something about Roger Ebert's autobiography "Life Itself"

Roger Ebert was a talented, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and writer who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he and Gene Siskel, film critic for rival paper Chicago Tribune, began co-hosting a weekly movie review show in Chicago. The no-frills program was picked up for national syndication and eventually moved to commercial network television. The odd couple—plump, mop-haired Roger wearing glasses next to tall, thin Gene—having tense, insightful arguments and giving thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie reviews became a pop-culture phenomenon in the 1980s and 90s. After 53-year-old Siskel died in 1999, Ebert continued the show format with other critics.

Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands in 2002, and his treatment and surgeries later led to the removal of his lower jaw. Ebert, disfigured and no longer able to speak, continued to write, and his blog attracted a loyal audience. He reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and was on TV for 31. Ebert was 70 when he died.

His patient, careful autobiography, Life Itself, is traditional and lovely. Ebert describes his parents, his childhood (including Catholic school), his career, his alcoholism (and then his pain-killer addition during cancer treatments), and his relationships, including the close, competitive relationship he had with Siskel. Ebert's writing about his disfigurement and condition is touching. I also enjoyed reading his views on the evolution of film promotion over the years and his descriptions of his interviewing habits.

 

Read some of his interviews:

• "Who's gonna get me a beer?" An interview with Lee Marvin by Roger Ebert, October 10, 1970
• Interview with George Peppard by Roger Ebert, February 18, 1968
• Interview with John Wayne (1969) by Roger Ebert, June 29, 1969

And one passage early in the autobiography sneaks in this gut-punch.

The optometrist had me read the charts and slowly straightened up. "Has Roger ever worn glasses?" he asked my mother. "No. He hasn't needed them." The doctor said: "He's probably always needed them. He's very shortsighted." He wrote me out a prescription. "Wasn't he ever tested?" It had never occurred to anyone. My parents and my aunt Martha the nurse monitored my health, which was good; I was in the hospital only twice, to have my tonsils and appendix removed, and had monthly radiation treatments for ear infections (they were probably responsible for the salivary cancer I developed in my sixties.) I'd never complained about eyesight, and no one noticed any problems.

Life Itself was published in 2011.

something about hearing the guitar tone

In sixth grade, my friend popped in his older brother’s cassette single of “One.” I was immediately drawn in by the song’s tense simplicity and perfect storytelling. And then came the compressed, poured-on layers of heavy-metal guitar tracks. That is what music should sound like, I thought. When I got an electric guitar and Metal Zone distortion pedal, I tried to get that sound: the shoosh of distortion—as much as possible—with the high and low maxed on the equalizer, the mid turned way down. It took me a long time to stop seeing that sound as the peak and to develop an appreciation for a heavy sound where each guitar string is alive.

something about Skip Bayless’ “God's Coach: The Hymns, Hype, and Hypocrisy of Tom Landry's Cowboys”

Long before he was a clicks-generator for ESPN, Skip Bayless was a well-regarded, award-winning journalist. He started at The Miami Herald, moved on to the Los Angeles Times, then, in the late 1970s, moved to Dallas to be lead sports columnist covering America’s Team during the Cowboys' peak celebrity.

In 1989, after several years' of writing Cowboys columns, Bayless tried to cash in and published God's Coach: The Hymns, Hype, and Hypocrisy of Tom Landry's Cowboys. The book streaks through the times and personnel behind the Cowboys’ rise to national prominence, the team’s decades-long winning run, and the organization’s disillusioning decline and cold-turkey break with legendary coach Tom Landry.

God's Coach is not flattering for Landry or the organization. Influential general manger Tex Schramm, the team's front office, and some big-name former players all get sacked in Bayless’ book. And he describes Landry—"the man in the funny hat," as was affectionately known—as a deeply religious man coaching in a corrupt organization, withholding emotionally to keep players working for his approval, and, eventually, getting passed by as the game evolved and times changed.

I enjoyed reading parts of God's Coach, including the opinions of Landry's great assistant coaches and some long-forgotten background bits on former players. Plus, Bayless' sport-column-writing style, with its dumb wit and constant motion, works well in longform here. But, overall, I found the book distasteful largely because Bayless engages in a lot of suggestion and innuendo, frequently framing accusations as questions. Bayless' premise—that Landry the man was not as good as Landry the legend—is a straw man. Did anyone in 1989 believe Landry and the Cowboys were perfect? No. But many believed that the iconic coach deserved respect.

Bayless does not know the meaning of the word.

Finding someone with a bad word to say about the Cowboys will never be a problem—especially when the team is down, like it was in '89. But Landry and the organization did not have a losing season from 1966 to 1986. And, in that time, the Cowboys won 13 division titles and made five Super Bowl appearances, winning twice.

