A Little Bit Louder Now (2022)

The internet is not a good place to argue with people--did you know that? Bookmark this page so you don’t forget.

Spent the better part of two days arguing over something on a message board earlier this week. The argument was tangential to what was being discussed initially, a question posed by me after seeing the new David Bowie documentary: along with Bowie, who were the most chameleon-like pop stars ever?

The question was a little vague, though I tried to clarify with three other names that I thought fit what I was thinking about: Madonna, Dylan, and Neil Young. I mentioned a couple of other possibilities I was less sure about: Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. It was meant to be a combination of the way these people presented themselves to the world, and also--the two usually went hand-in-hand—stylistic changes in their music.

The thread puttered along for a few days--understandably; it’s hard to come up with anyone who fits the idea as well as Bowie--at which point someone suggested the Isley Brothers. As I wrote in an online inventory of my albums many years ago, I’m not the biggest Isley Brothers fan, but I do have five different compilations of their work, covering three distinct phases of their career (and in the running “mixworthy” section of said inventory, I included “Shout” and “Twist and Shout”--and probably should have included “This Old Heart of Mine” too). So, while I was aware of their stylistic changes musically, I said that I didn’t think they were famous enough to qualify; I hadn’t mentioned this yet, but I realized right then that a certain level of fame was always implied as to who might fit. Bowie, Madonna, Dylan, Neil Young, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift: they’re all, in my mind, very famous, and when they change musical direction or reemerge looking completely different than they did a year ago, people talk about that. They make news (or made, as the case may be; the first four are either dead or old and not very chameleon-like anymore).

Within half an hour, someone jumped in with an addendum (italicized) to my response: “I like the Isley Brothers fine, but they wouldn't rise to that level of fame among white people.” Somehow, an assessment of general fame--I used the term “pop audience,” which to me encompasses people who listen to popular music of all kinds; to me, it includes everybody--was turned into a racial issue. If we section off this part of the pop audience, it's being explained to me, the Isley Brothers are famous--and by not realizing that, I’m probably a blinkered white guy (or worse) who doesn’t know anything about the Isley Brothers. (The poster of this comment was white.)

Chiming in, another poster (also white) half went after the first poster for making the distinction between white and black listeners (the Isleys, he pointed out, had played a Pitchfork Festival, with billing proximate to Stereolab--his comment included an internet acronym that lost me, so I misunderstood his point; more on internet-speak later), and half went after me for suggesting that Neil Young and Lou Reed (another possibility I’d mentioned, although I dismissed him for settling into “regular-guy Lou” sometime around 1980) are more famous than the Isley Brothers. And at that point, that’s what the thread became about: are the Isley Brothers as famous as Neil Young and Lou Reed?

To me, the answer is obvious: no. I’m not saying the Isley Brothers aren’t famous, but (as I pointed out in another comment) fame is relative, and it can’t be measured one way (the first poster threw in a list of how many Top 40 hits they’d had, including--this seemed very important to those who disagreed with me--a #1 song of Beyoncé's they’d just collaborated on). I tried to analogize: yes, they’d had a lot of Top 40 hits, but so did Brenda Lee in her day: did that make her more famous than the Ronettes, Janis Joplin, or Jimi Hendrix, all of whom had far fewer? Hits and commercial success are a component of fame, but does that mean that whoever directs the next Marvel film will automatically be more famous than Jean-Luc Godard, whose films--all of them combined--were probably seen by fewer people than will see that next Marvel film on its opening weekend? (I’m just guessing there, but you get the point.) I turned the question back on the message board where all this was taking place, pointing out that while there are multiple threads on the board devoted to Neil Young and Lou Reed, with hundreds upon hundreds of posts, the Isley Brothers have eight threads totalling fewer than 200 posts (with seven of them combining for probably 50 posts). Only one response there: that discussion on this message board is not a good barometer of fame. (To me, how much people talk about someone is one of the best barometers of fame there is.) I also mentioned how often Neil Young and the Velvet Underground have been covere by other artists--I’ve got hundreds of covers on my hard-drive--and that I thought that mattered, too.

The last point was dismissed--confirmation bias--the first two weren’t really addressed. A couple of people (I think I was arguing with about eight at this point) made what I thought were good counter-arguments, and I said so: one, that I’d overlooked sampling (I assume that the Isley Brothers, especially their ‘70s work, have been sampled a lot), and two, that Hendrix got his start playing backup with the Isleys. The second poster I mentioned--the Stereolab/Pitchfork guy--chipped in with a couple of ridiculous posts: one, a caricature of the Velvet Underground that I think was supposed to be funny, either as cutting ridicule or in the spirit of “this is so ridiculous it’s funny,” but if anything reminded me of Greg Gutfeld, that cretin who’s all over Fox, and two, an equation of Neil Young and Lou Reed with Robyn Hitchcock in the fame department. Onward and downward.

Which brings me to internet jargon--I don’t think there’s anything I despise more these days. By jargon, I mean all internet acronyms, stylistic tics, ways of phrasing things, and the widespread assumption that everyone knows what you mean when you engage in this kind of silliness. A couple of examples:

A phrase turned into single-word sentences: Dumbest. Idea. Ever. There were all sorts of useful methods already around for emphasizing your words; I can’t see that this one has added anything.

