Fair Weather

In the two weeks since my last post, the weather has turned fair. According to Atlanta Hawks point guard Mike Bibby, so have the Celtics' fans.

For some reason, after his team was blown out last week in Game 1 of the playoffs, Bibby told the press, "They are fair-weather fans if you ask me,” and "A lot of those fans are bandwagon jumpers trying to get on this now," i.e. the Celtics' league-best regular-season record of 66-16. "I played here last year, too (with the Sacramento Kings), and I didn’t see three-quarters of them. They’re for the team now and they might get a little rowdy, but that’s about it."

Actually, to Celtics' fans credit, the crowds were quite good last year, even as the team finished a putrid 24-58. (I know, I watched a lot of games. The Globe also documented this, but I can't find the story at this moment.) It's the Hawks' fans who might be fair-weather, or, more likely gloomy weather: they were 20th in the league during the regular season with 16,280, and, according to the Celtics' announcers last night, there are still about 3,000 tickets available for tomorrow's Game 4. Like Bibby's performances the first three games, pretty sad.

I find it hard to believe I'm defending Celtics fans here, I can barely defend any Boston sports fan. They all hyperventilate at the slightest slump (see David Ortiz's start to this season) and faint in pandemonium at the slightest uptick (see what everyone thought of Clay Buchholz after last year's no-hitter), and generally whine while simultaneously thinking they're the greatest. But at least they care, fill every stadium and are loud at the games.

I've been trying to write about the Celtics for the past few months now, about how much I miss Al Jefferson, and how the fans -- them again! -- are even more spoiled now that the Celtics make three dominating Boston sports teams. Since the regular season is already finished, I'll just say what I was saying in September: Hope the Celtics at least make the finals this year because it's probably they're best chance. Ray Allen probably only has one more excellent season left and Paul Pierce two (maybe three) , though Kevin Garnett seems bionic and probably has 10 more wonderful seasons left, despite being almost 32 years old. The youngsters Rondo, Perkins, Powe and Davis are all exponentially better thanks to Garnett, though Rondo is legitimately very good, and the rest of the bench is the kind of bench that will be scattered among other rosters within two seasons.

Enough with the negativity: The Celtics play good defense, move the ball well and are intense on the court. They beat the Hawks in five.

Update: So my prediction was off by two games and perhaps even the winning team. But at least the seven-game series, when you learn many more nuances of each team, has had its fair share of funny times:

* The Hawks' coach, Mike Woodson, with his bushy, poorly sculpted mustache and poor decision to shave his head before the playoffs, looks a lot like a sitcom dad circa 1987-1994. When you consider the Hawks players' average is just older than mine and they much prefer running and one-on-one moves to executing diagrammed plays, he becomes even more of a sitcom dad.

* Why does Hawks center Al Horford like to flex his muscles so much? Yes, they're big and he's had a few solid games in the series, but he also looks about 17 years old -- especially when he wears a hoodie for the post-game press scrum -- and has eyes and eyelashes that make him look like a drag queen. (As for Horford and Big Papi's budding friendship, which every Boston paper wrote about this week in [mock?] shock, the press should stop feigning disbelief when players from opposing cities [and this isn't even within the same sport!] like each other. It's the fans' job to root vigorously for whoever they want, ideally the home team(s), and stay true to them. Athletes, much like the top echelon of almost every profession, have greater allegiance within their working circle and should be allowed to do so. Really, who is going to have a greater understanding of what it's like to be David Ortiz: Sean from Winchester or Al Horford?)

* Kevin Garnett is crazy, but in a really good way. He had this block on Josh Childress in Game 5 where he looked at Childress after and said something like, "How could you dare try to shoot when I'm hovering over you? I am better than you and will be forever." (Obviously, I'm keeping this a PG-rated post and have edited appropriately.) He is so intense and driven, it's amazing. I like to think of myself as the Kevin Garnett of cleaning.

Let Go, Mets

Spring seems to be much more a state of mind here in Boston, where the literal signs -- leaf buds, temperatures above 60 degrees -- haven't decided to appear yet, even on April 14. So I've taken things into my owns hands: wearing a comical number of layers instead of actually putting on a jacket (hopefully my mom isn't reading this) and watching lots of baseball.

It's hard living in a city where your favorite team isn't the hometown one. But there's something so refreshing about the start of the season: Roger Angell's always wistful, always edifying "Opening Day" column; pitchers squinting to get the sign from their catchers; pale brown infield dirt and deep green grass; and the routine, nuance and long haul of the 162-game season. It promises that summer is almost here, and overall, much is much better.