The team owner, Bum Bright (who was losing a bundle in the savings and loan crisis at the time), sold the team to a 40-something Jerry Jones for $140 million in 1989, and Landry was fired after 29 seasons. Bayless writes that Bright and Schramm intended to fire Landry whether or not the team was sold. I do not doubt that they would have looked for a way to offer Landry a dignified exit; and I need not doubt that Jerry Jones was one key source for the book. Many Cowboys fans still associate Jones with Landry's undignified dismissal.

Hats off to Tom Landry.

Note: Landry was 6’2” and fit as hell his whole life. He wore a suit on the sidelines, but, in practice, he was poppin' in t-shirts and shorts. The man died in 2000.

something about a new album by a French noise-rock band

Biographic details on Salo, the noise-rock band responsible for this punchy new release, are hard to come by. But the album, From Melmac With Hate, makes a fine statement on its own.

The first of these 11 confrontational songs is “Guillotine,” which zigzags a trail of noise buoyed by a hairy bass guitar tone under crashing cymbals and a vocal that seeks abandon. Salo’s musicianship comes through especially on “Jay” and “Speed Missile,” two of the most energetic performances on the album. The tremolo effect on the guitar breaks through at 1:35 on “Jay”—the notes cut noise like the bent, serrated edge of the junk-drawer knife. And the swinging drumming style, accompanied by that hairy bass, propels a lot of this album. “Jay” and “Speed Missile” exude a punk-inspired sound that is confrontational, spiteful, and desperate for attention.

Salo is a trio based in Lyon, France. Funny how small bands can make such big sounds. Social media suggests Salo is about five years old. The band cites as influences The Fall, Thee Oh Sees, and METZ—the last band being the most directly comparable. Halfway through From Melmac With Hate comes “Bring Back Medieval Plague.” This song, with its provoked vocal and damaging low-end rhythm section, approaches a blend of The Jesus Lizard and Young Widows. It is a clawing scramble up a mountain.

Salo slow the pace later in the album with “Tasmanian Tiger (for Nikita).” The bass guitar remains imposing, but the drums, especially the hi-hat, become stilted and self-conscious, almost uncomfortable. Arpeggio-style guitar notes smolder. The measured cadence of the vocal sounds borrowed from the tune of some Scottish folk pub song. The tone on the opening and closing guitar figure is a change-up, too. It is a stadium-ready sound from a guitar that spends the rest of the album cutting through back alleys.

about tennis and a new piece in The New Yorker

The Australian Open men's final this year was awesome. The Russki, Daniil Medvedev, is a funny, quasi-villain and impending champion, and Rafa Nadal, in his mid-30s now, is the sport's older statesman—older even beyond his tennis years because his unrelenting hustle and highly physical style of play has worn down his body. But Medvedev had the harder journey to this final, and Nadal is still a champion. Here is how a piece from The New Yorker summarizes Nadal's winning tactics:

Nadal’s topspin forehand gets a ball to not only bounce up but penetrate deeper wherever it’s headed, and he sent Medvedev chasing angled shots that bounded beyond the sidelines. He moved Medvedev forward and back with short slices, followed by deep, out-of-reach groundstrokes.

And then here is the column denouement:

Nadal spoke before the tournament began about how majors are bigger than any one player, and how generations of players come and go but the game remains. He also talked about how tennis is, as he put it, “zero important” compared with the pandemic that has swept the world. This was his way of talking about Djokovic, whose arrival, unvaccinated, in Melbourne, and subsequent deportation dominated coverage of the sport in the week before the Australian Open began, and threatened to cloud it afterward. That it didn’t—that the tennis was just too good not to become what mattered—was due in great part to Nadal and to Barty. That’s what the greatest champions can do.

 

Note: The final was played on January 30, 2022.

 

something about great tennis

The New Yorker published "Without Fans, the Drama of the US Open Came from Within," a great piece, right after the 2020 US Open; the commentary includes this passage:

There were moments when I asked myself what this was all for. So much effort, and such high stakes, for what? The tournament was taking place against the backdrop of tremendous unrest in the United States—the unfathomable spread of a lethal disease, continuing protests against racial injustice, profound civic distrust, and soaring unemployment. What is the U.S. Open when it is sealed off from New York? What does a championship signify, if some of the top contenders don’t come? What does it mean if fans aren’t there to ratify it? What’s the value of sport right now?

Some of those questions are unanswerable, but not all. In most respects, the U.S. Open was a success. It happened safely. Two deserving champions were crowned. The quality of the play was, for the most part, remarkably good. And, by the end, something strange was happening, at least for me: the event seemed to become more meaningful, not less, for being so stripped away.

The New Yorker piece details the men's championship match—the final match of the tournament, the match perspective played the net and won.

I remember agreeing that this match became more meaningful for me than most previous US Open championships.