The Facebook post that begins with “So”: “So I just wrote this thing,” or “So I just won the Nobel Prize for physics”--the “so,” I think, is to let you know that geez, this big thing I’m telling you about really isn’t that big a deal to me, but I’m telling you anyway, because I’m incapable of not telling you, because it’s a really, really, really big deal.”

And so on--there are many that drive me around the bend. I don’t get the appeal at all. It’s like you’ve been reading everything people are saying on the internet, and you suddenly notice that everybody’s saying this one thing, and you decide...what? “I want to use that; I want to sound exactly like everybody else.”

I bring all this up because, with the argument winding down, someone jumped on the thread--it always takes courage to join a pile-on--and, in a very theatrical display of incredulity, threw one of these phrases at me: “_________ (my display name on this message board)...I can’t.” Which is usually, I believe, rendered as “I can’t even.”

The point there is that my side of the argument--that Neil Young and Lou Reed are more famous than the Isley Brothers--is so wrong, so hopelessly beyond the pale, that this person can’t even find the words to express how egregiously wrong I am. And--nudge-nudge--race is again insinuated: the person wondered if I listened to much R&B, hip-hop, or funk.

Okay. I knew this person enough to respond in a FB message, and I did; no need to share that here. I wasn’t happy with the question.

The thread had basically (and understandably) scared off everyone by this point, including me, so after a few more posts, it’s been dormant for a couple of days, where it will hopefully remain forever. Not wanting to reopen the issue, I’ll post a couple of follow-up thoughts here.

1) Not sure why--it’s not like I consider his word gospel or anything, though I do trust him on the subject of the Isley Brothers more than some of the people I’d been arguing with--I thought I’d look up what Robert Christgau has written on them, by which I mean reviews of their albums in his Consumer Guide. As least in the online version, he’s reviewed 18 albums of theirs, including compilations and a box set; that would seem to indicate sufficient familiarity with their music, and, by extension, their relative place in the grand scheme of things. Sixteen of the albums get grades from C+ to a B+, one (the latest, a collaboration with Carlos Santana) gets the star treatment (which approximately translates as a B, I think), and the box set gets an A-: “an honorable job on a significant band whose catalog cries out for landscaping.” Great rating, words of praise. He also writes this, though, in the same entry: “But folks, this is only the Isley Brothers. They gave us ‘Twist and Shout’ and ‘It's Your Thing’ and, um, ‘That Lady,’ they hired Jimi Hendrix young and learned a few things, they formed their own label and held on like heroes. They have a great single disc in them. But who's up for canonization next? Frankie Beverly and Maze?”

I’d say that’s pretty much what I’d been saying all along, except Christgau’s sometimes harsher--“only the Isley Brothers.” Even if I’d still been posting in the thread, though, I don’t think I would have brought up Christgau. He’s a lightning rod on this message board, and any mention of him would have immediately been dismissed out of hand.

2) Something I just thought to check today (not that I’m still thinking about the whole episode--not me): how many books have been written about these three artists? With Neil Young and Lou Reed (as solo artists only, not including books on some famous bands they’ve been in), I found at least 10 each. Neil: Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey, Sam Inglis’s Harvest, Johnny Rogan’s Zero to Sixty, John Einarson’s (and others’) Don’t Be Denied, Kevin Chong’s Neil Young Nation, Daniel Durchholz and Gary Graff’s Long May You Run, Harvey Kubernik’s Heart of Gold, Sharry Wilson’s The Sugar Mountain Years, Nigel Williamson’s Stories Behind the Songs 1966-1992, Sylvie Simmons’ Reflections in a Broken Glass, The Rolling Stone Files (various), Carole Dufrechou’s Neil Young. That’s 12--the last one, the earliest, I used to own back in high school, but somehow I lost it along the way (still can’t remember when or how). Same with Lou Reed, give or take a book or two.

I can’t find a single book on the Isley Brothers. I have to believe that there was at least one written at some point, and that it went out of print (such books still tend to turn up on sites like AbeBooks--e.g., the Carole Dufrechou book), but I didn’t turn up anything. They do get indexed in Nelson George’s The Death of Rhythm and Blues seven times, which in fairness is only one fewer mention than Smokey Robinson. In my mind, Smokey Robinson is much more famous than the Isley Brothers--and on par with Neil Young and Lou Reed--so that’s another piece of evidence worth considering.

Anyway, is the number of books written about someone a meaningful measure of fame? Does that count for anything?

3) Another board-centric way to approach the question. This message board is often the site of artist polls: people send in ballots on their favourite songs, the results are compiled and counted down. I’ve run one poll myself--surprise, Neil Young--co-ran a Yo La Tengo poll with someone else, and looked after the vote tabulation for a Motown singles poll. (I’ve also run a few film polls.) To try to bring some semblance of order to the whole process, there’s a thread where people throw out ideas, and a running list of who’s next in line is maintained. Three threads, actually--the first got so long, a second and then a third thread were started.

