Sticks and Stones and Christmas Jeer

Meet our newest contributor to Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing), Jeff Fitzgerald, photographed here at the Virginia Craft Brewers Fest, tasting--what else--a craft beer brewed somewhere in Virginia. You could reasonably ask if there isn't a more appropriate photo for introducing Jeff. The answer is, nothing is more appropriate.

Jeff Fitzgerald has talent that can inspire jealousy in other writers—not all writers, just the good ones—and he’s one of the few who can make me actually laugh out loud (not simply LOL). He lives in Roanoke, Virginia, where he writes about music as well as topics like Southern (as in Dixie) cooking, in a way that makes me want to grab a tenor saxophone in one hand and plate of barbecue and coleslaw in the other, and commence to shouting. Here in his debut piece for Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing), he renders his pithy take on the serious topic of Christmas jeers, the newly fashionable trend among hipster killjoys and thin-skinned libertines. – CLH

Sticks and Stones and Christmas Jeer

By Jeff Fitzgerald

We live in contentious times, here in the land of purple mountains majesty and fruited plains (whatever the hell that means). People who wish to divide us into querulous, perpetually offended microgroups that can be easily manipulated, have been chipping away at us for decades. And they've used our primary form of communication, language, to do so.

They've weaponized speech for their own ends, turning almost every word into a “microaggression” or a “trigger event.” They've played upon most everyone's desire not to deliberately hurt someone's feelings, and used it to create subgroups upon subgroups of victims. It’s a microaggression towards me, as a lefthander, when someone uses the word “right” instead of “correct?” Of course not, don't be silly.

Which is the whole point. Let us all take a step back for a moment and get over ourselves. Remember that playground rhyme, which our parents and our teachers (those of us who are of a certain age, of course) taught us? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Call me whatever you want. Call me a fat, crippled, crazy bastard. Call me a bubba, redneck, hillbilly, or a grit. Doesn't bother me. I'm a grown man, after all. If I let stuff like that bother me, then I give someone else power over me. It's that simple.

So let's fight back at these divisive, censorial, would-be martinets. But let's do so with a smile, to let them know they can't get to us no matter how they try. This time of the year, if you should wish someone a Merry Christmas and they get all huffy and indignant and accuse you of forcing your religion* on them, just smile and say:

"Please, I didn't mean to offend you. If I had meant to offend you, I would have told you to go ____ yourself. Know the difference." Then, go on about your day with a song in your heart.

---

* In my experience with the Jews, Muslims, and Hindus I've met, they do not take offense at being wished a Merry Christmas, and take it in the spirit in which it is offered. And I don't mind being wished a Happy Hanukkah or Eid Mubarak in return. I just smile genuinely and say "Thank you," glad to have made a human connection.

Throwback Thursday

This is my own first-ever edition of a Throwback Thursday post, published yesterday, inspired by a number of Facebook friends who dream up something noteworthy every week to disclose about their past, usually images or stories. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about my past. I haven’t amassed a large collection of photographs of myself, and even if I had I wouldn’t feel the urge to publish them.

Just the same, reading through a handful of TBT posts as they are called--Facebook posts by the well-practiced veterans of Life Before Now--I realized there was something for me to say about such matters.

Not surprisingly (if you know me) it involves baseball. (Jazz, too, is another throwback. I noticed some time ago that if an American jazz musician is any kind of sports fan, he or she is a baseball fan.) But oddly enough, few baseball fans will see this post until later, if at all, because Thursday marked the first day of the baseball playoffs...

Unless you count the Wild Card games. But let’s not split semantical or sabremetrical hairs.

The game of baseball, with organized teams and written records dating back to 1845, is a throwback in itself. It is vaguely related to British cricket and rounders, but the game as it it known now was designed, codified and organized by American bookseller/fire chief Alexander Cartwright. By the time of the 1860 presidential election the game was so popular that baseball imagery was incorporated into an Abraham Lincoln campaign poster. There are stories about Union and Confederate soldiers sneaking away from their campfires at the end of the day and meeting at a neutral location for a friendly game.