I had wondered, when the tournament decided to carry on without fans, whether the 2020 results would have an asterisk in people’s memory. Because of how it played out, it doesn't.

Tennis players are not supposed to get coaching or have any communication with the people in their player’s box; the player is out there alone, fighting himself and his opponent, often buoyed or rejected—especially in big matches on big stages—by the crowd. In this match, the isolation, the loneliness, was heightened to an extreme, and I really felt for them, felt the struggle, felt empathy.

Note: The Australian Open concluded today with an instant-classic match between Rafa Nadal and Daniil Medvedev.

 

something about a progressive post-hardcore album

Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers, the new album from Seven Nines and Tens, introduces vocals to the Vancouver band’s blend of progressive post-hardcore and shoegaze. The vocals debut on album opener “Popular Delusions” and sound like a softer version of an Alice in Chains-style harmony over thick, cotton-sonic waves of thunder.

“Throwing Rocks at Mediocrity” again rolls out a controlled, tapered vocal harmony, but this time over picked-out single notes that sheen over a stuttering beat. Then a dramatic guitar and bass figure diverts the song into a confident strut that sets your head nodding yes. The song slows, expands, explores until it finds enough room to explode in slow motion.

I wondered if the vocals were too consistently restrained. But, with a little time, “Throwing Rocks at Mediocrity” turns its attention outward, then upward, reaching cruising altitude after 3:35. The drum work rounding out the song’s finale not only sounds great, it feels great.

The album’s promotional copy notes that, when writing the record, Seven Nines and Tens performed live with bands like Alcest and Pinkish Black. I can hear those bands’ influences, and I hear the influences of bands including Tool, Alice in Chains, and Black Sabbath.

The fourth song, “Let's Enjoy the Aimless Days While We Can,” starts softly, “You’re everywhere and nothing. Don’t tell me we can’t pull this off. It’s a far cry from a factory life. Permanence of the firmament.” These fever-dream lyrics lead to a churning riff overdriven with fuzz, a tentative, plodding bass and drum fall in behind, and the song labors, barely able to lift its lids. Heavy reverb blurs the edges of the vocal, which struggles under the subsea tones of the guitars. The song is a sailing stone.

But “Edutainment” offers a dramatic lift. The rhythm section engages with a syncopated beat and challenging bass line—together, they complement the even, chanting vocal harmony. The verse returns with guitars added to the arrangement. Then the song transforms, and by Jove, at 3:15, the album hits a second high, lifted by the surrender in the lyrics and vocal, “It’s going to end just like it started.”

Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers was released January 7 and is the third album from Seven Nines and Tens. For this release, the band signed to metal label Willowtip Records.

 

something about Novak Djokovic and his 2022 Australian Open quest

The Australian Open starts next week. Heading into it, the big story is how Novak Djokovic's anti-vaccine stance is jeopardizing his Australian visa status. Djokovic is the top men's tennis player in the world now.

For a while, tennis had the Big Three—Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic, the youngest. But Djokovic, unlike Federer and Nadal, has never been a fan favorite (outside of Serbia, where he is loved, of course). Fans tend to root for Djokovic’s opponents.

Why he is disliked is sort of a mystery, and some sportswriters have explored the question. He actually seems to feed on the negativity during matches, though, and he will no doubt one day hold the record for winning the most Grand Slam tournaments. Over the last two years, with Federer and Nadal not playing as much, I noticed that fans seemed to finally start to come around to Djokovic. But right now, he is everywhere and for the wrong reasons, and he will be booed if he plays this tournament.

He won last year’s Australian Open, so he wants to defend his title. And if he won this tournament, it would be an incredible fuck you because he would win it in a country that did not want him there while pulling ahead of fan favorites and his rivals Nadal and Federer in the ranking for most Grand Slam tournaments won, thereby making him, effectively, the Greatest of All Time. Incredible.

His status is still in limbo, and he is running out of time to deliver maybe the biggest fuck you in sports history.

 

something about “Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation,” a nonfiction book by Jamie Thompson

Standoff counts down the minutes of July 7, 2016, the punishing summer night when a lone gunman waged war on police amid a Black Lives Matter rally in downtown Dallas. That night, protesters, moved by the recent murders by police of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, marched in cities across the nation to demand policing reforms and accountability. Dallas police were monitoring the city’s peaceful protest when a black, young man in a bulletproof vest, armed for battle, murdered five officers and wounded eleven other people.

A chaotic gun battle in the streets moved into a downtown community college, where police cornered the shooter. As a negotiator tried to talk down the gunman, whose cause was sick vengeance for racial injustice in America, the SWAT team armed a robot with a bomb, directed it to the gunman, and blew him to bits.

The author of Standoff, Jamie Thompson, cycles chapters through perspectives—on events and on the issues—from the officers, from family, protesters, a doctor, and the police chief and mayor—people whose lives changed that night.