As I say, there’s been a Neil Young poll. There’s been an all-encompassing Velvet Underground poll that combined the VU with solo work. There’s been a David Bowie poll, a Madonna poll, and a Dylan poll. Some other obvious ones: the Beatles, Prince, Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, an all-encompassing Jacksons poll that combined group and solo work, the Who. There’ve been over 100 of them the past decade, and if you were to look at the whole list, it’s not like everyone is that famous--far from it. There’ve been a number of polls where my first thought was “Really? You’re going to run a poll on them?”

There hasn’t been an Isley Brothers poll, though “Shout” did place #38 on a ‘50s poll from a few years ago. I don’t have my own ballot from that poll--it was run on a Google Form--so I’m wondering if I voted for it myself. (Probably not--much of my 50-song ballot was devoted to doo-wop.) No Isleys poll is not, in and of itself, especially significant: I could name a lot of important and famous artists where there’s never been a poll. The thing that caught my eye when I looked at the three housekeeping threads, though, is that--if the “find” command is to be trusted--not a single person has even suggested the Isley Brothers as a poll possibility. The three threads combine for around 5,500 posts. Not one mention. I’m sure, had I made this point, this also would have been brushed aside, but seeing as this is the very message board where this argument is taking place, doesn’t this at least suggest some kind of disconnect?

4) I said that the charge of confirmation bias towards me--that the mere fact that I’d been collecting covers of Neil Young and the Velvet Underground (Beatles, too) already ensured that I’d consider Neil Young and Lou Reed more famous--was valid. I’ll bring up another common bias, regularly brought up in all kinds of contexts when it comes to baseball: recency bias. This Beyoncé/Isley Brothers record on the charts right now came up a few times, almost like its success was a function of the Isleys' enduring fame rather than Beyoncé’s.

5) Is the latest version of Rolling Stone's Top 500 worth anything? I wouldn't mention it in the thread, no, although clearly this is not the same Top 500 as their 2004 or even 2010 list (the top three spots and six of the top ten are held down by black artists). On the 2021 list, the Isley Brothers placed one song, "Shout" at #268; Neil Young had three ("Heart of Gold" at #259, "After the Gold Rush" at #322, and "Powderfinger at #450), Lou Reed also three ("I'm Waiting for the Man" at #81, "Walk on the Wild Side" at #180, and "Sweet Jane" at #294). Again, to be fair, of those seven songs, the two most specious for me are "Heart of Gold" and "Walk on the Wild Side."

6) In my mind, the fame of the Isley Brothers has been exceeded by that of their two most famous songs. Play “Shout” for 1,000 random people--music fans, non-music fans, a mix--and my guess is that more people will identify it as “the Animal House song” than as an Isley Brothers song. And if you were to do the same with “Twist and Shout,” I’m pretty sure it would be identified as a Beatles song far more often than an Isley Brothers song. That’s not their fault, and such things can be infuriating, I know--I wince at the reality that certain cover versions have become more famous than the originals. (There’s one in particular that gets under my skin, but I’m drawing a blank right now--obviously I'm not talking about the Beatles’ great “Twist and Shout” cover.) It is a reality, though.

Not sure if anyone I’d been arguing with will ever see this. In any event, I’ll say it again: the Isley Brothers, who were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 (Young and Reed are each in there twice--we can discount that, too), are not as famous as Neil Young or Lou Reed. To me, they’re not all that close to being as famous.

1.12 (2021)

Vlad and Tatis and Acuna are great stories this year, Wander Franco’s a great story, umpires patting down pitchers like they’re about to enter the gates of the Corleone compound is a great--or at least a strange--story, but the number-one story of the year is obviously Jacob deGrom. There’s what he might do, and also some of the puzzling questions that will arise if he just misses.

To start, ERA--not adjusted, not fielding-independent, just plain old Earned Run Average. Three months and 69 games into the season, deGrom’s ERA is 0.50. Depending upon how skeptically you view any pitching records that predate Babe Ruth, deGrom has the all-time ERA record within reach—Dutch Leonard’s 0.96 in 1904--and also Bob Gibson’s modern-day record of 1.12, set in the freakish Year of the Pitcher, 1968. Wait, though; sitting above Leonard on Baseball Reference’s leaders page is Tim Keefe, 0.86 in 1880, and also five players from the Negro Leagues (including Satchel Paige), statistics from which were, within a certain window, absorbed (if that’s the right word) into the official record book this past year.* If you include everything, deGrom is aiming for Eugene Bremer’s 0.71, established in 1937.

With so many variables in the earlier numbers, I think most fans and media are looking at Gibson as the guy to beat. Right now, according to a little graphic the MLB site includes on their front page every day, deGrom is over a run ahead of Gibson, who was at 1.52 through his first 12 starts. But, with Gibson throwing 305 innings in 1968 (and 106 in his first 12 starts), that’s kind of meaningless.

