Busy Weekends, Part 918

Is 918 really the edition we're on for this heading? Why not...

Friday night was a volleyball game at the Blue Pyramid:

But that's more of an establishing shot of our little burg. Up close it's a little more imposing:

Inside is pretty cool:

The seats we had were general admission, and they were great:

Long Beach State battled University of Hawai'i, but 'battled' may be a bit of a stretch, as LBSU swept the match 3 games to 0.

The next day, Cass and Corrie had a volleyball game of their own, and since all the players from the VolleyRaptors, their awesome team name, were at the Pyramid with us, they all got to see each other again a few hours later.

Since Camille was adamant about not going, we chilled at home and got ready for the No King's protest we would bike to once they got home.

Civic action  at its finest: with the youth fully involved.

But, the ocean was in view, which was nice...

Sunday could be my busiest day of the week generally speaking, what with laundry, grocery shopping, the floors (on a good(bad?) day), on top of whatever other cool family stuff we're doing (cashing in free lunch prizes; going to the beach; more bike riding; et al).

Anyway, as busy as it gets, I wouldn't change it for anything...

What are we watching here?

I've been watching baseball for a long time. I've been a fan for possibly longer, and growing up in a Yankees household from my dad, and a Dodgers household from my mom, lead me to being overtly familiar with "Evil Empires(TM)" charges. But...

I've been blessed with watching Jeter kick ass forever in the highest leverage positions. Watching Big Mo kill it every single time except for one. Watching Matsui go-go-Godzilla it in 2009. I got the complicated extra-inning Grand Slam from Freddie last year, matching the excitement of Kirk Gibson back in '88. The Maier-assisted home-run...the Flip Play...Mr. November stuff---and that's all from Jeter.

But what are we seeing now?

I wrote last year about hyperbole and Shohei Ohtani, and somehow this past Friday he topped himself. He had...what, the BEST single game someone can have? Maybe it wasn't clinching the World Series, but holy hell!

First inning, as the starting pitcher, he was on the mound. He walked the first batter, then promptly struck out the side. Three strikeouts in a row. I captured a screenshot showing just how crazy his pitches can be. This was the called third strike for out number 2:

I mean...what can you do with that? Lower outside corner, 100 mph...Seriously WTF? Out number 1 was a swinging whiff. Out number two was this called third-strike above. Out number 3 was another swinging whiff. 

Okay, so far so good. Lots of pitchers have been ass-kickers and dominant to open a game. Big deal. Well, none of them did what he did next: Shohei walked over to the dugout once the top half of the inning was over, dropped his glove, put on his elbow armor, grabbed his helmet and bat, and strolled out to the batter's box to lead off the game for the Dodgers.

Then he hit a 400+ foot homer. His next at bat he hit a homer out of Dodger Stadium. Out of the stadium. The number ascribed to the homer was 469 feet, but it felt like 600. THEN HE HIT ANOTHER HOMER.

In the end, Shohei Ohtani gave up less hits as a pitcher, 2, than homeruns he hit as a batter, 3. He struck out 10 batters, which has happened maybe a dozen times in playoff history. He hit 3 homers in a playoff game, which has happened less than a half-dozen times.

But he did it in the same game.

I'm not sure how long it will take after he retires for us to truly appreciate his game, but I'm going to try to appreciate it right now, as he looks like Babe Ruth mixed with Walter Johnson, being the best of both types of players.

This is really happening...going 50-50 last year and winning the World Series in his first year with the Dodgers was not the high point...?

Cinematic Car Chases

I've yet to go see "One Battle After Another" for a second time (but I'm trying to figure out how to take Corrie with me), but I've been ruminating on the car chases. 

Before seeing the film I'd heard about the wild and original take on a car chase, similar to hearing about the journey through music that we take in Sinners before seeing it---when it happens, I remember thinking, 'Oh, here it is.'

But there are two visceral car chase sequences, one very early, and another much later, likely to become known as The Chase. The first one is less about being chased than it is about getting away, if that makes sense, but you feel it as you watch it. Later on, The Chase is on a whole different playing field, and has callbacks to Bullit.

But that whole enterprise got me thinking about some of movie's better car chase scenes. Obviously Bullit ranks as the originator of the vocabulary, or at least gets credit for it. How it gets filmed, though, is practical and original, and so exciting to see in context in a film that shows its era: it demands you pay attention. When the follower becomes the followed, and the driver snaps his seatbelt, you're tense with anticipation---you know it's going to get crazy.

When Gene Hackman as Popeye is chasing the J train's elevated tracks down Broadway in Brooklyn in The French Connection, you can feel the true danger, since they filmed it without permits. The exhilaration comes from that real peril.

I've see the opening chase scene in Baby Driver, and while I think the cinematic nature of the chase looks nice, I find the getaway highly annoying. He keeps running into cops! He never gets away until the maneuver with the two other red cars and the overpass. I heard about it and saw it very soon after the opening chase sequence in Drive, which I found far superior as a realistic approach to chase scenes goes. It's how it would play out in reality, or at least I could be convinced as much. It's not flashy, a full daylight bank robbery getaway like Baby Driver...Drive is the dive bar that pours its gut-rot scotch into the PBR can for the five-dollar boilermaker, while Baby Driver is an overpriced bar at a themed restaurant in Las Vegas.

