front gate at Cooperstown (they don't actually have a front gate, but work with me here) until they also make room for Tom Henke.

Natural Born Plumbers: John Cazale and the Character Actors of the 1970s (2001)

American cinema in the 1970s will always be remembered first and foremost as a legendary decade for directors (the familiar litany of Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, and company) and secondly as a time when a new generation of lead actors superseded the Waynes, Newmans, and McQueens of the '60s (Nicholson, De Niro, and Pacino preeminent among them). It's not a decade famous for its character actors, those familiar-but-elusive faces that turn up in film after film to commandeer the proceedings with some memorable bit of business that stays in your mind long after everything else is forgotten--certainly not in the way that the 1940s, the height of the studio system, is widely regarded as the highwater mark of character acting. In O.K. You Mugs, an anthology of writings on the art of character acting, editors Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson define the specialized appeal of the character actor this way: "As they reappear in one film and then another, it is as if they are returning in our very dreams; these characters take on character."

Defined as such, the '70s was actually a time of unforgettable role players. Their names haven't as yet been accorded the same mythological status as Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, Harry Carey, Sidney Greenstreet, or Elisha Cook Jr., but men like Allen Garfield, Ned Beatty, Peter Boyle, Bert Remsen, Harry Dean Stanton, Michael Murphy, Burt Young, Billy Green Bush, and G.D. Spradlin left behind a body of work that was absolutely integral to the key American films of the era. If, like me, much of your movie-going sensibility was shaped by that time and place, De Niro's "You talkin' to me" monologue in Taxi Driver is like scripture; but you probably cherish Peter Boyle's densely layered a-man-is-what-he-does lecture in the same film (culminating in his "It's not Bertrand Russell, but what do you want, I'm a cabbie" apologia, a masterpiece of redundancy) just as much.

And most of all, you cherish John Cazale. Dead at 41 by cancer, Cazale's filmography is endlessly fascinating in its haiku perfection. His career consisted of five films over a seven-year period: the first two Godfathers (1972/4), The Conversation (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978). All five received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture (inexplicably, Cazale himself never earned a supporting nomination); three of them won, The Conversation lost to one of the other five, and only Dog Day Afternoon was beaten by a film that didn't feature Cazale. Leaving aside the validity of the Academy Awards as a barometer of artistic worth (other than to observe that the awards given out during the '70s tended to be more adventurous than at any other time in history), that's a combination of brilliance and brevity unmatched by even James Dean. I've gotten into the habit of referring to Cazale as the Velvet Underground of actors, insofar as everything he ever did has its own secure niche in film history, without a single misstep along the way.

In trying to place Cazale according to Luc Sante's classification of character actors ("Some character actors are foxes and some are hedgehogs: the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing"), I'd say he was a hedgehog with a little bit of fox in him. His specialty, on full display in all his films but one, was everything that fell on the vulnerability end of the emotional spectrum: weakness, ineffectuality, fragility, resignation, invisibility. When Talia Shire pleads with Pacino in Godfather II to forgive Cazale's Fredo, she pins down his overriding persona perfectly: "He's so sweet and helpless." To think of Cazale is to recall first his sad, imploring eyes, the mixture of inadequacy and shame he conveyed--he was one instance where the overused adjective "haunted" is justified. Cazale's performances elicit feelings of protectiveness, a sense of having to look out for a younger sibling. Coppola expertly plays upon this instinct in the Godfathers by turning the Fredo-Michael relationship on its head: it's the older brother who grudgingly submits to being watched over by the younger brother, in time coming to resent the arrangement so deeply that humiliation gives way to betrayal.

In Godfather II's scene inside the Corleone compound where Michael questions and then disowns Fredo, this resentment and humiliation reach their breaking point. Cazale has had relatively little screen time up until then--two significant scenes in The Godfather (most memorably, toadying up to Moe Greene to the withering dismay of Michael) and a lot of jumping through hoops in II (his debauched wife, Johnny Ola)--which makes his confrontation with Michael all the more remarkable. In a brother scene that stands alone with Brando and Steiger in On the Waterfront for its purity and intensity, Cazale seizes his big moment by venturing to a place where almost any actor would look foolish. He completely melts down--when Fredo snaps at Michael that "It's not the way I wanted it," Cazale does a thing with his arms that borders on epileptic seizure. It's a startling transformation.