The focus is very much on deGrom’s ERA, but he’s also presently eclipsing a number of other pitching records, both old-school and sabermetric. I’ll again stick to post-war MLB records--especially with Adjusted ERA, there are many Negro League pitchers who bettered Bauer’s mark:

1. Hits-per-9-innings: Trevor Bauer, 2020, 5.05 (deGrom – 3.38)

2. K-per-9-innings: Shane Bieber, 2020, 14.20 (deGrom – 14.63)

3. K/BB ratio: Phil Hughes, 2014, 11.63 (deGrom – 11.70)

4. WHIP: Pedro Martinez, 2000, 0.737 (deGrom – 0.463)

5. Adjusted ERA: Trevor Bauer, 2020, 292 (deGrom – 774)

6. Fielding-independent pitching – Pedro Martinez, 1999, 1.40 (deGrom – 0.87)

I take those Trevor Bauer/Shane Bieber numbers with a huge grain of Hydroxychloroquine, by the way: Bauer threw 73 innings in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Bieber 77.1. I assume you had to throw one inning per team game to qualify for leaderboards and records, but when you’re down to IP in the 70s, you may as well include some of the other-worldly numbers put up by Chapman and Kimbrel and other closers. Looking past those two guys, the post-war record for H/9 is Nolan Ryan in 1972 (5.26); K/9 is Gerrit Cole in 2019 (13.82); and Adjusted ERA is Pedro in 2000 (291). I’ve probably missed a couple of marks deGrom is chasing, esoteric stuff like Base-Out Runs Saved that only the people at Fangraphs understand.

If deGrom does break Gibson’s mark, one thing falls in place for sure, another almost for sure: he wins his third Cy Young award (unanimously) and, 10-15 years down the road, he goes into the HOF. The second, because of some complicating factors, is not a certainty, but precedent has established an inviolable rule-of-three when it comes to Cy Youngs and MVPs: provided you don’t have a PED cloud hanging over you (Clemens, Bonds, and A-Rod), and assuming Pujols, Trout, Kershaw, and Scherzer are HOF-bound, three of either guarantees induction. There are a number of players who won two and fell short.

But what happens if deGrom doesn’t break Gibson’s mark, or if he breaks it but doesn’t have enough IP to qualify for the ERA title (meaning he doesn’t actually break it)? How close does he have to come--in ERA if he qualifies but ends up higher than 1.12; in innings if he’s lower than 1.12 but short of 162 IP--to win his third Cy and, presumably, end up in the HOF?

Getting to 162 innings is not a given the way things stand. DeGrom is both fragile and cautious: he’s had, I think, four different physical issues this year that have led to him exiting games early and/or missing starts. Last week, against the Cubs, he pitched three perfect innings, struck out 8 of 9 batters, and pulled himself from the game--he was back in there five days later. He’s thrown 72 innings thus far, with the Mets about to play their 70th game. DeGrom will pitch their 71st; if he stays in rotation the rest of the way, he’d get 19 more starts and would have to average 4.73 innings per start. Which is nothing--it’s staying in rotation the rest of the way that provides the challenge. There’s not a huge margin of error there; if he misses one start, that jumps to 5 innings per start; if he misses two, 5.29. If he were to go on the DL for anything longer than two starts, his margin of error all but disappears--to date, he’s averaging exactly six innings per start.

Two scenarios:

1) He betters Gibson’s 1.12, but he only throws 150 innings. I’d still vote for him for the Cy, but I think many sportswriters will automatically drop him from their ballots (or at the very least only give him a nominal 4th- or 5th-place vote). How many, I don’t know, but with Gausman, Wheeler, and Woodruff (three guys about whom I know virtually nothing--you can maybe throw Scherzer in there, too) all having great seasons, that might be enough to cost him Cy #3. Or maybe, with those other guys splitting votes, he’d win anyway.

2) He gets his 162 innings, but he falls short of Gibson. Maybe he comes really, really close, ends up at 1.25 or something, or maybe he ends up more in the range of Dwight Gooden (1.53) or Greg Maddux (1.56), or maybe even he gets hammered in one start and ends up over 2.00. If he just barely clears 162 IP, then it’s a case of balancing that with his ERA; if the first is too low or the second too high, he’ll probably end up behind one or two of the aforementioned Cy contenders in WAR.

There is so much weirdness attached to deGrom, for both his career (his infamous lack of run support from the Mets, which combined with a late start--he broke in at 26--has him with 77 wins at the age of 33) and this season (he’s hitting .407, and has knocked in more runs, 6, than he’s allowed, 4), that it’s becoming harder and harder to know where he stands in relation to anything. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speak, either.

*Something I fully support, but the transition--feelings vs. facts--won’t be instantaneous; 0.71 is just not going to acquire the larger-than-lifeness that 1.12 has overnight.

Pauline Again (Naturally) (2021)

I’m writing about Pauline Kael again. Cue Al Pacino in The Godfather Part III (one of Kael’s last reviews before her retirement, one that was perhaps a little too forgiving--I think she would have eviscerated that film in 1977).

