Comically Sad
A chef, a playwright, and a composer walk into a bar...
I’m not sure there’s anything more comically sad than a lousy major league baseball team.
The dropped fly balls. The boneheaded base-running mistakes. The pitchers who can’t throw strikes.
Sometimes when I’m watching my beloved New York Mets this season, I feel like the Benny Hill theme music should be playing.
For those who don’t follow baseball, the Mets — a team whose history is more humorous than triumphant — were one of the best teams in the league last year. They made the playoffs though lost in the first round.
After the season, billionaire owner Steve Cohen decided to assemble the most expensive roster the sport had ever seen, spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $350 million on this year’s team. (That’s about 25 percent more than the payroll of the next-biggest spenders, the Yankees.)
The results so far have been, well, Benny Hill-esque.
As of this morning, the Mets are in fourth place in the NL East, 17 games out of first. They’re on their way to emulating the 1992 Mets, whose overpriced futility was memorialized in a book called The Worst Team Money Could Buy (payroll: $45 million).
I don’t begrudge the players their salaries. Nobody held a gun to Steve Cohen’s head and said, “You have to pay 38-year-old Max Scherzer and 40-year-old Justin Verlander $43.3 million each this year OR ELSE.”
Maybe this is our comeuppance for celebrating when Cohen, whose hedge fund paid $1.8 billion in fines for insider trading in 2013, bought the team from the penny-pinching previous owners almost three years ago.
Or maybe this is just what it is to be a Mets fan.
Last year was great, but for me, there’s something oddly comforting about watching this inept team bumble its way to defeat, night after night. (Another book about the Mets entitled So Many Ways to Lose sums this up well.)
“Comically sad” is what we’re used to. And for now, anyway, it’s what we’ve got.
The Best…
…Series I Watched This Week
The Bear (Season 2) — Directed by Christopher Storer & Joanna Calo
Streaming on Hulu
The second season of The Bear asks questions about purpose, creativity, family, and other fundamental concepts that ultimately bring us to the big question: what makes a happy life?
(If you haven’t seen the show’s kinetic, anxiety-filled first season, I highly recommend it.)
This season, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and the team are back together, but their restaurant, The Original Beef of Chicagoland, is no more.
Instead of just trying to survive each workday without killing each other, now the characters all have a longer-term common goal, to transform the beef counter into a fine dining establishment called The Bear. (While still trying not to kill each other.)
The show in Season 2 is no longer primarily about Carmy. All of the key characters receive fully-told stories, several within their own episodes. We see them growing, striving, and hoping for happiness, while coping with the complications of their pasts. (One standout in this regard: Episode 4, “Honeydew,” a showcase for actor Lionel Boyce as pastry chef Marcus.)
These narrative choices not only humanize the characters but also unite them in their common dream — their need — for the restaurant to succeed. As their stories pile up, so too does the pressure.
But when childhood friend and femme fatale Claire (Molly Gordon) walks back into Carmy’s life, his desire for love threatens the collective dream and puts the audience in a tricky position — to root for Carmy’s happiness with Claire is to root against the success of the restaurant.
Watching how this unfolds is a wonderfully rich experience, one that brought happiness to my life for two binge-filled days.
…Movie I Saw This Week
Past Lives (2023) — Written & Directed by Celine Song
In theaters
We can probably all look back on our lives and identify different paths we could have taken if we had ended up with this person or that person, if we hadn’t moved across the country at a particular moment or prioritized a different aspect of our lives.
Or if life — some might say fate — simply hadn’t intervened in some unexpected way.
The new movie Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song, explores the what ifs of one particular woman’s past, present, and future.
Nora, at age 12, immigrates with her family from South Korea to Canada, ending a close friendship with — and crush on — her schoolmate Hae Sung. This rupture changes the trajectory of her life.
From there, Nora (played as an adult by Greta Lee) becomes a young playwright, moves to New York City, and marries a Jewish writer named Arthur (John Magaro).
Hae Sung (played as an adult by Teo Yoo), meanwhile, follows a more typical path for a young Korean man: school, military service, middle class job.
Their subsequent reconnections in their 20s and 30s are filled with nostalgia, melancholy, and longing for what they once had as children and what they could’ve had as adults, if Nora’s family hadn’t moved across the world.
These interactions have implications for their present and future lives, particularly for Nora and Arthur’s marriage.
The film’s lead performances, particularly Lee’s, are tender and heartfelt. They inhabit their characters with such openness and humanity that I could see myself in all three of their situations, could relate to their separate heartbreaks and heartaches.
But be forewarned: this movie may inspire you to consider the great what ifs of your life. It’s a powerful portal to enter.
…Articles About John Williams I Read This Week
“John Williams Always Settles the Score” — By Darryn King, Vanity Fair, June 26, 2023
“The Force is Still Strong with John Williams” — By Alex Ross, The New Yorker, July 21, 2020
When I was five years old, we had a handful of Betamax video tapes that I would watch over and over again. Among them were Star Wars and Superman.
In addition to falling in love with these stories, I also fell in love with their orchestral scores, both of which happened to be written by the composer John Williams.
As I got older and immersed myself in rock music and jazz, I still carried a flame for Williams’s movie scores. In my CD collection, alongside Bruce Springsteen and Miles Davis albums were the soundtracks to Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and a four-disc boxed set from the original Star Wars trilogy that I treasured.
Williams’s work even helped me learn intervals in music theory class, providing mnemonic devices for a perfect fourth (the first few notes of Luke Skywalker’s theme) and a perfect fifth (the first few notes of the Superman theme).
Whenever I sit down at a piano, I still play those notes.
Williams, now 91, has been in the news lately for writing the music to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. I don’t have any plans to see the movie — I tapped out on the series after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — but the occasion did inspire me to do some reading.
This Vanity Fair piece, which came out this week, was my entry point, explaining how Williams brought classical music to the MTV generation. This New Yorker profile from three years ago provides Williams’s commentary on his history and remarkable career.
But who am I kidding. Your time is probably best spent listening to the music. I think I’ll go do that now, too.
Maybe you should root for the Marlins...