Talkin' Not Goin' to Wahconah Park Blues...

When I found out Bob Dylan was going to play Wahconah Park in Pittsfield last year, I thought about going. But I didn’t, for all the typically lame reasons: the traffic, the crowd, and I felt a little bad about it. Then when I heard he’d be coming back this year, to play this Saturday, I was excited for a few minutes, then decided I wouldn’t be going. And it isn’t just the $49.50 ticket price.

Before I go any further I should state clearly that I am a huge fan of Dylan’s early albums, which are on regular rotation in my iPod, and am a pretty decent amateur Dylanologist who can could parse the meaning of being followed by a Persian drunkard or of “jewels and binoculars hanging from the head of a mule” until the wee hours of night. That said, his live performances, and everything he’s recorded since Blood on The Tracks is just… is just… is just…..

I’ve seen Bob live three times. The first was in fall 1992 when I was in high school at the Paramount Theater in Springfield. Back then I was big into classic rock and the 60s and 70s, and since so many of my heroes and just about everyone I really liked was dead, I was quite in awe of the fact that Dylan was still around. And indeed, I was so star-struck that I felt bad for thinking that the band was ragged and sloppy and that the best moments were when he was alone on stage – like the old times – and grumbled out one of his classics.

I saw him again in December 1995, at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. This time, he was wearing a weird sparkly blouse and again, the band chugged like some engine that was spitting out screws and blue smoke. He grunted, garbled and chudded through a boring set of what I thought I recognized as Bob Dylan songs. He wasn’t helped by the fact that he followed up his opening act, Patti Smith, who was playing one of the first shows of her comeback and damn near blew the roof off the place – to my incredible surprise, because I didn’t really like her all that much before that night. Bob didn’t have a chance, and I actually left early.

Last time was late 2001 at the MCI Center in Washington. It was the worst place to see a concert, though we got good standing spots along the boards of the hockey rink stage left and had a good view. I have much fonder memories of this show. His band was certainly much, much better. They were on a tighter leash, and clearly far more in tune with what Bob was up to. Maybe I’d just grown up, or knew the work better, but I could see the stubborn way he tried to make his songs new, by changing the rhythm and the intonations. That said, I dug it as an intellectual exercise, but my heart was elsewhere.

So while I might not think his most recent stuff really compares to his early stuff as much as some other serious fans do, I still have a lot of respect for him. The first volume of his memoirs, Chronicles, Vol. 1, was one of the most interesting and insightful things I’ve read in a long time. I like that in an upcoming article for Rolling Stone he refused to come down against Internet music downloading. That and the fact that he still makes a living as a musician should – by going out and playing music for people – signals that he absolutely has the right attitude about his art and his craft.

On Saturday night I’ll probably put on Blonde on Blonde wherever I am, but I won’t be going down to Wahconah Park. I hope everyone who is has a great time.

Eh, just call it a massacre already

After thinking about it for far longer than a guy my age should, I think I’ve finally found the faint silver-lining in the five-game, four-day beatdown the Red Sox suffered at the hands of the Best Team Money Can Buy this weekend at Fenway. No more of our guys got hurt – though, in keeping with the spirit of this unbelieveable catastrophe, the jury is still out on Manny and his hamstring.

As a pessimist, I’m rarely surprised by how bad things turn out. I believe behavioral science has proven conclusively that people as a matter of course exaggerate how bad or how good outcomes will be. So it’s amazing when something like this comes along and a part of you just shakes your head and is surprised that happened. My friend John had morosely predicted last week they’d loose four out of five, which I thought a bit skeptical, but probably on target.

The horror of this series, as any fan will tell you, was that it was perversely much closer than it looked. Baseball is aggravating like that – each of these games had discreet moments when things could have gone one way or the other. And the specific horror of baseball fandom is those moments keep coming back to you until you somehow push them out of your mind.

And it is perhaps a bit harder for me because I am not buying into any specific scapegoats. I remember 2004 too well to get down on Mike Timlin for long, and I just feel bad for those kids in the bullpen who were thrown at this buzzsaw like a batch of conscripts on the first day of the Somme. And I can’t even get on the case of management, because I am one of the few lonely voices that agreed with the decision to stand pat. There really wasn’t much on the market, and grossly overspending on junk at the deadline is what the Bad Guys do, not us. Remember this motley crew was in first place in the AL East most of the year, and was only down by one and a half when this bloodbath started. So I can stick with Theo Epstein and company because I remember that we won it all in 2004, and I believe that Willy Mo will work out, that Damon was overpriced, that we have to be smarter and more patient than the Yanks, and because two of their most recent screw-ups – acquiring Edgar Renteria and letting Doug Mirabelli go – were rectified as quickly as possible. For all these reasons I can handle a season going awry with a certain amount of faith. Which leaves nothing but the black kernel of hateful desire to see the Yankees not win anything. Not only are they the embodiment of everything that is wrong with baseball, they also are everything wrong and perverse about America. I’ll probably have to get into this later in the season.