I don’t really want out; I still enjoy talking and writing about her, and I expect I’ll be doing so for as long as I live. I had a flurry of Kael activity about 10 years ago, first when I interviewed Brian Kellow about A Life in the Dark, his Kael biography, and--an offshoot of that--also an intense and lengthy message-board argument with someone who didn’t like the book and ascribed all sorts of nefarious motivations and shortcomings to it that I found rather hysterical. Must have gone on for at least a couple of hundred posts; it was exhausting.

A year ago, another flurry. There was What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, a documentary that was a good companion piece to Kellow’s biography; not sure when it was released exactly, but I made the two-hour drive into Toronto to see it on Feb. 12 (I still have the ticket stub sitting on my desk). At the same time, I finally obtained a copy of Talking About Pauline Kael, a book I had been coveting for a few years. That must sound weird: if you’re so devoted to Kael, why would you covet rather than just buy the damn thing? Without getting into too much detail, it’s pricey--very pricey, as books published by smaller academic and university presses generally are. But, in a very Kael-like display of heedless spunk--kidding, kidding--I contacted the publisher and asked if they’d send me a copy if I promised to write about on my homepage. Which they graciously did. I read the book immediately, saw the documentary, and, come March, I was all set to go.

At which point, I got badly sidetracked for the next few weeks--no explanation necessary, right? By the time I re-focussed, enough time had passed that, with my very faulty short-term memory, I wasn’t really up to writing about either anymore. Life went on.

(God, I get bogged down in process…I really ought to be in the U.S. Senate.)

Sparked by Charlie Kauffman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and also by long-lingering guilt, I ordered a copy of the documentary, reread some of Talking About Pauline Kael, and I’m again all set to go. The Kauffman film, if you haven’t seen it, takes a very bizarre detour--bizarre for almost any other film, that is; it may be one of the less bizarre things about I’m Thinking of Ending Things--where one of the two principals begins quoting Kael’s review of A Woman Under the Influence (before or after which, there’s glimpse of Kael on a bookshelf--not Reeling, the book in which the review appeared). What did I think of that? Same thing I think after every film that gets a strong reaction from me, good or bad: what would Kael have thought of that (both the film and her inclusion)?

Anyway, I’ll start with Talking About Pauline Kael. I wasn’t quite up to re-reading the whole thing--the two weeks that would have taken more than anything--so I limited myself to three chapters: Ray Sawhill’s, which I singled out in a message-board post when I read the book last  year; Steven Rubio’s, because I’ve come to know Steven over the past few years (we’re currently collaborating with Scott Woods on a series of Zoomcasts about various films and TV shows); and Brian Kellow’s, because, as I mentioned, I interviewed him when his biography was published. I also think that’s a very good cross-section of writers in terms of their relationships to Kael: a close friend (Sawhill), a fan (Steven), and a biographer (Kellow).

I’ll start with Steven’s essay, and a (probably self-aggrandizing) note that this kind of reminds me of the ending of Kael’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday review, where she was writing about a film written by Penelope Gilliatt, her rotating partner at The New Yorker: “Miss Gilliatt and I are ships that pass each other in the night every six months. It is a pleasure to salute her on this crossing.” (Reportedly, they were far from actual friends.) I first got to know Steven close to 15 years ago via rockcritics.com. I can’t remember the exact details, but I soon started reading and posting reader comments on his blog, we were involved in a Facebook project once, we joined Scott in a long podcast on Robert Christgau’s memoir, and he’s been supportive above and beyond with my own self-published books ever since.

Steven’s chapter zeros in what he designates as Kael’s “expansive subjectivity,” which is a great description of the critics I tend to gravitate to, and also of what I hopefully get into my own writing. Eliminate either part of that and the writing loses out: too subjective, leaving the work behind and making it solely about the critic (I can think of examples I won’t mention), that can wear you down; the other extreme, a critic whose own self disappears and writes only of the work, well, I know that approach is viewed by many as the only legitimate approach to criticism, but it doesn’t really work for me, either as a reader or a writer. Here’s Greil Marcus describing in an interview what he was after in his old “Speaker to Speaker” column: “What does it mean to be a listener? What are we doing when we listen? What happens? What doesn’t happen? What could happen? I really am a critic in the sense that I don’t give a shit what the artist intended, or what he meant. I couldn’t care less. What I’m interested in is what happens when you listen.” (Italics mine.)

For me, that means I’m not all that interested in how important Vertigo is to Hitchcock’s obsessive lifelong quest to find the perfect blond. I’d rather read about what it feels like to sit there and watch Vertigo, or what place it has in the writer’s life. And then connect that to the film, and its meaning, and go from there.

As other Kael observers have noted, Steven also writes of how Kael was never boxed in by a theory or prescriptive rules (the immediate contrast being Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory, which Kael methodically dismantled in a famous early piece of hers): “So how does a writer who lives in the moment by her wit, style, bombast, and immediate passions influence others?…I see what I got from her was less a way of looking at movies than a way of looking at life. Challenge everything, I hear her say in the lines, and often between them.” I like that: “A way of looking at life.” I’d apply that equally to Bill James, another writer I know I share a passion for with Steven.