Cazale's hedgehog-like ability to do one thing exceedingly well--to recede into the background and meekly defer to his superiors--also shapes his portrayals of Stan, Gene Hackman's assistant in The Conversation, and Al Pacino's accomplice Sal in Dog Day Afternoon. Stan is the least neurotic of Cazale's characters, but he's also such a cipher that he's reduced to the role of chattering lapdog to Gene Hackman's Harry Caul, maybe the most socially inept of '70's movie-loners. Harry manifests a painfully evident inferiority complex with just about everyone he encounters, but in his working relationship with Stan, it's Cazale who's shut out and made to feel like an intrusive amateur: "It wouldn't hurt if you filled me in a little bit once in a while, Harry--did you ever think about that?" So he quits to go work for Harry's number-one competitor, the despised William P. Moran (Allen Garfield), as a means of both revenge and retaining some self-respect. It takes all of a few nice words and a vague promise from Harry to bring Stan back into the fold--with a shrug betraying apathy as much as it does loyalty, Cazale reasserts himself as the ultimate pushover.

By the time of Dog Day Afternoon, Cazale's an empty shell. Sidney Lumet's casting deftly echoes the Fredo/Michael relationship by again placing Cazale in a position of feckless subservience to Pacino. Cazale's Sal is afraid of everything: of Pacino's wired unpredictability, of guns, of cancer, of planes, of being reported as a homosexual on local news broadcasts. Cazale comes up with a vibrantly tacky look for Sal--with his long hair, cheap suit, and extra-loud '70s tie, he's like a rough sketch of Benicio Del Toro's character in The Usual Suspects--but the eyes are more lifeless than ever. A lot of Cazale's screen time in Dog Day Afternoon consists of little more than a blank, uncomprehending stare at the unfolding circus around him. Pacino gyrates and schemes and exhorts; Cazale just stands by and waits for the bottom to fall out, which of course it eventually must.

Cazale was enough of a name after Dog Day Afternoon to get second-billing to De Niro in The Deer Hunter. Perhaps feeling boxed in by an emerging pattern of variations on Fredo, Cazale used his newfound visibility for a masterly about-face. This time, all the fumbling silences and little-man significance go to De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage (too much so--at times their lines seem to have been written by Barton Fink), while Cazale reinvents himself as a womanizing, vainglorious blowhard, again named Stan, who stays home and cultivates a moustache while his friends go off to war. Stan is crude, self-aggrandizing, reckless, and 99% bluff--it's like Fredo has been inhabited by Moe Greene. When Cazale starts spewing invective at De Niro's grandiloquent "this-is-this" rationale for not lending him some hunting boots--a scene of comical miscommunication that anticipates Raging Bull's "Did you fuck my wife?" interrogation--he's a profane motormouth far removed from anything Cazale had previously attempted. Stan was a beautifully crafted adumbration of where Cazale might have gone if he hadn't died--proof, really, that he could have gone anywhere.

If Cazale was the most purely gifted of '70s character actors, Allen Garfield may have captured the tenor of the times better than anyone else. There's no more emblematic '70s image to my mind than Garfield stalking around in Nashville, waving off Ned Beatty and Michael Murphy with his mantra of "I got no time, Delbert--I got no time!" In O.K. You Mugs, Greil Marcus envisions the late J.T. Walsh as a reflection of Bill Clinton: a charming lout drifting from one tawdry role to another inside an ambiguous "haze of sincerity." That's the kind of irresistible analogy one can easily overdo, and to prove it, I'm going to overdo a different one: I've always viewed Garfield and many of the '70s' other key character actors as extensions of Richard Nixon, the inescapable white whale of another time.

Cazale was Nixon the brooding, self-pitying outsider--the eternal wallflower who felt inferior to East Coast intellectuals, the part of Nixon that wanted to crawl out of his own skin. You can easily envision Godfather II's compound scene played out between Nixon-as-Fredo and JFK-as-Michael: "I was in the White House before you, Jack, and I was stepped over!" Ned Beatty was Nixon the mechanical bumbler, the one who couldn't work a tape recorder properly; Burt Young and Peter Boyle were Nixon the uncouth slob (all those expletive-deleteds); and G.D. Spradlin (Senator Geary in Godfather II, Nick Nolte's imperious coach in North Dallas Forty) was Nixon the cooly manipulative despot. Garfield had some Nixon in him too, but most of all he was the ultimate Nixon flunky: the compulsive wheeler-dealer, sweating under his collar as he works the crowd, backroom rot with a smile. Garfield's political ad-man in The Candidate (a prototype lifted intact from The Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinniss's account of how the "New Nixon" came to be) and his squalid wiretapper in The Conversation were two of the most gleefully amoral small-time operators of the era, natural born plumbers on the order of Hunt and Liddy. (Even as Ronee Blakely's avowedly apolitical husband/manager in Nashville, Garfield still managed to come across as a weasel-for-hire.) When Garfield offered his assessment of some welfare mothers gumming up one of his ads in The Candidate, his words were as sure a marker as "Ohio," Joe (Peter Boyle as the phantasmagoric embodiment of Nixon and Agnew's "silent majority"), or All in the Family that the Nixon decade was well underway: "Grim scene, baby, grim scene...You look uptight and uncool. Nobody's listening and nobody's digging you." To which Garfield, Robert Redford, and everyone within earshot burst out laughing.