Which, I might add, has awhile yet to go. Things are very dour, of course, but not out of reach. Key players can go cold, and they can get hot. In a few weeks we’ll (hopefully) have Varitek, Nixon, Wakefield back. And as the Yankees have proven every season since 2001, a baseball team is not always the sum of its parts. Besides, August is always a bitch.

"Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung"

It is amazing how more than sixty years on, unexploded bombs from the Second World War are still tilled and blown up with surprising regularity. Last week, Nobel laureate and long-time anit-war author Guenter Grass revealed more details about his record during the war, particularly that he served in the notorious Waffen-SS. There are a host of mitigating factors here: that his unit was a figting one, not one of the ones that ran the death camps, that he originally tried to serve in the submarine service, and that in 1944 young German men hardly had many choices in the desperate waning months of Nazi rule. Every honest writer, journalist, or historian knows is that nothing is black and white.

In the course of cleaning out my old belongings from my parents house before they moved, I came across many of my old books from college. One particularly valuable discovery has been my copy of William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, which is really an overlooked classic of the run up to the war from his perch as one of the “Murrow Boys,” covering Germany for CBS radio. He would go on to write the definitive first comprehensive history of the Nazi era – and become a regular columnist for the Berkshire Eagle after he retired to Lenox.

Shirer clearly had little love for the Nazis, and he rightly saw them as cheap thugs and whackos as brutalized and led a once brilliant nation into war. He wrote on the fly, and the book was published even before America got involved in the conflict in 1941. He knew nothing of what was to come, naturally, but his observations are just as valid and are worth remembering as we try to look at that period through the truly horrible knowledge of everything else that happened, and see through the pervasive preconception that Germany was little more than a mob of goose-stepping thugs hell-bent on world domination.

Here is Shirer writing about the Sudeten crisis in autumn 1938, a full year before the war actually broke out, but when Hitler’s increasingly crazed bullying of his neighbors made it seem a repeat of the First World War was imminent (and was only averted by appeasement at Munich)…

“Berlin, September 27…. A motorized division rolled through the city’s streets just at dusk this evening in the direction of the Czech frontier. I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them. The hour was undoubtedly chosen today to catch the hundreds of thousands of Berliners pouring out of their offices at the end of the day’s work. But they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence unable to find a word of cheer for the flower of their youth going away to the glorious war. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. Hitler himself reported furious. I had not been standing long at the corner when a policeman came up the Wilhelmstrasse from the direction of the Chancellery and shouted to the few of us standing at the curb that the Fuhrer was on his balcony reviewing the troops. Few moved. I went down to have a look. Hitler stood there, and there weren’t two hundred people in the street or the great square of the Wilhelmsplatz. Hitler looked grim, then angry, and soon went inside, leaving his troops to parade by unreviewed. What I’ve seen tonight almost rekindles a little faith in the German people. They are dead set against war.”

And a year later, when war did break out…

“Berlin, September 2… I was standing in the Wilhelmplatz about noon when the loud-speakers suddenly announced that England had declared herself at war with Germany. Some 250 people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before. Stunned.The people cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war.”

Of course, many things happened in the next few years. But it seems hardly worthwhile condemning one of the leading voices of sanity and healing because of this brief and marginal moment. We should be suspicious of those that see this as an opportunity to advance their own agendas, and understanding of those that still can’t see the shades of grey.

Ando way they go...

I didn’t expect to make this a space for metacommentary on my regular work, but if the opportunity presents itself, might as well. On Friday architect Tadao Ando was in the area visiting one of his latest projects, the new “Stone Hill Center” – as it seems they want to call it – at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. It’s not everyday you get to follow around a Pritzker Prize winning architect. I’d covered his last visit to the area last year, when they unveiled the final drawings for the building.