Ray Sawhill’s piece, “A Memoir in the Style of a Long Blogposting About a Friendship with Pauline Kael” (also the title of a great Primitive Radio Gods song, by the way), is both a remembrance of Sawhill’s friendship with Kael, and also an attempt to dispel some assumptions and myths about her. As a friend and sort-of mentor (i.e., Sawhill resisted), Kael was always pushing him (or nudging; was he pushed or was he nudged?) to get on a career path as a critic, and she would help him by way of contacts and/or recommendations wherever she could. He wasn’t particularly ambitious, though, and that would create some tension in their friendship. Actually, if there’s one minor quibble I have with Sawhill’s piece, it’s that, in an almost passive-aggressive way, he gives an idealized version of himself as a drifting pure spirit resisting the blandishments of success being dangled in front of him. I’m not saying this isn’t an accurate portrayal of their relationship–I’m sure it was, and how would I know anyway?–just that he might have deemphasized that a bit.

Sawhill’s attempt to set the record straight on Kael comes in the form of nine numbered statements:

• Best not think of Pauline as a normal person.

• Best not to think of Pauline as complicated and/or neurotic.

• Best not to think of Pauline as someone who made a lot of sense.

• Consistency was not one of her defining characteristics.

• Don’t worry about whether she was a radical or a feminist.

• It may not be best to think of Pauline as an intellectual.

• Although her dissidence was frequently internalized, Pauline always remained a leftie.

• Pauline was also, it can’t be stressed enough, an extrovert.

• Best not to think of Pauline as a film critic, let alone a film geek.

Each is expanded upon, of course, with an explanation and examples. Best not to think of Pauline as a film critic–obviously, provocative and counter-intuitive, but Sawhill expands (there’s that word again) on these ideas in a way that will fascinate any Kael reader who’s wondered about these very things.

(Subjective interlude. As I read Sawhill’s sketch, at times I had this overwhelming sense that I was reading about another critic who has influenced me, one whom I have a personal relationship with. “Consistency was not one of her defining characteristics”--words that, if I had formulated and accepted such an idea 20 years ago, might have saved me from some self-induced trauma.)

The title of Brian Kellow’s chapter, “Detective Story: Notes from a Biographer,” says it all: where exactly do you begin if you’re writing a biography of Kael (or anybody, for that matter), especially someone whose biographical asides in her own writing, while certainly there, were still scattered far and wide across 40 years of writing? Kellow begins by visiting a couple of Kael’s old homes in California--actually, he begins by waiting a few years after Kael’s death, convinced that someone else will write the book he’d like to write; no one does--and by getting an interview (a not very successful one) with Edward Landberg, Kael’s husband for a short time who ran the Cinema Guild theatre in Berkley with her. And it builds from there, piece by piece--minus the participation of Kael’s daughter Gina, who politely declines (she’s heard from frequently in the documentary)--until he runs up against the awkward reality that Kael’s famous “Raising Kane” essay borrowed liberally, and without attribution, from the work of film professor Howard Suber. One of Kael’s confidants accuses Kellow of making it all up—bringing it back full circle to that message-board argument I found myself trapped in 10 years ago, I empathize.

Kellow turns up a few times in What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, which I’ve now seen three times--had to watch it once more since I started this piece. The film seemed to get a mixed reaction, but with no real preconceived notion about what kind of Kael documentary I’d want, I thought it covered all the signature controversies of her life--her reviews of Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, and Shoah; “Circles and Squares”; her brief Hollywood sojourn, etc.--reasonably well, excerpted key passages from lots of reviews (including autobiographical detours from her Hud and Casualties of War reviews; Sarah Jessica Parker provides Kael’s voice), and was not a work of deification. You hear from Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris’s wife (she actually seems to be an admirer, if, obviously, a conflicted one), avowed non-admirers like Ridley Scott, Robert Evans, and William Peter Blatty (whose Tonight Show clip is in fact rather embarrassing), and wry ex-Paulettes Paul Schrader and David Edelstein (a “Paulinista,” he clarifies). The almost wall-to-wall assemblage of film clips seems arbitrary at times, and occasionally altogether wrong--narration suggesting you’re seeing something Kael celebrated matched with images from Network, Blow-Up, and other films she didn’t like at all--and sometimes they respond to the narration in gimmicky fashion. But most belong to that loose core of films one most immediately associates with Kael: Nashville, Shoeshine, Weekend, The Godfather, Carrie, etc.

A few things I really liked. The film begins and (almost) ends with an interview conducted by Allen Barra’s then 10-year-old daughter Maggie--Kael’s last, as it were. So many beautiful moments right there:

Barra: “What was your favourite time of your life?”

Kael, in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s and near death: “Now.”

(Something that made me laugh: when Kael described her famous Limelight review to Barra as a “con.” She meant that in the sense of a negative review paired with a positive one; at first I thought she was saying the film was a con, and that she was about to launch into a Kael-like diatribe to a 10-year-old.)