The peculiarly feral quality of Garfield can be found in Steve Buscemi's best work during the '90s, just as Cazale and his contemporaries have their own modern-day equivalents in Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michael Imperioli, and Luis Guzman. In time, stray moments from this current generation of character specialists will seem much more vital than most of the huffing and puffing that now pushes them into the background (or a lot sooner than then--a few seconds of Guzman and Don Cheadle clowning around in Traffic is worth the whole Michael Douglas subplot). John Cazale packed more of those moments into five films than anyone I can think of. In Coppola's hollow Godfather III, Fredo is only present as an absence, as empty space on a rowboat; Michael is consumed by the memory of standing at the window, looking out on the one murder that in time will come to weigh heaviest of all on his conscience. That flashback to the empty rowboat is The Godfather III's most resonant image--tribute to the enduring power of the first two Godfathers, but perhaps even more so to the deep impression left behind by Cazale.

(Originally published in Cinemascope)

The Day That She Met Me (2001)

2000 Year-End Ballot

1. "Sour Girl," Stone Temple Pilots: After a false start, Stone Temple Pilots' junky Nirvana imitation has become much livelier and more unpredictable than Pearl Jam's ever-more lugubrious one. (The radio agrees: Toronto stations continue to play "Even Flow" and "Alive," the two Pearl Jam songs with some forward momentum, to death, more or less ignoring everything else.) Actually, on "Vaseline" and "Interstate Love Song" and "Trippin' on a Hole," there wasn't much of an attempt at all to mimic Nirvana--"Interstate Love Song" is a title that belongs on a Marshall Tucker Band album, and the song itself has some of that group's same feel for wide-open spaces. Having said all that, even those songs seem clumsy next to "Sour Girl," whose free-floating weightlessness is touched by pop genius. As with Alice Deejay below, the lyrics function mostly as mantra: the subtle inversion around the title--sour the day she meets him, happy the day she leaves--and the stalker-like suggestiveness of "What would you do if I followed you?" And in the middle break, a line that should have provoked more offense than any of the Eminem singles: "The girl got reasons/They all got reasons." In a very casual, offhanded way, that's a lot of ill-will squeezed into eight words: hostile, patronizing, infantile, dismissive, kind of hateful even. It's the purest, most unguarded bit of male smugness I've come across since my favorite moment of the Simpson trial, the one time when I felt like cheering Johnnie Cochran: (looking askance at Judge Ito after waiting out one of Marcia Clark's worst-abuse-of-the-criminal-justice-system-ever harangues) "Is she finished yet?"

2. "Brand New Low," Treble Charger: Buzz and howl under the influence of 1985. The shift into "And I wanna know..." each time the chorus comes around is my favorite leap up the vocal scale since the chorus of Green Day's "Walking Contradiction."

3. "My Music at Work," Tragically Hip: Two in a row from home--hey, you're acting like you've never seen a Canadian before. I heard a DJ correctly point out how it could be Ethel Merman singing here; the name Foghorn Leghorn comes to mind too. But I think this is the Tragically Hip's second great single in two years. I'm just as surprised this time as I was with "Fireworks," so I guess I still expect the worst from them.

4. "All the Small Things" and 5. "Adam's Song," Blink 182: None of the boy- or girl-bands appeal to the nine-year-old in me, but Blink 182 stirs the 13-year-old in there. I remember hearing "Hey Jude" on the radio one night in grade 9, when I was wracking my mind over whether or not to ask Nancy Phillips to a dance, and convincing myself that the song was addressed to me personally, urging me to go forward. (What a middlebrow Beatles song to be receiving secret messages from. I never would have lasted in the Manson Family.) The first time I really noticed "Adam's Song" was when Adam Pugsley played it last spring at my grade 6 class's year-end party. Me: "What's that?" Adam: "'Adam's Song.'" Must be wonderful to be that age, the exact moment when adolescent boys start to move from Top 40 to what my own little group refers to as "older-brother music," and have a strange new punk song belong to you without even having to embellish. I felt like an intruder just asking.