This week he was in town with a posse of consultants, officials, Japanese media, etc. and we all followed him up to the building site near Stone Hill. It felt a little bit like those scenes in 8½ when Marcello Mastroianni is taking the crowd around the movie set. There were lots of people with cameras and microphones milling about, all following around a mysterious genius who drops cryptic remarks around and seems both nervous and perfectly at home at the center of attention.

I should say that architecture is one of the more interesting of the arts in my mind. I wish I could say that there was one building or experience that won me over forever, but I think it was a gradual think. I remember I agreed with little thought when I read about how the Situationists were into architecture as the purest total artform because of its power to immerse and dictate experience, and by the time I made my first trip to Chicago in December 2004 I was far enough along that I thought it was one giant and super-cool museum. It is one of those things that grabs me for no real reason. How I could find so interesting something so basically functional and practical when all my other interests are based on abstraction, serendiptity and non-utility is a great mystery. Architecture’s submission to physical reality, ruthless emphasis on process, existence in everyday life, are all interesting, but hardly the kind of things that usually float my boat. And that whole thing about architecture’s durability, that it lasts, strikes me as a bit fatuous.

So it was great that Ando was designing something like this on my beat. It would be one of those buildings serious architecture nerds are going to drive out of their way to see, there will be fancy photographs of it at sublime angles in expensive glossy magazines. And I’ll get to follow it from the start. Though I have to say I was skeptical at first. Architectural drawings, no matter how fancy and chic, seem silly to me. I always get a kick out of the faceless CGI people walking about like ghosts. Here are ones for the Stone Hill Center…

But as I learned more about it, the more I came to buy into it. When I write I usually try to find the thing that interests me the most and start from that. Usually, what interests me would not interest anyone else, which is why daily journalism is probably not my perfect metier. In this case, the interesting thing to me is the concrete.

When you think about concrete as a building material a lot of very negative things probably pop into your head. Like the Boston City Hall, a building which has its unique charms in terms of being like a fat upside ziggurat suspended in mid-air, but the material looks cruddy when it rains, and it is almost certainly an inappropriately brash thing to have in the center of America’s most European and traditional cities.

So for awhile I had a hard time understanding how Ando’s building on Stone Hill would involve concrete. How could that work? But the interesting thing is that Ando’s concrete is nothing like the gravelly crumbly stuff on sidewalks. As with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, the stuff is extremely dense, set in place by specially made forms and settled with industrial vibrators (they have an interesting slideshow about it here). The end result, amazingly, actually shines in the sunlight.

What Ando is doing here is creating a sense of harmony with the the surrounding hills. Based on the mock-ups at the site, the forms will be made of Yellow Pine, and will give the finished concrete – which again, is more like a dense and molded stone that anything you’d see out on the street – a horizontal plank appearance with the grain textures embedded. That will work with the cedar planking in other parts of the building, along with the glass and metal elements, to create something that fits in.

It also seems that for all his poetic license – last year Ando went on about the building as a jewel hidden in the landscape – it does seem to be in harmony with the surroundings. While a construction site never looks in harmony with anything, and we couldn’t see the promised views because it was overcast and drizzly, it should work out. It is not a high building, it is fit carefully ino the hillside, and there will be only small roads and paths to get up there. You won’t be able to see it from the rest of the Clark campus.

It all seems to be coming together pretty well. And perhaps the backhanded fun of this is that you just won’t know how the thing is work until after the $25 million is spent and there’s no turning back.

Extraordinary time for the Sox

I keep trying to explain to wife that we are not living in ordinary time when it comes to the Red Sox. That this is why after we get back late from birthing class I instantly flip on the game, for the last few innings, and that even though it looks like an ordinary listless midsummer loss, with a pall of trading deadline malaise and freak injuries in the air, I stick to it. Because David Ortiz is likely to come through with something like that. I know pretty well this is temporary, this is something we go through for a few years every decade or so. One of the beautiful things about being a Sox fan is that you know your team isn’t going to plunge into one of those death-spirals you see in markets that don’t take baseball seriously. But there is something in the air right now. I felt it during the game at Fenway I made it to this summer, a Monday afternoon makeup game that went into extra innings, and the whole time I wasn’t worrying about whether or not the guys could pull it off, but rather when they would finally finish up and win the damn thing already. It was that feeling I imagine Yankees fans have all the time. Granted, my wife doesn’t entirely believe that this weird moment of grace happens to conincide with our moving back to New England three years ago and we started getting NESN with basic cable. But I know full well this is a special time, and that’s its not enough to just read the box score everyday.