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  • How to Buy a New Car

    The first thing
    I do is research the customer service program of the company that makes
    that new car I have my eyes on. The last thing I want to do is
    buy a product that makes one go to the dealer and pay $100 to ask a
    question. The Internet and all its frauds has also taught me that
    I don’t want an 800 number thrown at me with someone on the other
    end who is struggling with my language and knows nothing about the environment
    my car and I live in—mostly near zero many months of the year.

    I’d also like
    to know how much of the price they are asking goes to pay for advertising
    and trying to sell people on something they shouldn’t be buying.
    Money spent for this stuff just takes away the product’s value and
    adds to my costs: costs I don’t want to pay for. Sell me the
    car; don’t sell me 30% car and 70% BS. Sure, just send me the figures
    on the ratio on this, I’d appreciate it.

    This next step
    I don’t bother the poor salesperson with, I go directly to the SEC
    filings of the company to find the answer. I don’t make much
    more than the average U.S. income and it’s fine with me if others
    make more or less than I do. But I would like to know what the
    management is pulling from the company making this machine that is waiting
    for me. It better be reasonable or I’m not contributing, OK?
    Just post it on the window with the price: that would save us consumers
    a lot time.

    My final checkpoint
    is pretty easy, and it would be helpful if this would just be placed
    on the sticker, too, with the price that no one ever pays. My
    1996 Ford gets 25 MPG and that’s too much if I am going to follow
    Czar Gore’s mandate to shrink our carbon footprint on this planet.
    It would probably last another five years with care. Now how much
    carbon would be emitted in making the new car? I’d sure like
    a new MINI, but how much energy would it take to turn out this shiny
    new gem? If keeping my loyal old Ford for five more years would
    amount to less of a carbon footprint and suck of energy, the better
    environmental answer is drive what I have. When do the lines cross
    and I can get a new one? Until I know that, I’m staying green.

  • When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold

    first published on realbuzz.com

    It’s hard to believe that
    this is the same group that released Overcast a decade ago. Back
    then they were a minimalist trio, with pared-down beats that, because
    of their easily discarded rhythms, put emphasis on the lyricism of the
    their lead MC, Slug. (Quickly thereafter, Spawn, their other MC, left
    the group.) On When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold,
    Atmosphere’s very design seems to have flipped.

    Ant,
    their producer, has come a long, long way from his barebones snare drum
    tic-tic-boom beats that underscored that first full release. On every
    ensuing album he’s become progressively more complex, and here we
    find some downright delightful, surprising rhythms. The tracks are varied,
    from the perhaps-slightly-over-produced "Can’t Break," to the
    guitar-only "Guarantees." But Ant’s at his best mid-track, where
    sometimes he will freshen up a song, for just a measure or two, with
    a brand new riff seemingly from out of nowhere.

    Slug,
    meanwhile, has gotten much more simple. You won’t find any of the
    lyrical ingenuity like the "Multiples Reprise" on Overcast,
    where he went through and danced with every letter of the alphabet.
    It’s still rap, and so it still rhymes, but the lyrics are much more
    naked than anything Slug’s put out before. As rappers age, the ones
    that stay in the game seem to place less emphasis on wordplay, and work
    harder to come up with narratives. Ghostface Killah and Jay-Z are just
    a couple artists that come to mind, who have undergone this type of
    metamorphosis. It’s an attempt at candidness, at honesty, it seems.
    Not to say Slug’s ever been gimmicky – or more so than any other
    rapper – but this is kind of like taking away the smoke and mirrors,
    and yet there’s still a magical quality.

    Their
    talents converge on "Yesterday," a meditation on Slug’s deceased
    father. Musically, it’s a deconstruction of M.O.P.’s "World Famous."
    Ant has hit those piano chords with a baseball bat, turning them into
    arpeggios that happily glide up and down the track. Probably it’s
    one of the most up-tempo songs on the album; probably it’s one of
    the most up-tempo songs Slug has ever rhymed over. Lyrically, it’s
    a welcome entry to the book of father-son relationships, as Slug laments
    the rocky past he and his father shared, and yet wishes his dad was
    still around. "But who am I joking with/There’s no way you and I
    will ever re-open it." It’s a call for reparations, though the son
    knows it’s too late. Not overly intricate or psychological, to be
    sure, but it’s honest.

    And again and again on this album, honesty plays well. Songs like "Me,"
    "The Waitress," and "Like the Rest of Us," all have a genuine
    quality about them, because they feel lived, and therefore they feel
    true.

    But
    I’m not sure his meditations on society are so convincing. There’s
    a fair amount of bemoaning the unfortunate state of the union, with
    licks about blue-collar workers and single parents. It’s ambitious,
    to be sure. It’s almost as if Slug is taking a Norman Rockwell approach
    to his work, making it his mission to analyze his city. But songs like
    "Guarantees" and "Dreamer" just don’t come as naturally to
    Atmosphere’s aesthetic.

    For
    the most part, though, Slug sticks to his trademarked brand of introspection.
    Even though they release something every one or two years, it seems
    like every album Atmosphere has put out lately is a comeback album.
    Maybe because of the sped-up cycles induced by the internet. But there
    always seems to be a lot of backlash against Atmosphere about two months
    after their CDs drop. When Life Gives You Lemons is simply another
    affirmation that Slug and Ant are still on top of their games, and even
    getting better.

  • Errol Morris Speaks

    In his latest documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris is addressing questions no one has bothered to ask and finding answers no one has bothered to tell.