6. "Bring It All to Me," Blaque: Warm and fuzzy girl group R&B, Jean Arthur in soft-focus to Destiny Child's (or forebears En Vogue's) Barbara Stanwyck. Instead of a forefinger admonishing some guy over all the things he's not, Blaque invites him to bring along "your special brand of 'G'" and settle back. (Seventeen different websites have the lyric as "your time, your love, your space, your energy," but obviously they're all wrong.) Somewhere along the way, "G" passed from the concrete noun that Dr. Dre and Warren G celebrated into the realm of abstraction--it's now an essence, like courage or thrift or humility. Self-help books are on the way: "G" for the Soul. Pathway to "G." How to Control Your "G" Before It Controls You.

7. "Better Off Alone," Alice Deejay: Very elliptical: a single question, "Do you think you're better off alone?", played off over and over again against a trailing afterthought, "Talk to me." It's not clear whether the singer is a girlfriend, an ex-girlfriend, a friend-friend, or a bad conscience. In any case, it's a good question.

8. "Porcelain," Moby: The beauty in "Porcelain" does not sound effortless the way it does in "Eight Days a Week," "Till the Morning Comes," or anything else I'd place in the very first-rank of pop-song bliss. It's a very clinical, academic kind of beauty, the kind you get in Terence Malick films. But it's something to lose yourself in anyway.

9. "I Wanna Know," Joe: There's an instrumental curlicue throughout "I Wanna Know" that sets it apart from any other soul ballad I heard this year, a little three- or four-note flourish that punctuates the verse lines, and that's what gets it on the list. Whether I'll remember the curlicue or anything else about the song five years from now, I don't know. As Winston Churchill famously said, the soul ballad in the era of Mary J. Blige is a wisp wrapped inside of a fragment wrapped inside of a mirage. There are a number of them from the past decade that I either listed on my year-end ballot or reviewed favorably at the time--"Twisted," "Lady," "G.H.E.T.T.O.U.T.," "Touch Me, Tease Me," "Candy Rain," "He's Mine"--that I draw a complete blank on right now. That's not a knock, just an observation. "I Wanna Know" was Billboard's fourth-biggest single of the year.

10. "Independent Women Part 1," Destiny's Child: Independent young women--the minute they wake up, only 263 people start to go to work on them. The smile that I wear, I bought it; the way I move my arm, I bought it. I'm being unfair--Bob Dylan told some tall tales too. The strings have some dramatic swoop to them, some twilight cityscape, and the histrionics that strangle this group's other singles are kept to a minimum, sort of. Rough translation: I pine for Lucy Liu.

Cold Late Nights, So Long Ago: I love "Sour Girl," but this is the third year running that a film has been a much richer pop-music experience for me than any one piece of music. You could, I suppose, find the same fault with The Virgin Suicides that I do with "Porcelain" above, and absent Heart, Todd Rundgren, Carole King, and Air, Sofia Coppola's movie probably would collapse into a somnambulant pretty picture--I'm no fan of Picnic at Hanging Rock. But with the songs in place, the dreaminess of the pacing, the narration, and the cinematography coalesces into something very felt: the music gets at something deeper than the words and the images can on their own, and Coppola has the good sense (or the good counsel, if you believe speculation--I don't) to let the soundtrack take over at those moments. It's disappointing to see The Virgin Suicides get only scant attention in year-end polls (a few stray votes here and there, even fewer than what Boogie Nights or Rushmore got), especially when it gets passed over in favor of what is also essentially a mood piece, the Ang Lee film, but a sillier one. Film critics are impressed by subtitles. If Adam Sandler movies had subtitles, they'd be programming them at art galleries.

And He Walked on Down the Hall (2001)

The voting for this summer's Hall of Fame inductees will be released next week. Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci has a good overview and analysis of this year's field available on the CNN/SI site, along with his own picks. Most of the attention right now is focussed on Winfield, Puckett, and Mattingly, with the latter two a potential source of contention. (The only conceivable red flag I can see against Winfield is that he padded his career totals towards the end as a full-time DH. He was sucha good athlete, though, it's a specious argument. I don't have any doubt that Winfield could have, had it been necessary--as it was in the '92 Series for the games played in Atlanta—still done a better-than-adequate job in the field. He wasn't exactly in the tradition of Cecil Fielder/Dave Kingman DHs.) There's a nice symmetry between the three of them as to how players get into the Hall of Fame: Winfield represents the long-and-distinguished career route, Mattingly the meteoric Koufax-like peak period, and Puckett, because of his premature retirement, an odd combination of the two.