Aside from the negotiator, who is black, the officers, in Thompson’s telling, all have the colorless view that police decisions should not be questioned—and the officers’ views are the ones most frequently expressed in Standoff. The officers are also portrayed as heroic or tragic. They were.

Note: Jamie Thompson won an Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in writing for her coverage of the gunman’s ambush of Dallas police in July 2016. Thompson originally covered the shooting for The Washington Post and later wrote about it for The Dallas Morning News. She has also contributed to D Magazine, Texas Monthly, and the Tampa Bay Times.

something about Beach House's "Superstar"

 

Beach House is releasing an album, Once Twice Melody, in "chapters." The four songs comprising the first chapter were released in November. One song was "Superstar."

"Superstar" offers sentimentality. Sentimental songs always have a chance with me. I like sentimentality. I like to remember good times from when I was younger because otherwise I just worry about everything that is happening now or might happen in the future. I like to think about the good times in past relationships.

    When you were mine
    We fell across the sky

 

Then the song (and I with it) turns maudlin for a moment.

    Something good
    Never meant to last

 

something about a couple of songs from Coilguns

Right after Thanksgiving, the Swiss noise-rock group, Coilguns, released two songs—the first installment of its new collection of 12-inch vinyl singles, the "Hummus 12-inch Maxi Collection," carried by guitarist Jona Nido's label, Hummus Records. Song one, “Shunners,” opens with thick, three-note progressions glaring down on tumbling drums. A high-strung vocal relives the anxieties of one asking himself how he will make it to the end of the year. The intensity builds as he loses his nerve amid the constant calls for vigilance—“Hold the line! Watch the line! Line the line! Watch the watch!” Approaching two minutes, the song shifts, then finally spasms out something like djent or groove metal, trying to stomp out anxieties that seem only to multiply. The lead guitar bends and loops through more anxious loops, getting nowhere. The song finally, after five minutes, falls apart, worn from worry.

Coilguns usually records live, and recent efforts have been entirely self-produced, like this EP. What is new is a bass guitar. Kevin Galland joined the band in March 2020 to play bass and help mix and master the audio. Song two, “Burrows,” shows off the new, gritty bass with a pummeling, forward-facing groove that knocks down what stands in the way.

This EP and the rest of the "Hummus 12-inch Maxi Collection" are pressed on transparent or transparent-colored vinyl and housed in a picture disc-style sleeve. Side A has the music, and side B has an original drawing from Noé Cauderay screen-printed in La Chaux-de-Fonds by Out of Gas.

Coilguns is not planning many shows for 2022, so the group, which started in 2011, will be producing its fourth studio album.

 

something about a Vandal X best-of

The band’s volume knob goes only one direction.

Vandal X’s noise-rock sound has moved over the last decade from angular punk and metal influences toward sludge and doom, away from bands like The Jesus Lizard and Helmet but still near to Unsane. Now the Belgian band, which formed around 1995, celebrates its career with a best-of album, XXV, accompanied by a compilation of rarities.

The band is a twosome of volume masochists dishing noise-rock fans all they can handle and more. Bart Timmermans is the original singer and guitarist, and Dave Schroyen took over the drum kit in 1999 after the original drummer, Jo Boes, left.

XXV starts with “Fuck ‘m All”—feedback feeds into riffs that punch through the wall. The scream-shout chorus “Fuck ‘em all!” burns through the mic connection. First songs are often statements, and this is a fine one. Drums on “Jacobs Wife” pop with syncopation as the guitar plays a guileless riff that turns out to be a great contrast to the song’s big bass-drum kicks.

On “All Lined Up,” the snare drum cracks out the bars and goes full bore into the chorus, where layered vocals seethe out “All lined up against the fuckin’ wall!” with the barking guitar’s tone buried in the low- and mid-range. XXV has 13 songs, and the last third or so sound more like sludge metal—maybe none more so than “Patient Zero.” The vocal is deeper, the guitar tone has a fuller, more present buzz, and the drums sound gauche. Next to the earlier, faster-paced songs, though, this final stretch drags.

The pandemic delayed the release of XXV, but the band has assured its audience that the best-of will finally come out December 10 (via 9000 Records). It will be offered in a limited-edition white vinyl (remixed and remastered) with a CD of previously unreleased demos, live recordings, and rarities from the band’s “archives.”

something about that dream-like moment between beginning and end

Her eyes tossed bouquets, and I chased after each one. Then, one day, sitting side-by-side on a cafeteria bench—“Okay, I’ll be your girlfriend.” She grew to fill my vision. We lay across the bench, and I felt so good my heart tumbled loose. But, in the very next moment, a centuries-traveled sense leaned in and cursed how her affection would not stay long for me. She was hardly real as it was. I tried to keep my signal-shattered smile a few more seconds.