    With an Academy Award under his belt for Fog of War, Errol Morris continues to investigate and research stories that many people have undoubtedly turned away from. Standard Operating Procedure, his newest film, delves into the lives of the soldiers and prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Using intrigue and intensity, Morris brings to life the stories surrounding the haunting and epic photographs of prisoners in the Middle East.

    The Rake sat down with Morris to discuss his latest artistic achievement, and his thoughts on the importance of his latest film.

    Roger Ebert compared you to directors like Hitchcock and Fellini. What does it feel like to be compared to some of the greatest filmmakers in history?

    Well, what really feels good is actually having Roger Ebert as a champion for so many years of my work. He’s someone who I’ve come to know pretty well. At first it surprised me because he put the first film that I ever made on his list of the top ten films of all time. Sometimes I think I can’t actually make a film that Roger is going to like more than that first film, but he’s liked an awful lot of them (laughs). He’s an incredibly good guy. I’m delighted that he’s said so many kind things about me. The Hitchcock remark is one among many and I’m grateful.

    Which film did he put on his top ten list?

    Gates of Heaven

    What is it that draws you to making documentary films?

    I don’t know if it’s making documentary films or if it’s just making films. I’m a filmmaker. They’re films about real things, they’re things about reality but they’re constructed in many ways like a traditional movie. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the best Hollywood photographers and I think this [Standard Operating Procedure] is an interesting movie, as a movie even independent of all the questions you might address.

    Do you enjoy making documentaries rather than fiction films?

    Well, I plan to do a hybrid film with some fiction. I think I enjoy all of it. I enjoy investigating, that’s one thing I do enjoy. I made a film, the Thin Blue Line, where I was able to get an innocent man out of jail, which was the end of a two-year long investigation, and now I’ve been investigating the photographs of Abu Ghraib. In a similar kind of way I’ve been trying to ask questions that I don’t think anyone else has asked about: why the photographs were taken in the first place and what they mean.

    When did you first get the idea to document the lives and photographs of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib?

    Probably when I first started to become aware of the photographs. It would have been in April and May of 2004. These are photographs that have been seen by an awful lot of people. I started to wonder and have discussions with friends of mine and everybody had a different opinion on why the photographs were taken, no one seemed to know much about it. I thought no one has bothered to talk to the people who took these photographs, wouldn’t that be of interest.

    Did you find this product to be emotionally draining at all?

    Yes, very draining. I mean it’s really hard when you’re investigating with a camera to get people to actually agree to be interviewed and getting them to open up in the interview, that’s all really time consuming and hard. I know I’ve been asked quite often if it’s easy to get these interviews and the answer is no, it was not easy, it’s was really hard.

    How did get the soldiers to agree to be interviewed?

    It was kind of a crazy sort of networking. You talk to one person and they know someone, they like speaking to me, so they’ll say something nice and another person will come in and it’s gradually making your way into this whole group of people.

    One of the biggest things I noticed, personally, when watching Standard Operating Procedure was my ability to become numb to the images and stories.

    How so?

    After a certain amount of time I started to understand that the soldiers used this technique as a survival tactic. And I could sympathize with where they were coming from.

    Well that’s good! I think the idea is to put people watching the movie in their shoes so they can see them not as monsters but as people and to imagine what the hell would I do if I were put in that situation.

    Well that was definitely the most powerful things I felt when watching the film.

    Well that’s good, that’s what I hope to do, so thank you.

    The film only tells the story from the soldiers’ perspectives. Did you attempt to interview any of the prisoners?

    I interviewed one prisoner. I didn’t want to interview prisoners at random, just like I didn’t want to interviews at random, I wanted to stick to the photographs. There’s this incredible story about the hooded man, the iconic photograph of the man on the box with the wires tied to his hands, and there was this impostor, a guy who claimed he was the hooded man and in fact wasn’t. I was fascinated by that story of two people claiming to be the guy under the hood. It’s like the unknown soldier except the unknown Abu Ghraib victim. I tried really hard to find the people who were in the photographs, like the guy who they call "Gus" on the leash with Lynddie England, the guy with the hood on the box, I tried really really hard and I could not find them. I did find the impostor, of course he was well known at the time but I interviewed him. That interview was really interesting because I asked him about [the American soldier] Sabrina Harman, and as a prisoner, he has really nothing to gain from saying anything nice about any American, and he said he liked Sabrina and that she was "a good one," which was interesting to hear.

    Did you contemplate putting that interview into the film?

    I didn’t for a whole number of reasons. It’s tricky, I didn’t interview him on film, in fact it was over a series of phone conversations. The movie has its own style to it and when you start bringing in characters from left field, the movie could simply fall apart. I thought it was best in the end to stick with the soldiers. You feel what it must have been like to be a prisoner there, I think that’s part of the story as well and that’s in the movie, whether you’re looking at the dogs, the man on the box, the ants, any of that stuff.

    The beginning and ending of the documentary opens and closes with pictures of the sunrise and sunset. Why did you choose to use photographs that stand in stark contrast with the mood of the rest of the film?

    Well I don’t think they’re in that much stark contrast. They’re certainly photographs, and the movie is about photographs, so I like the idea that these were actual photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, not just sunrise or sunset. It begins with a sunset and ends with a sunrise and follows Tim Dugan’s (the khaki construtor who opens and closes the movie) story coming to Abu Ghraib and of course the story of sitting out watching what he calls the birdies fly away at sunrise every morning.

