Waiting for Berkman - a web project

In my new blog Waiting for Berkman, I am doing a survey of the baseball media consumption landscape. I am exploring in essay form the various forms of the game, how it appears before our eyes, where we find it, and what we do when we get there.

It's an ambitious project, I suppose, a complete survey of the experience. The benefit is there is no lack of content. Every day brings a new angle, a new observation culled from the media thinkers contributing constantly to the collective brain. I hope myself to add a little bit of gray matter.

Baseball is a big place, with lots of corners and crannies. I'm searching them out, asking questions, providing few answers but hopefully at least some places to start.

Narrative

A narrative: my lord what a thing.

I've been thinking about narrative (in the vaguest of ways).

It started (or continued) while C and I listened to the college radio broadcast of an IU football game. Calling a football game is not an easy thing to do, but these two poor kids were absolutely brutal. A sour cake of stuttering, cluttered descriptives and dangling concepts, with bad cliches from ESPN speckled throughout like stale butterscotch chips. It was a chore to form a mental vision of the game from these inept bakers.

Presented with the failings of the form, I thought of what makes the best broadcasters the best broadcasters. It comes down to the word that begins this post: narrative. The best broadcasters--well, first of all they are baseball broadcasters, because baseball as a media and a form provides the best inherent narrative structure of all sports (no clock!). What the primo broadcasters do is to simultaneously A) describe the action as it occurs and B) weave the action as it occurs into the broader tapestry of other actions that have already occurred, on that day and on the days and years previous.

To advance the argument about baseball and narrative--straying of course from the initial question into a charming diversion: baseball's action is focused (the batter and the pitcher interplay moves to fielder and runner, etc.), the action is segmented (one play stops and provides the much-documented time for evaluation), and the action is linear (one play follows another and another). The same can be said of football, to a point. Once the ball is snapped, though, the field is a seriously chaotic mess. 11 x 11, bouncing off of each other, running free, blocking, etc. Nobody should have to describe it. I'd rather narrate a petri dish full of fucking amoeba.

Leading us meanderingly back to narrative: so what is it about a storyline that is so appealing?

Perhaps: our lives are each of our respective primo narrative, the most interesting story ever told. All of us, in fact, want our lives to be or have been a STORY--a long-running sequence of events in which we change and grow and fall in love and hit the game-winning home run. Born, live, die is the Greatest Story Anyone Ever Told. Why shouldn't we want, on some deep, dark level, all of our stories to go along like that?

Creating a narrative: it's hard. Why should it be so hard to contsruct, seeing as how the life I am eponomycally living is one? I have experienced said growth, linear development, etc. Why do I have such trouble putting it down? I put it down all of the time, telling stories to loved ones. Conversation is life's gift to us, it seems, that our brains have developed such that we can line up thoughts and jokes and relay them to others in a sensible, entertaining manner. It is, on one level--out loud, free-flowing--, very easy.

And so what is it about the putting down on paper that is difficult? There is something in the form that makes it hard. Words--text--are as linear as it gets. Gesticulations are the great Carneval masks of expression. Facial expressions, mad hand motions, tones of voice; it's a brilliant toolbox with which to do the work of expression. Characters placed in a row are in comparison vastly underqualified for their job.

So how to make the leap from ingrained, instinctual communication to stilted, muffled, disabled communication?

Often I think to myself: I'll sit right here and describe this particular thing, A, from beginning to end. That is what I will do, and when that exercise is complete I will have accidentally made a story out of it. The narrative will occur naturally. It rarely happens. I don't have the patience, and the simplicity of it all evaporates quickly.

Furthermore, the best stories are not even linear. They are spherical balls of yarn, unravelled then wound up again and left in the sun to fade or set on fire. The beginning to the end is just the beginning. To say nothing of the role of choice and discernment. One should not describe again the curtain fluttering in the wind, even if it has been fluttering throughout the course of the narrative.

Baseball, and sports as a whole, provide the most readily accessible and at the same time unpredictable narratives in popular culture. They just seem to happen, to unwind and roll across the floor with the momentum of themselves. Just so should a story on the page propel, gathering the bits and dust of translation.

Pedestrian

There's a pretty piece of poetry in a pedestrian passing close to and just behind a moving car to cross the street. With simple intuitive timing, the pedestrian moves in the wake of the car, sparing no time and holding together a confident stride, like a bullfighter who steps forward as the deadly beast passes. The pedestrian's speckled cape is a messenger bag, his jeweled vest a tatty comfortable sport coat from the Goodwill store.

Bosh.

I miss the interplay of hardscrabble pedestrian and sympathetic driver. I walk to work most days here in Bloomington, but often I'm alone on the sidewalk-less street while the SUVs blow by me a little too closely. Crossing streets, I feel more Frogger than matador. 60% of drivers are on their cell phones and most are oblivious to the interplay of driver and foot-powered citizen; the marriage of phsyics and accomodation that keep the big city moving ever forward.