The Seattle Mariner baseball cap is a personal throwback to 1982 when I lived in Seattle. This was pre-Ken Griffey, a bleak period in Mariner lore, but I was a devoted fan (and still am). The hat was a giveaway at a game at which it was hoped that the recently imported and (eventual) Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry would win his 300th game. He didn’t do it until a subsequent outing, but I got a chapeau with the old Mariner logo (Poseidon’s trident) courtesy of a cruise ship line that shuttles vacationers along the Pacific coast between Seattle and Alaska.

The Mariners went on to build a new stadium after I left town. Jay Buhner and Ken Griffey and Edgar Martinez arrived and in 1995 the Mariners won the American League West title. This 2014 season just past, they came within a single game of going to the playoffs. (This is a brutally unforgiving, statistically-driven sport that defines "good," "better," and "best" by means of numbers as black-and-white as an accountant's--comforting in a world of grays and ambiguities.) Their final act of the year was to win every game in the last series of the year, vanquishing the best team in baseball, the Anaheim Angels. The Seattle Mariners will be back with a vengeance next year, you can count on that.

Among other things, being a lifelong baseball fan has taught me historical perspective. War? Droughts? Pestilence? Plagues? Economic and social collapse? These things too shall pass.

My personal throwback approach to all of the wrongs of the world is to go back out into the world and those green pastures and get into the thrill of the game again. And then when all the dust settles, put my feet up, get a bag of peanuts and a beer. It’s the playoffs!

Play ball!

Just A Bit Outside: A Response to Rolling Stone's Baseball Movie Survey

Now that the 2013 baseball season is over, what is left for baseball fans is the Hot Stove League: four months of arguments about who will win/should have won the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards, the December free agent signings, and some light betting on whether Alex Rodriguez will be mugged for his wallet by a pair of hookers, or killed in his sleep by a squad of black-hooded Yankee teammates. So in the interests of having more baseball to discuss, I thought I would post this Rolling Stone survey of rockers naming their favorite baseball movies.

Rolling Stone baseball movie survey

If the Rolling Stone editors had also surveyed jazzers, of course, they might have come up with a much better list. But they didn't. So, as a public service, I'll get the party started and list a few of my own. I'd like to hear other people's recommendations, too (it's going to be a long, cold winter).

Keeping in mind that as much as I love movies, I personally have never seen one that was as good as a live baseball game. Filmmakers seem hell-bent on adding to the game's mythology without ever getting under the game's surface, although some have tried, like the recent Moneyball (2011).

It's November. A baseball movie might help to fill the void until March. I was surprised by some of the ones selected in Rolling Stone's survey by Alice Cooper, George Thorogood, etc., and even learned of a couple I'd never heard of. All the usual suspects are there, like Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and The Natural, but I was surprised at some of the ones that were missing, ones I would have added to the list. I'm going to start the ball rolling with comedies--not just because I think humor is the ingredient most sorely missing in baseball movies, which I do--but because as Joe Garagiola wisely said, baseball is a funny game.

1. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)-- One of my all-time faves. James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor in one of the best film roles of his career, this is an important film as well as a hilariously funny one. It is a fictionalized story of a group of Negro League players who split off from their abusive team owner and form their own successful barnstorming team. Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell would have appreciated it, Larry Doby and Jackie Robinson, too. Satchel Paige probably did see it, and had a good laugh.

2. Major League (1989) -- When short-relief pitcher Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn comes in from the bullpen, to the sounds of a stadium full of Cleveland Indians fans chanting the Troggs' signature tune, it perfectly captures that key moment in a baseball game when the ace "stopper" is brought in to save the game, in a way no other film has ever managed. And when Bob Uecker as the archetypal "homer" radio announcer, calls Wild Thing's pitch "just a bit outside," it is baseball play-by-play like you could only see there in the front row, listening to ESPN radio and looking up at the press box.