    The main focus of the film was the stories and photographs by the soldiers. Do you think there is room for interpretation?

    I think that we’ll know more and more about as time goes on. The surprising thing, and I hope this is what the movie does, is that you look at a photograph you thought you understood and you see you do not understand it and that the photograph really has a different story connected to it than the story that you thought. Wether it’s Sabrina Harman smiling with her thumb up, you think
    she’s connected to the murder of this prisoner, but you find out she’s trying to expose a murder, there’s a huge difference, in how we view these people and how we look at these photographs, it’s two different things.

    Was there a particular moment in the film that stood out the most to you?

    Well, there’s a lot of stuff in there, from the leash photograph to the worst night of all, the human pyramid, it’s going into the world of those photographs, which are all burned into our minds, particularly mine since I spent so much time with them over the last couple of years. I like a lot of moments in the film. I like Lynddie England at the end when she talks about her son Carter, and how she would do it all over again. I like Javal saying "I think I know what I can do, and I think I know what I can’ do". We often think about these people who were at Abu Ghraib as being faceless automatons, evil-doers or monsters, what I like is that they emerge as people. And they’re all asking ethical questions. There’s a deep feeling of being trapped there, like some kind of Samuel Beckett play and that there is really no way out. I asked myself, what would I do? Your commanding officers have essentially told you to shut the fuck up. You’re in the military and people seem to be shocked that you follow orders in the military. What do you think people do in the military? If your commanding officer tells you to do such and such in the military, you DO what you’re told to do, yet they all questioned it. Sabrina knew what she was doing was wrong and she struggled constantly with ethical issues and ethical questions. I think it’s very powerful.

    Why did you choose to use re-enactments during the filming of Standard Operating Procedure?

    The term re-enactment might not be the best term.

    What term would you use?

    Well, I have used re-enactments, so I have myself to blame (laughs) but they’re visualizations of ideas. An interview is a kind of re-enactment, when someone is talking about the past. When Lynndie England is talking about the experience of being in a photograph or taking a photograph, she is re-enacting the past for us in words. Often I will take things that people say and I will put them in what you can imagine as a typography like bold-faced, italics or underlined. If a soldier talks about a drop of blood on his uniform and he wonders whether he’s complicit, and we see the drop of blood, not because I’m trying to pretend that you’re back in Abu Ghraib in 2003, but because I want you to think about what he’s thinking, his own complicity in the war and the meaning of that drop of blood. Across the board I think visualizations help bring the photographs and stories about the photographs to life.

    Why do you think this documentary is important for the public to see?

    I think it’s the issues at hand, not issues about torture but issues about fair play. We’re talking about scapegoats, people who have been blamed for the failure of the war and I’d like to set that record straight. I do not like the idea of powerful, important men at the top of the chain of command walking away from all of this pinning medals on each others’ chests and the lowliest soldiers taking all the blame, to me it’s un-American and wrong, I would go so far as to say even cowardly.

  • Double Whammy

    FILM
    Double Feature Picture Show

    Back when double features were standard fare, one good film would get paired up with a more questionable one. Granted, sometimes the second billing wasn’t so bad. I saw movies like The Brood and Barracuda like this — great B movies I never would have otherwise known. But tonight the Edina Cinema brings us a double whammy of a double feature: Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), and Peter Sellers and David Niven in Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther (1963). I must say, these are probably two of the best comedies of their time (if not of all time). Some Like It Hot has Tony Curtis and Billy Wilder dressing as women to join a girls’ band in order to escape the mob. And The Pink Panther, well, what can I say? Peter Sellers is probably the best physical comedian of all time. And who doesn’t love a good heist movie?

    7:30 p.m., Edina Cinema, 3911 W. 50th
    St., Edina; 651-649-4416.

    THEATER & PERFORMANCE
    Waiting for the Hearse

    Mixed Blood Theatre brings you their tenth bilingual production, a Theater All Year production at Stepping Stone Theater. Esperando la Carroza, directed by Jerry Ruiz, is a class system family satire that finds everything about the human condition laughable. A needy octogenarian with three adoring, married sons becomes increasingly burdensome to her three daughter-in-laws — one poor, one middle-class, and one affluent. English supertitles will translate the Spanish dialog for all to understand.

    7:30 p.m., SteppingStone Theatre, 55 N Victoria St., Saint Paul; 651-225-9265;

    MUSIC
    Two Options

    You have two great musical options this evening. For some baritone wonder, see Welch Bass-Baritone Bryn Terfel at the Landmark Center (8 p.m.). And if you’re feeling a little down on yourself, or a little down on your luck, find a little comfort in the company of Newton Faulkner at the Varsity (9 p.m.). "I need something to believe in / cause I don’t believe in myself / and
    I’m sick and tired of getting nowhere / guess it’ll all work out." With a last name like Faulkner, you might expect a touch of the gothic, but the British-born singer-songwriter is actually best known for his unique guitar playing habits: interesting finger picking techniques, and percussive use of the guitar’s whole body.

  • Heures Joyeuses Chez Vincent

    I bellied up to the bar at Vincent A Restaurant yesterday
    evening, and started to dig into what has to rate as the best happy hour deal
    in town: tap beers and wines by the glass for $3, appetizers for $3.50-$4, and
    the Vincent burger, stuffed with braised short rib for $8 (regularly $12.75). The happy hour, or heures joyeuses, runs Monday to Friday from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

    I ordered Joe’s Potato Hot Dish, a small cast-iron kettle
    filled with baby fingerling potatoes in a creamy chorizo and melted cheddar
    sauce ($3.50), and a socca, a thin chickpea pancake filled with shrimp, chorizo
    salami, parmesan and chevre ($4), washed down with a glass of Aramis
    Tannat-Cabernet blend.