It's funny what baseball does to geeky, scrawny guys like myself who can (or could) play the game. Statistics professors devote their research to it, mapping managers' tendencies onto cartoon faces (go Swarthmore and Steve Wang!); David "On Fire" Brooks breaks his hitting streak with a dense column lacking a punchline. Those are only two recent examples on a countless list. (Even Cokie Roberts got into the action, writing about how her kids love the Washington Nationals! Washington jumps on the bandwagon of everything.) I often hear people attribute this to the fact that baseball -- at least until the steroids era, and maybe it still even applies -- is the game that almost anyone can play. You don't need to be abnormally tall or wide, just able to throw, swing, run and follow a ball into a mitt. Really, baseball just lends itself much better to the romantic, i.e. Baseball is truly American, or beautiful summer days playing in the fields. and to the cerebral, i.e. The mind is never truly separated from the body, than those sports. And what do writers and academics love more than the romantic and the cerebral? Nothing.

As for my favorite "Metropolitans," as my favorite sports-talk host says, I think the team looks a lot better in theory than in practice. (Another reason for academics to love it!) After the truly excellent core of Jose Reyes, David Wright and Carlos Beltran, the line-up is mediocre and aging fast. The starting rotation is far above average, especially if Pedro can pitch injury-free and dashingly for the second half of the season (will there be a better pitcher in my lifetime?), but the bullpen again appears to suck. The team won 6-0 Tuesday night, bringing their record to 6-6, but my dad said talk was this weekend about firing coach Willie Randolph after the middling start. (And, yup, here's a "Fire Willie" Web site, though it hasn't been updated since last November.) Let's just hope they best the Phillies and win the NL East as revenge for last year's historic, gut-wrenching collapse. (I got so many "Are you doing OK? I'm sorry" phone calls after that, it was amusing. Even someone sitting in front of me at Fenway that week, when he heard me mention I'm a Mets fan, offered condolences.)

Anyway, to remembering the good times, here's the greatest catch I've ever seen -- Endy Chavez scaling the left-field wall in Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS to rob the Cardinals' Scott Rolen of a two-run home run:



Also, it should be noted here the departure of Shawn Green, the rightfielder the Mets released before the start of the season. He was clearly at the end of his career, but had some very good seasons earlier in it, especially from 1998-2002. Two women I know had been asking me to blog about him months ago, so I'll just tip my cap to a great ballplayer and a great Jew.

Thanks to Mr. Angell for the post's title. It comes from a wonderful 2002 essay of his about the Mets' follies, then and always, and is reprinted in his collection "Game Time." The phrase captures so much, though I'm not sure exactly what. Sometimes I find myself saying it to myself on my long car drives for some apparent reason.

Don't Need to Have An Offensive Band Name to Make It Disappear

In the Times' concert listings yesterday, Pissed Jeans, the raucous Sub Pop group, gets a nice write-up, with a star denoting their show last night at the Knitting Factory was "highly recommended." But why is the band's name written as "****** Jeans"? Is there really anything vulgar about the phrase? Obviously, it's not desired and no one attempts to piss his own jeans, but no one even purposefully pisses his own jeans to be provocative and/or controversial, right? Does the band play shows with pissed jeans, artificial or natural, and the Times wants to shield its genteel readers from the possibility of seeing that? Either way, playing a show with pissed jeans would be distractingly impressive, both for the crowd and them. And wouldn't it be better for the Times to spell out the name so the genteel readers with an inkling of heading to Leonard Street would be forewarned? (They were in town tonight, but I am tired and lame and didn't go see them -- not that their sound is quite my thing -- so I can't answer.)

Again, why would the Times feel the need to censor "Pissed Jeans"? No one under 16 years old reads the "Concert Listings," and if they did, they would find it funny, not offensive. (You could also argue no one under 16 years old reads the Times, or no one under 35 years old [except me] reads the print version.) Their parents wouldn't care, would they? It's not like this band's name is anywhere close to "Pussy Galore." Insert parent's shocked gasp here.

Even odder is the actual write-up from critic and "Listings" writer extraordinaire, Ben Sisario: "There has never been enough vaudeville in punk, but its best performers, like Iggy Pop and David Yow of the Jesus Lizard, have developed frightening and irresistibly entertaining stage personas based on lunging physicality and a constant threat of danger. ****** Jeans' Matt Korvette is a worthy successor, contorting himself and making sour-grapes faces while his band plays dark, grungy blues-punk that comes down from the Stooges and the Dicks. With AIDS Wolf."