Like Verducci, I'd cast votes for Winfield and Puckett but pass on Mattingly. (Verducci is also voting for Rice and Gary Carter; I'd probably limit my ballot to no more than three names, and I think I'd look to a pitcher for the third choice, either Blyleven or Morris. Between Ryan's induction two years ago and the eventual first-ballot pick of Clemens and Maddux, we're in the midst of a fallow time for starting pitchers. Eckersley and Lee Smith might be it for pitchers of any kind until 2010 or thereabouts.)

It's interesting how closely Winfield, Puckett, and Mattingly line up using Bill James's HOF point system. As James was always quick to clarify, the system was devised to predict who will get into the Hall, not who should--it's based on players who are already in there, an attempt to extrapolate from their career resumes what the writers give weight to when casting their votes. A full rundown of what conclusions James arrived at--e.g., hitting .353 in a season is worth five points, while an MVP award gets you eight--is available in The Politics of Glory, his meticulous look at the Hall and the history of its voting patterns.

By my count, Puckett totals 159.5 points according to James, Winfield is at 148, and Mattingly trails with 132. That's a fairly close spread; people like Mays and Ryan score well up into the 200s, while your Ray Oylers, Fred Talbots, or just about anyone else on the '69 Pilots doesn't make it into double-digits. All three clear 130 points, which is James's bar for a lock; 100-130 points means a high probability of induction, 70-100 points is what he calls the gray area (where a lot of Veteran's Committee picks reside), and under-70 translates as no chance. It may be surprising that Mattingly would rate as a sure thing, and even more surprising that Puckett would out-point Winfield and his 3,000 hits.

Because Puckett didn't last long enough to compile the instantly identifiable benchmarks he was headed towards--3,000 hits with room to spare, probably 300+ home runs, 1,500 runs and RBIs--and because he was never quite the colossus during his prime that Koufax was (a shortcoming he shares with 99.9% of everyone who ever played the game), I'm guessing that Kirby is not being thought of as an automatic first-ballot pick by the majority of baseball fans. It's difficult to appreciate how much he packed into his abbreviated career unless you take a good look as his batting line, which looks like something out of the '30s, the kind of dense statistical barrage that Paul Waner or Joe Medwick put together--big, fat numbers the whole way, with hits, doubles, and total bases accumulating rapidly. Medwick especially makes for a good comp, the biggest difference being that while Kirby's career was bookended by the offensive surge of '85-87 and the early years of the current boom, almost half of it fell during the offensive downturn of '88-92, the last time in memory that pitchers maintained a relative upper-hand in baseball. If you were to transport Puckett to the '30s, I'm sure he would have produced years interchangeable with what Medwick accomplished from '33 to '39. They're close enough as is: a .318 career BA, .477 OBA, and .360 SA for Puckett, .324/.505/.360 for Medwick.

Comparing Kirby to Mattingly, they both experienced easily isolated (and overlapping) three-year peaks early in their careers: Puckett's ran from '86 to '88, during which time he rang up 664 hits and over 40% of his career home runs, while Mattingly was consensus pick as the game's best player from '84 to '86, when he finished 5-1-2 in MVP voting. A comparison of their peak years underscores why Puckett deserves enshrinement first.

Not surprisingly, Mattingly comes out ahead in virtually every key category for those three-year windows--but the gap is not nearly as pronounced as you might guess:

	AB	HR	TB	R	RBI	BB	BA	SA	OBP	RC/27
K.P.	1961	83	1056	324	316	89	.339	.539	.369	7.91
D.M.	1932	89	1082	315	368	150	.340	.560	.387	8.37

Pretty close, right? RBI and walks are the only areas where Mattingly holds a significant edge. If you want to make the Koufax argument for Mattingly, then Puckett makes a good stand-in for Marichal, closely shadowing him every step of the way.

Placed in the context of their entire careers, however, Mattingly's '84-86 block represents 82 of his 132 points under James, or 62%; Puckett's '86-88 accounts for only 60 of his 159.5, or 38% (leaving aside any consideration of how much their .300+ career averages, worth 8 points to each under the system, are attributable to these peak periods). So although Mattingly's heyday is not demonstrably superior to Puckett's, it does indeed bear a much greater burden of his Hall of Fame candidacy. Take away those three years, and the balance of their careers weighs heavily in Puckett's favour.