    Halfway through this little feast, up walks Vincent, with
    only one arm visible, making the rounds of the tables in the bar. It turns out
    he recently broke his collarbone in a bike accident, so his usefulness in the
    kitchen is limited. I started grilling him about restaurant news, and learned
    that Vincent plans to open a patio on the Nicollet mall by Memorial Day weekend, if the
    gods and city inspectors approve. Francoual still plans to compete in a
    triathlon in Paris in June, and in his annual team triathlon ride in support of Fraser, a
    local non-profit that serves special needs children and adults, in July.

    This Thursday, as part of his Minnesota Chef Series, he’s
    teaming up with a young chef, Justin Schoville, from a hot new restaurant in
    Rochester called Sontes. Schoville will lead off with courses of octopus crumb
    cake with citrus, spiced cocoa and mint; and monkfish cheeks a la plancha,
    while Francoual will dish up the last two courses, a duo of roasted rabbit loin
    and rabbit shoulder; and a citrus tart with lemon sabayon. Cost is $60 all
    inclusive without wine, or $80 with wines.
    Call the restaurant at 612-630-1189 for reservations.

    I was already pretty well stuffed when Vincent sent over another dish for me to try – a half order of his stuffed pig trotters appetizer ($12.75). The pigs feet are cooked "sous vide" (in a vacuum pouch at very low temperature) for 24 hours, and then combined into a forcemeat with ground pork, and served over cannelini beans with a quail egg, sunny-side up, and a subtle hint of aromatic black truffle sauce. Magnifique!

    There’s lots more on the happy hour I would like to try,
    including the flat bread topped with smoked chicken, carmelized onions, blue
    cheese and red grapes; the breaded fried walleye fingers (which looked
    irresistible from a distance), and the seared chicken morsels marinated in
    coconut milk.

  • You Know How It Is. Or Maybe You Don't. Maybe I Don't. Maybe, in Fact, None of Us Does

    What does it mean that I have to sit and think for several minutes, and eventually have to count on my fingers, to figure out exactly how old I am?

    I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s appalling, the fact that I have to do it, and the number I eventually end up with.

    I’ve been gone. You may have noticed. Perhaps you did not notice. No big deal. No skin off my teeth. I’ve been out of it. It being, I suppose, things in general. I’ve been mulling and muddling in somewhat equal measure, although if I’m at all in the business of truth-telling I guess I’d have to say muddling has mostly been winning out over mulling.

    I don’t know what to tell you: there’s an honest statement if ever I’ve uttered one. And here’s another, as long as I seem to be in the mood to speak the plain, hard truth: Good Lord, I sure as hell do eat a lot of soup.

    The winter was interminable. There were stretches that I suppose I could say were like a dream. Perhaps they were a dream. I’m not sure I can tell anymore.

    You know what the "PF" in PF-Flyers stands for? I’ll tell you what it stands for: Positive Foundation.

    How do you like them fucking apples?

    I taught my dog to talk, but he’s still a pretty tight-lipped character. I can’t get a whole lot out of him. In the last 24 hours he’s spoken to me twice, and on each occasion his utterance took the form of a question.

    The first question was this: "Those Chinese kung fu sneakers in the closet –you ever wear them?"

    The other question was this: "You ever hear of a broad named M.F.K. Fisher?"

    To both questions I responded with "Why?" and received nothing in the way of a reply. I’ll say this for my dog: he keeps his counsel. One morning I asked him, as I do each morning, "How did you sleep?"

    "So-so," he said. "A phrase was running through my head all night in my dreams."

    "What phrase was that?" I asked.

    "Mist oppeternity," he said, and then turned his attention to his morning meal.

    I chalk that last business up to the Krazy Kat book I gave him for Christmas.

    I’m full of questions these days, but my dog is unfortunately of little help, keeper of his counsel that he is. Still I ask. I go on asking.

    "How did we ever agree that ‘time piece’ means a teller of time?" I ask. "Or, for that matter, how did we ever agree that ‘a teller of time’ or even ‘telling time’ means anything at all?"

    Sometimes I just go through the dictionary and recite words to the dog, trying to build up his vocabulary. "Bulldozer," I’ll say. "There’s a beautiful word. As is hourglass. As is pitch pipe, which is actually two words, referring to the invention of Jacob Kratt, Sr., who as a young man worked for a time at the Hohner harmonica factory in Trossingen Germany, and who later, in America, worked for Thomas Edison in Orange, New Jersey before opening his own harmonica factory."

    To which my dog will either say nothing or will say something like, "Big whoop."

    I’ve had a lot of dogs, and I’ve managed to teach almost all of them to talk. My current dog’s name is Leon "Blood" Runnells. I met him at a junior college in Kansas, where he had come from Fort Wayne, Indiana to play football, this because he didn’t have the academic chops to get into a division one school.

    Leon was a complete monster on the football field. Other guys on the team were terrified of him. They weren’t much more comfortable with him off the field. His old man was some sort of badass Special Forces character, or so Leon claimed.

