I lucked out. I have to leave the house today to pick up a prescription and it’s a beautiful day. I will take a long walk and get exercise. I just have to figure out where to walk. You’ll find that out when I write tomorrow. I’ll continue to be good and keep updating.
I talked to my psychiatrist yesterday. We never hear how anyone else’s sessions go but suspect that mine are different than others. We talked about how disappointed she is that she has to put off doing a Cannoli Crawl with Allison Scola and that she wants to do an Experience Sicily tour with her too. Then she brought up that she went to an Irish Session in White Plains with Rose Flannagan. I know Rose’s daughter Bernadette. It’s a tiny world. Today I have a tele-session with my therapist.
My other phone call yesterday was with today’s birthday girl, Deni Bonet. I was helping her with tech rehearsal for her streaming concert tonight. You should watch with me on Deni’s Facebook Page at 6 PM. I watched a lot of streaming concerts and missed a lot of streaming concerts yesterday. Everyone needs to coordinate their schedule. I love that people are coming to the shows I invite them to. I’m succeeding in my mission in life to get everyone exposed to the music I love that is underexposed.
I finally watched The Black Swan, it’s been on my watch list forever. It was not worth the weight. It’s a ponderous overdone, overly graphic, take on the exquisite The Red Shoes. If you want a great movie about the mental and emotionally toll of being a great ballet dancer watch that. It also has one of the greatest dance sequences in film history. It helps that the film’s star, Moira Shearer, was a dancer. Has everyone seen the film? It’s a classic, Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the most original directing team ever. Everything they did was special and no two of their films are the same. At the very least see A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway To Heaven, Black Narcissus, and I Know Where I’m Going, in addition to The Red Shoes. I’m the same way about film as about music. I’m an evangelist.
Today was supposed to be the opening day of the baseball season, the best day of the year. It’s sad that it’s not but it will come, and the lessons of opening day are still true. On opening day everyone starts out equal. While we have a good idea who the best and worst teams are we don’t know. We don’t know who will get lucky. The Mets were a 100-1 shot in 1969 and won it all. That will happen; about once every hundred years. That’s what makes it special. If it happened often then it wouldn’t mean anything. Special is one of my favorite words, you might have noticed. In any situation special is rare, the 1969 Mets, the films of Powell and Pressburger, Hadestown, Jean Rohe, poutine, are all rare in their domains but there are many domains. If one out of 100 musicians are special, that leaves us with many special musicians in absolute terms. I was contemplating my special friends, I can never figure out what makes them special, what special even means in that context, but I know it when I feel it. They are still rare compared to the number of people that I’ve met.
Baseball itself in special. It’s a silly game where people try and squarely hit a round ball with a round bat, and then run between bags. Yet this silly game can generate profound feelings. When our team wins we know joy, when they lose we die a little. I’ll never get over the 1988 Mets losing to the greatly inferior Dodgers in the NLCS. It’s how the fans of the 1969 Oriole’s must feel about them losing to the Mets. The joy is worth the pain. The pain is the price of the joy; we can’t have one without the other.
Most people love baseball in the moment and don’t want to think about it. For those of us analytically inclined it brings us added joy through numbers. Brilliant adults have made a huge effort to better understand baseball as if it were as important as splitting the atom. Before Nate Silver turned to politics, he analyzed baseball. He still analyzes baseball. Baseball in incredibly complex. Someone asked me why offense was so high in the 1920s and 1930s. He wanted to know if the pitchers were worse. There is no simple answer. Part of it is that pitchers weren’t used as effectively then. Now players face fresh hard-throwing arms in the late innings. In those days starting pitchers were rarely pulled early. But that’s just one small thing. There are the dimensions of the field, the quality of the ball, the changes in strategy, and so much we still don’t understand. But baseball is also a simple game. Willie Mays summed it up; “You pitch it I hit it. You hit it I catch it.” There’s something there for everyone in baseball, and many things for many of us. There are many aspects to the great god baseball. Annie understands.
Baseball is special.
Wise Madness 