Maybe my reaction to the realistic quality in Drive contrasts to the glee I get watching all the cop cars that get destroyed in Blues Brothers. Or how about the general entire movies that are essentially car chases, besides Blues Brothers: Smokey and the Bandit; Road Warrior and Fury Road; all the Cannonball Run movies...

But that brings me back to realism and originality, two things I found in Bullit, The French Connection, Drive, and this new classic, One Battle After Another. All four of these look nothing alike, and feel both realistic and original.

Got My Copy

The news dropped about its eventual release on my birthday, and today was the release:

It got me thinking about the last Pynchon release and my life at that time, about crushing it in a few days...maybe a couple weeks. This book is certainly shorter than Bleeding Edge,  and it may even be shorter than Inherent Vice.

Also, it's been a heavy Pynchon dose recently, what with my recent trip to see One Battle After Another. I have some things I want to say/write about that, but I feel it may be necessary to either see it again or talk it out with a Pynchon head...or both. It's intense, and it seemed so unlikely a movie that like would ever get green-lit in this epoch.  But here we are.

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction!

Schlittler Making Our Night

Seriously...the kid's name is Cam Schlittler. It was fun saying, or trying to say...

On the evening when Corrie headed out to Texas to supervise the construction site there for the next week, I had the Yankees-Red Sox game 3 of their wild card round playing on my laptop.

And some rookie, some flame-throwing kid with an awesome name who grew up a half-hour from Boston, came in and dominated for 8 dazzling innings. His motion was fluid and kept his grip hidden all night. When Boone, the Yankees manager, sent him back out for the 8th inning, I thought back to game 1, when he took Max Fried out when it seemed like it was too early...when Boston folks are happy the pitcher's coming out? And he hasn't thrown that many pitches?

Anyway, Schlittler set a record: 8 innings of no runs and 12 strikeouts with 0 walks...that kind of tells it all. It doesn't come close to the visceral feeling of watching batter after batter flailing away at pitches in the zone, out of the zone (although there were very few of those) and walking back to the bench, befuddled. When I saw a sinker zooming and dropping in the strike zone at 98 mph I thought: tough night for the opposition bats. Fantastic that it's my team making those pitches.

Ever since we moved away from Brooklyn back in 2009 (WAIT---WE LEFT SLO 19 YEARS AGO?), my connection to baseball, and sports at large, has been more tenuous and less, eh, visceral. I've written about many different sports things for this blog, but that's because of the amount of my brain I have dedicated to sports topics rather than the emotional attention I devote to sports...I've not devoted that kind of emotional attention since...2009? When the Yanks won that World Series and we left for Texas the next month?

Watching Eli win a second Super Bowl was definitely cool, even if we watched it Honduras, and of course I was interested in my Yankees last year in the World Series (lol that post was written before Freddie's walk off grand slam), but without reading the newspaper everyday while riding the train, or just drinking a cup of coffee on the stoop, has altered my sporting-emotional-levels, needs, and desires. It's surprisingly easy to care less. Like taking Facebook off your phone.

But still! Have your young kids try to say Schlittler's name! He's freaking awesome! For a storybook night, it was a transportation. And it was great.

Our Kitten Whisperer

Corrie has a nice habit of saying 'Yes' to the animal shelters when they call about fostering kittens. Some times it can have infuriating outcomes---in the short term---like when six kittens all have uncontrollable diarrhea for a week straight. Woof.

But fostering kittens does a few things: it gives the kids the ability to love on baby animals without making the multiyear commitment to having a pet; and it provides Corrie with an overarching structure to fulfilling needs on a daily basis that her brain has been needing since the cancer and chemo and babies and COVID experiences have sapped some focus-ability.

And, while she's obviously the true kitten whisperer, I've got a picture of my son under a pile of either four or five of our last batch of six kittens:

That makes it 14(!) total kittens over the last thirteen months. We even took a quartet to the Cabin. 

Anyway, Cass and Camille have their own, separate relationships with the kittens, and Cass may be a natural kitten whisperer...just like he's a natural athlete, reader, and mathematician...

Pynchon on the Brain

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon's newest book, is due for release in less than a month. Like Bleeding Edge before it, I'll be heading across town on the release date to get a copy in my hands. 

I was planning on starting a rereading of Vineland on the eve of the release of "One Battle After Another," the PTA movie based loosely on said book.

I'm planning on seeing it either by my onesie or with Corrie, who read most of, if not all, of Vineland back in 2012-ish.

I'm getting a presentation ready to send off for submittal for the International Pynchon Week 2026, which will be held in Dortmund:

Also, since I'm here with these thoughts on the brain, I should mention a few Pynchon-tangential items. First, two books (maybe I'll send Stone Junction along with Norm this Decemberween):

Pynchon wrote the intro to Stone Junction, and Matthiessen was one of Pynchon's favorite authors. I loved both of these books. Stone Junction is a roller coaster of Pynchonian batshittery, while Shadow Country is an unmitigated masterpiece about the nature of America and the ability of literature.

And one last thing, the movie "Under the Silver Lake:"

This was the most-Pynchon-movie that wasn't a Pynchon story that I can remember. Check out the trailer here to make your own determination. I'd like to watch it again and discuss it (didn't I already do that?). In any case, along with PTA's "Inherent Vice," "Under the Silver Lake" exists as a Pynchonian-curio, both happy under the same umbrella.