    "You think I’m crazy," he would say. "You should get a load of Leon, Sr. This shit’s football. My old man, he’s a warrior. He’d cut your nuts off and leave you to bleed to death in the sand, and you’d never even get a good enough look at him to make a positive I.D."

    Our Leon –my Leon now– was also notorious for having once told Lou Holtz to suck his dick, this after some booster had paid Holtz a boatload of cash to fly out to Kansas to make some sort of motivational speech, after which he’d been persuaded to swing by and lay some rah-rah bullshit on the football team.

    Anyway, Leon couldn’t cut it in the classroom, even at the junior college level, and he also suffered some kind of degenerative hip injury near the end of his first season. They were prepared to cut him loose and send him back to a dead end job in Fort Wayne. Around this same time he learned that his old man had been killed in Kosovo or someplace like that, and poor Leon took all this bad news pretty hard and started running the streets. He eventually ended up at the local animal shelter, where they cut off his nuts, implanted a chip in his neck, and put him up for adoption.

    When I visited him the first time he had turned into such a docile, good natured fellow that I took pity on him, paid the three hundred bucks, and took him home with me.

    Truly, his reticence aside, a guy couldn’t ask for a better dog. It’s crazy, I know, and people who knew him back when probably wouldn’t believe me if I told them that I now share my bed with that legendary badass Leon "Blood" Runnells and that he greets me every time I come in the door like I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to him.

    At any rate, I guess I’ve had my say, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to say, and was more than I had any intention of saying.

    I’ll just leave you with this: I’m here now, and there ain’t a damn thing Zen about it.

  • Wolves 2007-08 Season Recap, Part 1

    Note: I know I said I’d have a Wolves recap for you Monday, but with all the playoff ball consuming my time (not to mention other writing projects–my editors know what they are) I now realize I’m never going to get this done unless I break it into parts.

    So, here’s Part 1, which deals with what I wanted to hear from Kevin McHale at his season-ending press conference last week. (Please bear with the changes in typeface that may crop up because I cut and pasted some of the press conference transcription.) At least one other part will be an evaluation of each player on the roster: Both how I regard him and how I believe the Wolves’ front office regards him. Anyway, thanks for your patience. I’m also willing to kick around the playoffs, if anybody is interested, and will probably in the next couple of days set up an open thread with a bevy of impressions to get things rolling and see what happens. 

    When Timberwolves personnel veep Kevin McHale did his by-now traditional meeting with the media the day after the 2007-08 season to discuss the State of the Ballclub, his mood was decidedly more upbeat and the number of reporters he was addressing was much smaller than in recent years past. Part of the reason (for both) was that there was no buzz McHale was going to step down. The other part (again, for both) was that the bar of expectations had been set so low, especially for the immediate past and future of this ballclub.

    McHale sought to change that some with his dramatic proclamation that, barring significant injuries, the 2008-09 Wolves should improve by some 20 games, flirting with .500, if not a bottom-rung playoff spot in the ultra-competitive Western Conference. And how was this going to occur? Essentially by standing pat and letting the existing personnel get more familiar with each other.

    McHale said this two or three different ways, but just to be clear, I asked him, "Beyond the seasoning of existing personnel, what does this team need?" This is what he said:

    "It needs to come together and play. Everybody says ‘We’ve got to go and get somebody from the outside,’ [but] those guys have got to go in there and grow together as a team, establish themselves a little bit—Al has established himself—kind of, underneath that how are we going to play, our style of play, becomes more dedicated defensively in getting back; our transition defense needs a big step up. Defensively we have got to get tougher. So most of the growth I see is internally. Now in the draft we’ll get a good player in the draft, but with way it is set up we’ll get a 19, 20, 21 year old kid; if you are hanging your hopes on that coming into a man’s league….I would say that, overall, I would just say basically a little more shooting around Al, because he is going to get double-teamed and you have got to have court-spacers. But I thought Foye, when you had Foye and used Foye to enter the ball on the strong side and when you left him he made shots; that is a big part of it. Because I think Bassy was out trying [to distribute], not shooting a lot. Again I think shooting. But to me the biggest jump we are going to make is that group in there staying together and being confident."

    Asked point blank what *besides* seasoning is needed, McHale repeatedly invoked seasoning.

    There are two fundamental problems with this. Minnesota does not have a legitimate NBA center on its current roster capable of starting for a playoff contender. The other fundamental problem is that the Wolves have a glut of swingmen. You could argue–I do argue–that unless Randy Foye dramatically improves his court vision and attitude and Corey Brewer dramatic improves his strength and sinew, the team’s last three top draft picks are all best suited to play the off-guard position. And yet McHale specifically cites the two aspects of the game in which off-guards are thought to be most adept–transition defense and outside shooting–as the two largest areas where this ballclub needs to improve. 

    I understand where McHale is coming from. He’s not going to say this team needs a hardy, defensive oriented big man, because unless he’s going to reach for a player based on position more than talent in the draft, or overpay in free agency, there doesn’t look to be any way to address that weakness. By contrast, talking about the need for shooting and transition defense sets the to-do agenda for his swingman glut heading into next season. I’d have more sympathy for his hands being tied if he wasn’t the one spooling out the rope.

     

    But make no mistake: Minnesota will never be a viable playoff contender without a staunch big men to take the defensive pressure off the team’s two best players, Al Jefferson and Ryan Gomes. A steady diet of postseason games has reminded me what it takes to be an elite NBA team: A bonafide superstar, a demi-star, knowledgeable role players, and capable team defense. It is possible–not quite probable–that Jefferson is a budding superstar. Gomes is certainly a knowledgeable role player who can find a niche on most any ballclub. But put them on the court together at center and power forward and you cannot defend in a playoff-worthy manner.