3. A League of Their Own (1992) -- Like Bingo Long, another important film because it documents some of the fascinating story of the All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League that sprang up in 1943, when baseball owners saw all their players marching off to WWII. Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Madonna--actors who all seem to fare better playing for laughs than tears--camp it up, though Hanks' line as manager Jimmy Dugan beats them all: " Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There's no crying! THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!"

There is, of course, LOTS of crying in baseball. Every game has a winner and a loser. If you think the St. Louis Cardinals toasted the glories of sport and sang cheerfully on the flight home a few days ago, while the Red Sox celebrated, well... Knowing how to lose, knowing how to shrug it off and say "We'll get 'em tomorrow," is at the center of the sport.

The final scene of another great baseball comedy, The Bad News Bears, ends with one of the most authentic sentiments ever uttered in a baseball movie. The Yankees, managed by Roy Turner (played brilliantly by Vic Morrow) have defeated the Bears, led by their ace pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer, a girl (played more brilliantly by Tatum O'Neal) and managed by down-and-out Morris Buttermaker (played most brilliantly of all by Walter Matthau), by a single run, in a southern California Little League championship game--despite the Bears' magnificent come-from-behind surge. The Yankees have teased, bullied, connived and cheated to achieve their victory, but the facts are, the Yankees have won and the Bears have lost. 

After the Yankees receive their enormous trophy with a meek apology for their lousy sportsmanship, and the Bears receive theirs (a humiliatingly small consolation prize) Vic Morrow "graciously" leads his victorious boys in the time-honored, unicorns-and-rainbows self-esteem sugar-coating that Little League sponsors, child psychologists and heavily-medicated stage mothers all require in order to buffer themselves (and the kids, they believe) against the realities of life.

The Bears players all stare and listen patiently while the Yankees chant their insulting condescension:

"Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Bears, Bears, yay-y-y-y!"

And then, Tanner Boyle, a small but defiantly pugnacious Bears player, shouts back at them:

"Hey Yankees... you can take your apology and your trophy and shove 'em straight up your ass!"

Speaking of Improvising ...

Improvising is an essential part of life.  You can plan all you want, but life just keeps on surprising you with the damnedest things.  Your ability to improvise a workable solution to an immediate problem determines much of your success with a venture.  An inability or unwillingness to improvise when the situation is the most dire usually spells defeat.  Witness the imbecilic behavior occurring on Capitol Hill with the President, Speaker of the House (for now) of Babel, Senate Majority and Minority "Leaders", who can't get out of the others' way because they are too busy scoring political points to spend any time with actual governance.  They've known of their impending nosedive off the Cliffs of Finance for months and months and months.  They can't improvise?

No one can step into the fray and just creatively invent a solution?  It isn't humanly possible?

Of course it is.

Which is the upshot of my post of December 3rd, Jazz, Baseball, Politics and the Beltway Blues: Our American Dialogue, Part II. 

So for the education and encouragement of those who would like to believe you do not need a big salary, a big title, or years of training before you can improvise a clever solution, the video at the top of this page shows a ball girl at a minor league stadium (likely a volunteer who received nothing more than a T-shirt and the satisfaction of showing up a less-than-ambitious professional left fielder) making a catch worthy of Ken Griffey, Jr. in his prime.

If a little jazz improvisation from an improbable source is more to your liking, check out this amateur cell-phone video of Butterscotch, in the company of Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White.




Chick, Stanley and Lenny were duly impressed by Butterscotch's improvised performance, and accorded her the professional respect she had earned.

Jake the Outfielder looked as lazy and outclassed as he could be.  The ball girl's incredible athletic prowess and creativity earned a dull stare from him--but he did at least learn that an improvised solution is possible.

As Yoda told Luke Skywalker: "Do. Or do not. There is no try." 



It's a choice.