I loved the little montage of letters-to-Kael that flashed by, including correspondence from Carol Burnett, Marlene Dietrich (wanting to know where she can pick up The New Yorker in Paris), Spielberg, unpleasant ones from George Roy Hill and Gregory Peck, and even Bill Clinton (complimenting her on her Brubaker review). I share Lili Anolik’s reverence for Kael’s Casualties of War review, which is granted an extended close-up. Near the end of the film, there’s a fascinating few minutes of speculation on how Kael would fare in today’s media landscape. Carrie Rickey thinks she would have thrived on Twitter, with her gift for the acerbic, one-sentence dismissal. Maybe. Two of my very favourite things in the film suggest otherwise to me, that she came along at a moment--or rather, helped bring that moment into being more than anyone--when film criticism had a prominence in the culture that feels like science-fiction today: a two-page ad for Last Tango in the Times that consists of her review in its entirety, and, even more eye-opening, a TV commercial for her “Raising Kane” piece in The New Yorker. A TV commercial selling film criticism…not the world we live in. And while Rickey may be right, my own guess (or hope, maybe) is that she would have loathed Twitter’s character-count nonsense.

“I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”

Steven quotes that regularly--it’s on the masthead of his blog—and does so in his “Kael’s Influence: Expansive Subjectivity” piece. As the Hud and Casualties of War reviews I referred to earlier (and also, maybe most famously, Kael’s review of Shoeshine, excerpted in the documentary) attest to, autobiographical passages do indeed expertly weave in and out of her criticism. If you want to venture outside of her own writing, though, there’s a body of work beginning to emerge: along with Talking About Pauline Kael and What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, there’s Kellow’s biography, Conversations with Pauline Kael (edited by Will Brantley), Francis Davis’s Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael, and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me. I like them all. The final piece of the puzzle will appear when my own Kael biopic finally gets off the ground, with Meryl Streep as Kael, Ed Harris as John Huston, and Wallace Shawn as somebody (because you can’t make a Pauline Kael biopic without getting Wallace Shawn in there somewhere). Start date yet to be determined.

(Originally published in rockcritics.com)

By Gad, Sir--You Are a Character (2020)

It’s only a small part of Curt Schilling’s HOF résumé, but if you’re a Jays fan, you remember: in Game 5 of the 1993 World Series, the game before the game that even non-Jays fans could tell you about, Schilling pushed the Series to a Game 6 by throwing a 147-pitch shutout. He gave up five hits, walked three, and struck out six. I’m not sure if anyone’s thrown as many pitches in a WS shutout since then--truthfully, I’m not even sure if anyone’s thrown a WS shutout period since then. (Bumgarner?) Was Mitch Williams out in the bullpen warming up the last couple of innings? Is Juan Guzman (who pitched really well too) still fidgeting around on a mound somewhere as I write?

This year, and maybe (probably) next year too, Schilling is the most interesting HOF debate. The Scott Rolen (somewhat of an itinerant, fragmented career) and Todd Helton (Coors Field) debates seem to have resolved themselves--both have picked up a lot of support, and both are going in (next year for Rolen, soon after for Helton). The Schilling debate, as with the procession of PED players from the past few years, has nothing to do with performance; I doubt there are many writers who wouldn’t vote him in on the merits if he were Orel Hershiser or Fernando Valenzuela or any other pitcher who was generally considered to be a Nice Guy and Good Person. But Schilling, these days, has probably surpassed Bonds and Clemens and A-Rod as baseball’s #1 villain, and as such, has both shifted and intensified the “character counts” argument that attached itself to PED users the past decade or so.

Two prominent voters wrote at length about why they were dropping Schilling from their ballot this time around, after having voted for him--and publically advocated for him--for years: Joe Posnanski and Jay Jaffe. (Actually, Jaffe was limited to advocating; he’s a first-time voter this year, even though he’s probably written about the HOF more than anybody the past decade.)

Posnasnki

Jaffe

Posnanski’s may be behind a paywall--it’s part of his “Outsiders” countdown, the 100 best players eligible for but not yet in the Hall. He’s got Schilling at #30, quite a drop from where he would have put him a few years ago. The accompanying write-up is a declaration, and quite compelling:

“...it isn’t Schilling’s politics. It’s his nastiness. It’s his intolerance. It’s his compulsion to troll. Curt Schilling pushes anger and fear and hatred. Every day he divides, every day he offends...and all the while, he makes sure to note that those he offends deserve it, and bleep ’em if they can’t take a joke, and if they happen to have a Hall of Fame vote they should give it to him anyway because he was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I’ve done that for eight years. He was a damn good pitcher, particularly in the big games. I still rank him as one of the 100 greatest players in baseball history. But I’m not voting for him. I suspect he will get into the Hall of Fame anyway, and that’s fine. He doesn’t need my vote. He shows every day he doesn’t want my vote.”

And to underscore his point, Posnanski has included in his countdown--and elevated their rankings to a position not quite supported by their on-field accomplishments--a few players and managers for the totality of their baseball lives: Curt Flood, Dale Murphy, Gil Hodges, Dusty Baker, and Felipe Alou, and he’s about to list Buck O’Neil in his top three, possibly even #1.