     

    The numbers at 82games.com show that the Wolves allow a whopping 12.1 points per 48 minutes more when Jefferson is on the court (116 points per 48) than when he is off it (103.9 points per game). One reason for this is because opposing centers have an eFG% (which factors in three-pointers, not generally applicable to centers and power forwards) of 56.3%. By contrast, the power forwards Jefferson guarded had an eFG% of 40.3%. Unfortunately, the sample size for Jefferson at the 4 is woefully small, so we don’t know if that excellent D on eFG% would hold up; but we do know his inept defense in the pivot, where he played exponentially more minutes, overwhelms that performance. And we know that even a scorer as gifted as Big Al isn’t going to lead his team to many victories if that team is ceding 116 points per game.

     

    On to Ryan Gomes. Whereas Jefferson had a huge disparity between his minutes at center and those at power forward, Gomes, because he went to small forward not only when a center was slotted in beside Jefferson, but when Craig Smith or Antoine Walker entered the game, is shown to have played 26% of his team’s minutes at small forward and 34% of the Wolves’ time at power forward (meaning he was on the court approximately 60% of the time). Thus, his stats between the two positions are a little more reliable in comparison to each other. And again according to 82games.com, Gomes yielded an eFG% of 48.6% to the small forwards he guarded versus 54.7% to the power forwards he guarded. (His own eFG% was better at power forward–49.7% versus 48.5% at the 3–but not enough to overcome the disparity of his less effective D in the low block.)

     

    Fortunately, McHale understands this. When I asked him at last week’s press conference: "Are you comfortable, long term with Jefferson at center and Gomes at the 4?" here is what he said.

    "Well I don’t think, I think that Al is a 4-5, not a 5-4, and that Ryan is a power 3-4. Ryan gets more shots at the 4 because he can move around and all those big guys have that paint fixation. But he rebounds better at the 3, posts up better at the 3. They give you flexibility and that is a good thing. Do I want to see that 4-5 combination for 48 minutes? No. I would like to have another big guy for when Al plays the 4. Al has got to get better defensively. Randy Foye has got to get better defensively, Rashad McCants has got to get better defensively, Ryan Gomes, all those guys have to get better defensively. I like the versatility that they give you and again that is why I like bigger players that can do different things. To me Gomes may have scored more at that 4 spot, but to me he punished teams more when he was offensively rebounding and going into the post at the 3. I like that style of play. But he can play both."

     

    When I pointed out that the vast bulk of minutes wound up with Al playing center and Gomes playing power forward, McHale acknowledged: "For 25-30 games, yeah. And I thought we fell into that. They are both two-position players which are really good to have. [But] you don’t like Ryan Gomes, who works really hard, against Rasheed Wallace. What you really like him playing 4 is against Luis Scola who is sitting in the paint. But what I like is you can make one substitution and go huge or one substitution and go small."

     

    Compounding the problem is the fact that the Wolves play horrible perimeter defense, and have for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t quite as deadly when Kevin Garnett was the superstar in residence, and totally committed to the defensive end. (KG’s willpower slipped the last two seasons he was in Minnesota. I thought it was age until I saw him this season in Boston, reborn as a panther capable of hounding anyone from the three point arc to the low block.)

     

    The third and final question I asked McHale was: "For some reason perimeter defense has been a chronic defect of this franchise. Why has that happened?" His reply was: "It bothers me too. It bothered me for twelve years. For me it goes back to 7th grade basketball: If you can’t keep your man in front of you, I’m going to take you out. Don’t let him cut in front of you and keep your rear end between him and the rim. That’s as tricky as I like to make it and sometimes I think we scheme up so much we got so many schemes going on that we lose sight of that. We have got to get better at that, at containing the ball. The good teams in our league defensively contain the ball. They may have holes in other areas but they contain the ball…That is a definite, huge area of concern that we have got to work on."

    To me, that in a nutshell is why the Wolves only won 22 games this season: They played an undersized lineup where the center and power forward couldn;t effectively defend their counterpart, and they allowed perimeter players to penetrate into the paint almost at will.

  • Three Weeks, from Which We Can Conclude Virtually Nothing, So I Will Talk Instead about Vivisection

    AP Photo/Jim Mone

    I love baseball stats, love them as least as much or more than the next woman. And like so many others, the explosion of the statistical analysis of baseball was what drew me deeper into the grip of the game at a moment in my life when I was just starting to pull away.

    Maybe it doesn’t happen the same way for everyone, but in my case there was a period of vulnerability after I stopped thinking of baseball as a game I could play, and before I learned to think of it as a game I could simply enjoy. This would have been the late ’70s and early ’80s. There was not yet cable television in my hometown, and beyond the Sporting News and Baseball Digest there wasn’t much in the way of baseball literature available at the local newstand/bookstore. We could watch the Game of the Week, listen to Twins broadcasts on WCCO, and drive up to the occasional game in the Cities. But for most of my early life pretty much everything I knew about Major League players laboring beyond Minnesota I learned from Topps baseball cards and from watching whatever teams I was exposed to in the post-season.