There is probably an argument for democracy in there somewhere. There is an elemental bipartisanship.

What I Learned about The Man from Snowy River

In my catalogue of favorite movies, the charter member and longest running is The Man from Snowy River. As other kid's movies, joyous at 8, become treacly and unwatchable, The Man from Snowy River has respectfully maintained all of the structure and elan that it had when I watched it in my youth.

It's a story about a young guy in Australia--from the Snowy River Country--whose dad dies in a mill accident. Cast into adulthood, Jim Craig ties on with a big-time American beef baron, played by Kirk Douglas. Paterson the beef man has a lovely daughter Jessica, and a gorgeous horse, pure racing stock and priceless.

One thing leads to another and Paterson's escapes the pen. He takes up with the Brombies, a gnarly herd of horse escapees and convicts and badasses, led by the Stallion, he is always rearing up and staring at people who see him with a very stern "dramatic prairie dog" look.

The climactic scene in the movie occurs when Jim overtakes the band of more experienced and surly horsemen to bring in the Mob, as the Brombies are effectively called. (You can watch the best part of the movie here, if you want to go and ruin the whole fucking thing for yourself by watching it entirely out of context. But you'll miss Kirk Douglas also playing a wily mountain kook with one leg, called Spur.) It's a grand moment, this climactic scene. Just thinking about it--the slow motion, the dirt flying from hooves, the trumpets of the soundtrack bellowing--makes me grin.

And yes, so, the soundtrack. I downloaded it some time ago, and in that search I discovered another song not on the soundtrack: Man From Snowy River, by Slim Dusty. I'd never heard of it, but listening I realized that it was the story of the aforementioned Chase. The colt escapes, the surly guys and Paterson and all give chase, no one believes in The Boy, yet he rises to the formidable challenge and triumphs. It was all right there, those four minutes, in a beautiful and intricate old-school folk song. I was amazed, but also I was confused.

Slim Dusty

Was the song adapted from the movie? The movie came out in 1982, and it seemed like it might have been just popular enough for a folk tribute. Or was the movie based on the song? A possibility.

Further research was warranted, and undertaken (today):

Man From Snowy River is, in fact, a poem poem. It was written in 1890, by a man named A.B. "Banjo" Paterson, an Australian who grew up in the bush and wrote poems about the men and the myths of New South Wales and that surround. He was part of a movement that, in the words of one, "began to articulate a newly emergent Australian self-awareness and a distinctive national voice." Paterson wrote of legendary figures, the Paul Bunyan's of the bush, and in doing so gave Australians something to rally around. The Man From Snowy River is an example, as in it a young bush kid sticks it to the puffed up colonial overseer.

I read all of this ecstatically, the way that someone might learn that their grandfather was a war hero. The movie version is so familiar to me that I consider it, in a weird postmodern way, a part of my family. And in discovering that it harkens to an invaluable Australian cultural heritage, I realize that my deep affection for the film in fact channels the efficacy of the origin story. Joseph Campbell would nod knowingly and say something about our universal attraction to myths.

And get this: Banjo Paterson is on the Australian fucking ten dollar note! And so is the Man from Snowy River! Himself! He's on a horse chasing the Brombies on the goddamn currency! Unfathomable. Expansive. Elaborate.

And so this song by Slim Dusty is not a Slim Dusty song but a song of Australia. Someone Australian was likely very familiar with the myth, and decided that it would make a fine movie. It made a fine movie, I watched it twelve trillion times, and eventually I came back around to learn where it all came from. Banjo Paterson.

Who's Selling What To Whom Here?

Brett Favre's merry-go-round NFL off season has confounded not only Packers fans and also everybody else, but video game marketers as well. His jump to the Jets took place recently enough that EA SPORTS was unable to change his uniform from the Pack to the Jets before it shipped to box stores nationwide. The result: a cover for their flagship sports game full of painful memories.

Like an error card.

Well, with truly post-modern flair, EA SPORTS is now offering alternative packaging for its new Madden NFL 09, with Favre in appropriately wrong-seeming Jets gear (they pho-shoed the original but good). Upset game owners can download the newly appointed cover, and give their software case that "just-traded" shine.



The Consumer s/himself--at least in the eyes of EA--has become so confused and rabid as to market a product to s/himself, using s/him's own ink and printer lifespan to make up for EA's marketing failures and rush to production. If EA were a car company, that would be like telling EA Mustang owners: "Oops, folks, the Inferno Red paint color is actually Paris Hilton Pink. But guess what, EA fans?!? We're Fed Exing six cans of Inferno Red paint to your front porch, totally free!"

This is a strange time to be a consumer (note: it is always a strange time to be a consumer). The want has extended to the outer reaches of the market, so that we even want the tools that are supposed to make us want the product to begin with. Hell, I couldn't resist the .pdf myself, and the prospect of straight edges and a clean, well-kempt little lighted place on my plastic game box, no loose ends.

If Marshall McLuhan's medium is the message, then EA SPORTS' wrapping paper is the present.