As do some key intangibles. The Yankees were generally in contention through most of Mattingly's career, but they didn't win much of anything—a strike-shortened divisional title and wild-card berth during his final two years, when he was no longer a force. Kirby, meanwhile, was the resident superstar on two of the weaker World Series winners of the past quarter-century (and was named MVP of the '91 Series). Both were perennial Gold Glove winners, but Puckett played a far more demanding position. Puckett, though he never stole more than 21 bases in a season, had a clear edge in speed (Mattingly never stole more than three--if memory serves, he was regarded as one of the slowest non-catchers in the game). Both had their careers shortened by health problems, with Mattingly struggling through prolonged back trouble and Kirby suddenly coming down with glaucoma during spring training in 1996. Because Mattingly spent a good part of his career trying to play through his ailments, I'd say he was the more adversely affected of the two.

Most of all, though, Kirby was Kirby. I don't think I'd use the word "adorable" to describe any other professional athlete, but adorable he was. Before there were Teletubbies, Furbys, or Pikachus, there was Kirby. James once wrote that if Puckett and Tony Gwynn were to have a footrace, it'd look like two bowling balls rolling side-by-side down the lane. Kirby's teammates used to rub his head for luck. In another lifetime, he would have been a little bobbing-head on somebody's dashboard. He made a truckload of money (the first to break the $3-million barrier), but he did so in a way that never antagonized anybody; when management was slow to re-sign him one year, Twins fans made it very clear they were ready to boycott. I wonder if Kirby was ever booed in a major league park anywhere? Of course he was--but really, what kind of a heartless monster would you have to be to boo Kirby?

I just hope that when he gets voted into Cooperstown next week, there's no lingering suspicion that he's primarily a sentimental pick. Go back and look at the record. If Mattingly goes in too, that's OK--I wouldn't vote for him myself, not yet anyway, but along with Brett, he was probably the scariest hitter I've ever seen for those three years that he seemed destined for DiMaggio/Mantle-like status. If there are any voters who deem Mattingly as more qualified than Puckett, though--and I bet there are at least a few, both in and out of New York--that's insupportable.

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POSTSCRIPT: I said above that I might vote for Jack Morris, but truthfully, I'm not sure--that may be based more than anything else on the feeling that there needs to be at least one starting pitcher in Cooperstown who accumulated the bulk of his credentials in the 1980s (something no longer true of Clemens). Morris scores 123.5 points under James, suggesting he'll probably be inducted in time, by the Veteran's Committee if not the writers. A roughly weighted rundown of the pros and cons:

PUT HIM IN: 1) The tagline that's become synonomous with Morris: "Winningest pitcher of the '80s" (a relatively modest 162);

2) Game 7 of the '91 Series, a 10-inning, complete-game 1-0 victory—on the shortlist of greatest Series starts ever, arguably second only to Larsen;

3) 250+ career wins, a very solid total for the post Seaver/Carlton generation of starters. Clemens just passed him and Maddux will soon, but 250 wins is becoming a thing of the past;

4) Three 20-win seasons, ace of two Series winners, good lifetime winning percentage (.577).

NO WAY: 1) E.R.A.: 3.90 lifetime, with not a single season under 3.00;

2) Besides never winning a Cy Young, at no time during the '80s was Morris considered the best pitcher in baseball. Well, maybe for the first two months of '84, when the Tigers were invincible and he was 10-1 through May. Otherwise, it was Carlton from '80 through '82; at some point between '83 and '85 the title passed from Dave Stieb to Dwight Gooden; and Clemens was the guy the rest of the way. Morris won more games than any of them, but that was a function of the calendar, not ability;

3) Mediocre SO/BB ratio. I don't know if that'll matter, but it should--Morris was under 2.00, which to me should be the floor for any post-expansion Hall of Fame pitcher;

4) He was thought of as a self-centered jerk for much of his career. If you're Steve Carlton or Barry Bonds, that kind of thing doesn't matter. (Bonds's recent conversion to good-guy approachability is amusing. He should go back to being a full-time prima donna--you're in, Barry, you can do whatever you want.) If you're borderline, it might.

So I don't know. Bert Blyleven's numbers are better, but intuitively he makes even less sense than Morris. In a perfect world, I'd give the nod to Tom Henke over either of them, but in that direction lies sabermetric madness.