    For a few precarious years there in my adolescence I barely followed the game. I guess I could blame Jim Dandy and Black Oak Arkansas, who came to my hometown and played Riverside Arena in the late ’70s. I could blame Ted Nugent (same story), or Blue Oyster Cult (again, same story). Eventually, I suppose, I could blame The Ramones and The Clash and dozens of other bands that helped salve my crushed dreams of being a professional baseball player. I could blame all the garfong I smoked and all the Special Export (the Green Death!) I drank while parked in the darkness along Toke Road just outside town.

    I could blame adolescence and hormones and Calvin Griffith and the Metrodome and Paul Thormodsgard and Glenn Borgmann and Craig Kusick and Terry Felton and the 1981 strike and all those mediocre Twins teams in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

    By the time I moved to Minneapolis in 1981, however, I had discovered Bill James, a guy with a gift for contextualizing all those statistics in the Baseball Encyclopedia and cooking up stats of his own that made the game seem as intricate and difficult and complex and wondrous and just plain fun as it had ever seemed to me as a 15-year-old struggling with the realization that the skills necessary to succeed at the sport were light years beyond my own abilities.

    I learned about James from a geek at the local public library, and through him I received dog-eared, hand-me-down copies of some of James’ earliest, self-produced Abstracts. By the time Ballantine started publishing the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1982, I –who had been a sub-indifferent math student in high school– was a full-on stats geek.

    For years, in fact, I was a junkie. At a time when all of my friends were going to college or playing in bands, I was working in a series of parking lots and ramps, where I had ample time to pore over numbers, fiddle around with statistical formulas, and listen to games on the radio. Two years running I chucked everything and went to Florida for spring training. In 1987 I got a job at Tinker Field in Orlando, then the spring home of the Twins.

    Perhaps I was born for ruination, but there is no doubt in my mind that baseball accelerated the process. It was fun, though, at least for the most part. And the stuff I learned from James, and from the people who popped up in his wake (I’m thinking of John Thorn and Pete Palmer’s 1984 collaboration, The Hidden Game of Baseball, and Earnshaw Cook’s pioneering book from the sixties, Percentage Baseball, which I learned of from James), made the game a lot more interesting, and gave the off-season an obsessive focus that probably wasn’t entirely healthy.

    Eventually, of course, pretty much every serious baseball fan got indoctrinated into the Sabermetric army, and the stuff got increasingly complicated or –even worse– rarefied. It started to worm itself into even popular discussion of the sport, into the mass media, and into television analysis. James and a legion of his proteges became baseball celebrities (James is now a senior advisor in the employ of the Red Sox, and one of his most talented disciples, Rob Neyer, is a columnist for ESPN.com).

    I still love James (he has a terrific new book just out, by the way, Bill James Gold Mine 2008), but I also think it’s time to admit that I’ve become something of a heretic. I used to know the basic formula for James’ Run Created stat off the top of my head; I don’t anymore. With the explosion of baseball punditry made possible by the internet, and the mind boggling proliferation of baseball bloggers, the statistical vivisection of the game has become wearisome. There’s only so much of the stuff a guy can digest before it starts to get in the way of simply watching a game for the sheer pleasure of witnessing marvelous athletes playing the most difficult sport in the world.

    And here’s my essential problem with the now incessant barrage of baseball statistics: while the best of the new (and relatively new) stats can provide a remarkably accurate view of the big picture (given a large enough sample size), and are excellent hindsight tools as barometers of past performance and its bearing on future expectations, they can never adequately address the snapshot quality of any individual game. Because in any individual game, or any series of individual games, all sorts of unexpected shit still happens on a regular basis. Great players can kill teams for sustained stretches almost as brutally as lousy players, and the brutality can be all the more painful as a result of the expectations. Minor players, shit players, footnotes, reclamation projects, and journeymen can do astonishing things that are, in the context of expectations, as thrilling as a monster game from a superstar. Season to season and game to game, aberrations are a big part of what makes the sport so consistently gratifying.

    My other problem is this: Bill James was not only a terrifically entertaining writer; he was also –and this was crucial– consistently challenging and possessed of a playful mind and a wide-ranging curiosity about all sorts of stuff that he was more than willing to admit was technically and practically useless. There was always a sense –and there is still a sense– that he was working very hard to make his egghead nonsense fun. He was funny. He was attuned to the peripheral delights of baseball, the ugly guys and fat guys, the regular affronts and abominations, whether they be inexcusable uniforms, terrible ballparks, or particularly brutal lines in the boxscore.

    James was the best. He still is the best, even if he has a lot to answer for. And, sorry, but after thirty years of poking around in the shit he spawned, I see very little but a legion of pale, earnest imitators, attic bachelors and basement barons who have long since lost sight of the forest for the trees. Or the trees for the forest. I can’t quite decide which.

    And after all those years, and all that rooting around (and just plain rooting, the numbers be damned), I feel like I’m now in a position to draw my own conclusions about players and teams based on –and, yes, thanks to people like James– what I’ve learned and what I know and what I see. My father, who knew nothing about any of the new-fangled statistics, could watch a handful of games and zero in on exactly the sorts of players that analysis and stats now confirm for u
    s are valuable. And he considered them great players for –at least generally speaking– precisely those reasons that the statistics validate them as such.

    He’s gone now, but if we sat down over a couple days and ran down all the statistical categories that are around today, I believe he would agree with me that there are only a handful –OBP (on base percentage), OPS (on base percentage plus slugging), and WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched), for instance– that contribute a damn thing to the appreciation of watching a game or critiquing a ballclub, no matter how much they might contribute to a player’s leverage in an arbitration hearing or salary negotiation.