So, let's get this straight: "Pissed Jeans" isn't OK, but "the Dicks" is just ducky? And whoever named AIDS Wolf should be kicked out of the band, unless somehow that draws attention to charity. (Checking the band's Web site and...nope, what a surprise, no charity, but there is the promise of lots of artistic noise, and amid the band's "principles," the promise to "Allow for Sonic Fields of Nothing.") Obviously, I'm square and "AIDS Wolf" should not be edited out by the Times either, but doesn't that strike anyone else as an oddly unsettling band name?

Thanks to Pissed Jeans for the inspiration for the post's title.

More Living Proof, aka A Truism Post

Even after two weeks, the show still feels good. And the guys from Blitzen Trapper were really fun to hang out with afterwards. (Told you it was a truism post.)

What Do Woody Allen and American Apparel Have in Common?

Absolutely nothing, until last week, when Woody Allen sued American Apparel. The Woodman, Reuters reports, is the star of the clothing company's new ad campaign without his consent. He says in the lawsuit he never endorses products in the U.S., and is seeking at least $10 million in damages.

Now, which ad exec at American Apparel thought it was a good idea to have a man best associated with frantically anxious sex would match well with a company best associated with raunchily carefree sex run by a man best associated with being the defendant in a few sexual harassment lawsuits and eschewing pants around the workplace? (OK, American Apparel CEO Dov Charney also runs a "vertically integrated, made-in-the-USA, sweatshop-free enterprise," the Web site says, whose simply designed clothes are very popular among a certain subset of hipsters -- and, these days, more suburban teenagers than Mr. Charney would like. And the Woodman left his longtime partner, Mia Farrow, in 1992 for her adopted daughter, who he later married -- not exactly upstanding.)

My girlfriend countered that both Allen and the image American Apparel likes to promote are always thinking about sex. But when Woody thinks about sex, it's something like, "I'm sorry for making that advance. I should be probably just leave. Was that joke earlier funny? No, don't answer, I know it wasn't funny." And when "American Apparel" thinks about sex, it's something like, "Why would I wear a shirt while also wearing tight, electric-colored spandex?" or "Oh, I just walked into an apartment to find a woman only wearing a hooded sweatshirt, let's have sex," and they do. (And you don't have to visit American Apparel's lingerie section -- I visited for research! -- for the raunchiness to bleed through. I'm typing on my parents' couch and when my mom glanced at the homepage a few minutes ago, she shrieked, "Aaron, what are you looking at?")

I don't understand hipster irony sometimes.

S.M. is a Dad?

Paste, a monthly music magazine to which I now subscribe, thanks to my aunt and uncle, had a story recently about Stephen Malkmus, lead singer in the former band that gave this blog its name. It's funny to think he has two children, as the article mentions, considering how detached and disaffected his singing and much of his music always seems to be. When your lyrics include, "Ice, baby, I saw your girlfriend / She was eating her fingers, just another meal," it's hard to picture you pushing a swing, and that one only comes to mind immediately and isn't even as obtuse as they get. (Then again, that lyric was written almost 20 years ago now, and everyone matures.)

I never got into Malkmus' solo career. I bought the self-titled debut -- the one where he looks unnaturally smooth, beautiful and airbrushed on the cover, wearing the "Underdog" T-shirt at a waterside sunset -- when it came out in early 2001 and didn't like it on the first few listens, and then didn't like what I heard of the next couple either. (I haven't heard the new one, "Real Emotional Trash," yet.) But then I listened to the self-titled record a lot recently -- I have a long car commute -- and really started liking it. The jams aren't as jammy as I remembered and the hooks are hookier than I remembered.

The song that really gets me is the penultimate one, "Jenny and the Ess-Dog." (And, boy, do I love YouTube. Note Paul Shaffer rocking on his bald world of keyboards in the middle.) I actually find it quite touching. I doubt that's how Malkmus intended it: As discussed above, he's never struck me as a sentimentalist; some of the details -- the "Volvo with ancient plates," the golden lab with a bandana around its neck, the "awful toe rings" -- are sarcastic stereotypes of the yippie lifestyle; and the weird solo and breakdown seem intended to derail any building emotion. But as cliched as it is, the song is sad, the characters are real: Dating out of your league, living out of your league, remembering what it was like that one summer, wondering if you'll ever hit it out of the park again. Who's unhappier at the end of the song? "The Ess-Dog, Sean if you Wish," waiting tables after selling his guitar? Or Jennifer in 20 years, when she has two kids, lives in suburbia, pours cereal before rushing to her law firm, always recalling in the back of her mind that sticky fake leather in the Volvo and wondering what it would be like to take one more road trip?