I’m all for this. Curt Flood should absolutely be in the HOF, and now that Posnanski has me thinking about Alou and Baker, I’d say yes to them too. Much less enthusiastic about Murphy, but the point is, giving guys credit for things that aren’t reflected in their Baseball Reference career boxes, I think that’s a good and probably overdue idea. (I’ve even jokingly hinted that players should get HOF credit for memorable nicknames--Al Hrabosky, your time may come yet.) Which brings everything back to Schilling. Credit, yes; does the obvious corollary--that they ought to be penalized when the totality is much less than what happened on the field--apply too?

I’m less sure than ever how I feel about these things. Towards the end of Bonds’ career, I was 100% a defender; as time passed, and the utter freakishness of those last few seasons nagged at me, I stopped caring. But I’ve also accepted that the ten or so players who’ve been kept out of the Hall because of PEDs are barely the tip of the iceberg, and that there are users already in there. I used to be bothered by itinerant careers like Rolen’s, or Tim Raines’; I still am, but I’m not sure that I should be. I never liked the Andruw Jones or Joe Mauer type career where a player’s value pretty much vanished after he turned 30 or 31, no matter how much they’d done before that; I still don’t, but I’m not sure anymore whether that should make a difference. (Are Albert Pujols’ HOF credentials any better today than they would have been had he retired in 2011 rather than limp along for another decade--recently as one of the worst everyday players in baseball?)

Schilling’s even trickier for me. PEDs are presumably exactly as advertised: performance enhancing drugs. Bill James (who, though I doubt he’d ever admit it, has himself been all over the place on this issue) wrote last week that PEDs don’t matter because sabermetrics always measures performance relatively, against the rest of the league, so a league- and park-adjusted stat like OPS+ puts everything in context. I don’t know--doesn’t that start from the assumption that 100% of the league was using PEDs? My sense is that the most liberal guesstimates generally put that number somewhere around 50%. If you used, you benefitted; if you declined to, you didn’t.

But PES--performance enhancing stupidity--doesn’t exist. (PER--performance enhancing racism--does, if you go back to Ty Cobb and anyone else pre-integration, in that every white player faced inferior competition without any African Americans in the league. Relative to each other, though, they all benefitted equally.) Whatever Schilling has said since he retired--and he’s said some horrendous things, right up to and including the recent attack on congress--he didn’t benefit from this materially as a player. Even if he’d said these things while still active, ditto. For me, PEDs were never a character issue, something I would try to explain whenever someone tried to wave them away as such.

I would probably still hold my breath and vote for him. I think--I don’t know anymore. As I’m sure Posnanski and Jaffe point out, HOF induction is about more than just the honour and the plaque; getting into Cooperstown is a financial windfall in terms of what a player can charge for autographs at card shows. So even if (how I envision it) you induct him and then have him experience the indignity of a ceremony where everybody sits on their hands during his speech--the attending players, at least, if not all the fans; you Kazan him, in other words--once that moment passes, he’s out there charging $100 per signature for the rest of his life. And, you can bet, saying lots more stupid stuff.

Character counts...I like Posnanski’s efforts in trying to get this idea to take hold, but I wonder if that’s going to be even murkier than PEDs. With Schilling--or, at the other end of the spectrum, Buck O’Neil--it seems clear-cut enough. But sometimes, like with Kirby Puckett (or, this year, Omar Vizquel), you’re the greatest person in the world on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday you’re not. Dick Allen was a pariah for years; as time passes, a much more nuanced and favorable view of Allen has emerged.

I don’t have a vote, so I don’t have to decide. (Something else I always say to anyone exasperated by my fence-sitting: if you don’t have a vote, agnosticism is perfectly okay.) For those who do, it doesn't always seem to bring the same sense of excitement and privilege I’m sure it did two or three decades ago. Ken Rosenthal, writing about his ballot this year: “Right now, I’m reconsidering everything, including whether I still want to vote for the Hall of Fame.”

The results of this year's voting are released tomorrow night (Tuesday, Jan. 26). Schilling is right on the fence at the moment: 172 voters have released their ballots ahead of the announcement, roughly 45% of the electorate, and Schilling sits at 75.3%, just barely ahead of the 75% needed for induction. The way it usually works with sabermetrically strong candidates like Schilling is that they get their strongest support from voters who declare publically, then fall back when the rest of the votes are counted. With Schilling, I was thinking that it might work the other way, that some people who voted for him might want to keep that to themselves. But more important than any of that, he's thus far lost one net vote from last year, when he ended up with 70% support, so there's a good chance he'll miss again. (In a very strange development, some people who voted for him this year have requested that Schilling's name be removed from their ballots after he publically supported the insurrection three weeks ago.) If he does, he'll have one last chance next year, his 10th appearance on the ballot. With Ortiz coming on (A-Rod, also, who'll be starting an extended Bonds/Clemens purgatory that will take votes away from others), and Rolen and Helton getting stronger--maybe Andruw Jones and Billy Wagner, too--I don't see any last-minute momentum. If that's what happens, and he's dropped from the ballot, he can then set up shop somewhere for the rest of his life and complain about a rigged election, just like his mentor.