    Pathetically, I suppose, the one most valuable thing I’ve learned from watching thousands of baseball games is that the team that scores more runs than it allows wins; the team that does that most often wins the most games; and four runs is the magic number: the team that scores four or more runs wins the overwhelming majority of its games. And sometimes the good teams (at least on paper), the expected teams, are the clubs that pull off that trick. But often enough –just often enough to keep things interesting, and more often than the stats slaves are perhaps willing to admit– they’re not.

    And sometimes a guy like Roger Maris hits 61 homers, or a guy like Norm Cash hits .361. Or a team like the ’87 Twins win the World Series.

    Even when you can’t understand a damn thing about it –and perhaps especially then– baseball is a beautiful game.

  • Toddler Insurgency

    My son’s birthday party began with me looking like a giant dumbass. Big shocker there. We were in the jubilant 11:15 a.m. Backyardigans parade at the newly remodeled Nick Jr. amusement park in the center of the Mall of America. I was holding the foamy oversized hand of a teenage actor who was dressed as a cuddly moose named Tyrone from the hit kid’s cartoon. When the cheery music piped in I couldn’t stop myself and decided to do a little jig. As my wife gave me the "you’re sleeping on the couch" stare I spastically danced like I’d been hit with defibulator paddles. The teenage actor quickly snatched his big cartoon hand from mine and pranced away. We were there because the blitzkrieg marketing campaign from the good folks at Nickelodeon bombarded my toddler son’s brain to the point that even though he had no idea who half the characters were he just had to go. So sue me if I felt like doing a little "Mr. Roboto" with a stuffed moose.

    After the parade, my motormouth son told me it would be a good idea if I bought a bunch of tickets for the rides, which I promptly did seeing as it was his birthday. Immediately after I inserted my money and the tickets spit out of the vending machine, he refused to go on any rides. He vehemently denied ever saying that he ever wanted to go on any rides, even though he just finished telling me he did. I felt like I was talking to a midget Bill Clinton. As the neon glare beat down on me and the demonic bubblegum melody to some cartoon song bore into my skull, I felt like telling my beloved son to "grow a pair of testicles and get in the giant inflatable pineapple and bounce around until you barf." But I didn’t because, well, I’m not that big of an a-hole.

    Truth be told, the food court was far scarier than any ride there. Wild children loaded with sugar and suburban angst burst through the eating area like a toddler insurgency. As I navigated the lanes with my tray of crappy food, kids popped out from behind trash cans and tables, setting off squirts of ketchup and lemonade. Packs of horny teenagers pawed at each other as they loitered around the tables. From every corner I was besieged with tickle fights and grab-ass. My cheeseburger tasted like an old Birkenstock sandle and worst of all, the cheese was wet and cold. How hard is it to melt cheese on a hot burger? In the middle of the nation’s biggest indoor shopping mall, it totally felt like a shitty picnic.

    After trips to four gift stores (strategically located at every corner of the park) and the Disney store, we walked past the "Hawaii Hermit Crab" kiosk. It took about three seconds before my son decided he really really wanted one. But you can’t get just one. Apparently, hermit crabs are social animals and need a companion to share their stupid fake log and plastic coconut shell with. It was chump city from there on out. I bought two crabs, tank, two extra shells, food, extra wood, and bottled water. The genius marketing minds also painted the shells of the hermit crabs to reflect the most popular kid’s programs. My son picked the "Batman" and "Lighting McQueen" crabs. Somehow I don’t think that when Jacque Cousteau was laying the foundation for the preservation of aquatic life it meant tearing crabs away from their natural seaside environment, shipping them to a shopping mall in Minnesota, and airbrushed to death.

    I finally got my kid into the car. There was some gooey resin in his hair from Lord knows what and his eyes were ringed with exhaustion. He was pale and twitchy and after being exposed to the Petri dish that is any kids indoor play area, I assumed he had contacted the bird flu, mad cow disease, and rickets. As I pulled out of the parking lot, he let out a giant yawn and said, "I thought we were going to go on some rides?"

    "Next time," I muttered.

     

  • Happy Earth Day!

    MUSIC
    Ben Glaros

    Ben Glaros’s music is that of the familiar: songs about falling in and out of love; shoutouts to familiar
    local uptown hotspots like Spyhouse Coffee and the Mayday Cafe; a folk rock blend that includes harmonicas, cellos, and
    mandolins; and a stint in the local indie pop rock
    scene since the mid 1980s. In his debut full-length album, Lovesong Roulette, Glaros proves the preeminence of the familiar as he teams up with other local
    greats, including Michael Ferrier and Greg Schutte. Enjoy his music this evening as he warms the stage for Phil Solem, one half of the sensational Rembrandt’s, and Fran King and Duncan Maitland (on tour from Ireland). —KM

    8 p.m., 400 Bar, 400 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-332-2903; $8.

    BOOKS & AUTHORS
    Read Me the Riot Act

    Join hosts Paul Dickinson and Laura Brandenburg this evening for their monthly Riot Act Reading Series. I have no idea what author(s) they have in store for us tonight, but whoever it is will likely have their touch of punk rock history.

    9 p.m., 331 Club, 13th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-331-1746; free.

    WINE & DINE
    Capital Grille

    Enjoy a five-course Wine Dinner with Chefs Jeff Ansorge and Christian Ticarro at The Capital Grille tonight.

    The Capital Grille, 801 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-692-9000; $85.