Had nothing nice to say yesterday, so…
But perhaps a good rain came and swept the Rangers out of the Bronx and back to Texas for the deciding last two games. And the Yankees should have already made the upstarts sweat the flight back home.
How awful was Tuesday’s game’s end? I don’t know; it was the very, very rare occasion that I left the TV set before the final pitch, but I was supposed to be somewhere else. And with the end of the MLB season around the corner of the calendar page, I am going to need something else to vent about on here, so…
I went to a comedy show at Akbar, which is around the corner from me. Knowing that I was damned if I do, damned if I don’t, I got there at the prescribed time and then had to sit through a handful of mostly unfunny comediennes. There was one male, but I stand by my original take on the lineup. And I don’t see anyone with drinks in their hands, or making the back and forth to the bar (except for me that is) but I want whatever else it was that most of the rest of the crowd was imbibing, because they were having a laugh riot.
The closing act, and the reason I was there in the first place, was Mary Mack from Minneapolis. She, on the other hand, was very funny and rather charming and the rare exception of an attractive comedienne. I think you have to have some sort of affection for the Mid-West to get a lot of her act – and it is an act I found out afterwards speaking with her in the bar.
Now, here’s where I tie it all in – because when I informed Mary that I had missed the end of the Yankee playoff game to come see her, she offered to let me use her MLB package sign-in to see the end of the game. Now, seeing how I, a virtual stranger (although we have a friend in common which is how she came to my attention in the first place) and the fan of the team that knocked her team out of the playoffs, this seemed like more than the 20% Midwestern “nice” that I have been told about. The fact that she is a big enough baseball fan to have the MLB package was far from being lost on me.
Yesterday’s Yankee playoff game felt like a rally to restore sanity; at least mine, maybe CC Sabathia’s as well. Backs against the wall and really not wanting to let the Rangers celebrate at Yankee Stadium and in front of the fans, a fourth and final loss was simply not going to be. I knew it even before the Yanks came to bat.
I’ve been updating friends who can’t watch live (stupid jobs!) via text message for years as a matter of fact. But seeing how I’ve been furnishing nothing but bad news, I told a friend in New York that the Yankees were up 5-0 before they had even come to bat in the first. And ok, I got it wrong by six outs, but it’s good to know the powers were functioning at capacity.
Giants downed the Phillies, again, in the nightcap and the guys in pink and their manager seem to have pushed the panic button. My prediction of Philadelphia in seven is still technically possible, but if you’ve been watching the great pitching does seem to be doing in the good hitting and the Phils (like the Yanks) have not been hitting well.
Living in Los Angeles, I came to realize as I was chatting some with the guy in the tattoo shop chair (I watch most of the games in my friend’s tattoo shop as I don’t have the cable TV) who’s a local that the worst thing possible is a Yankee/Giant World Series. And that’s what I’d like to hand them…
Last night I went to see Hugh Cornwall play Stranglers songs at El Cid. And with no respect to the club or its awesome manager/booker Dave Knapp, it was amusing, but not terribly entertaining. Yes, I was prepared for it to be the aged sausage fest that it was, but really old guys? Do you really have to wear old guy t-shirts to see old, old guy play old songs? We get that you’re old and you’ve been cool for a long time, but all I saw were Damned (including my own friend!), Devo and Stooges t-shirts.
Hugh, looking gaunt and tired, opened with “Nice ‘n Sleazy” a Stranglers’ classic, and I do mean that. And I closed my eyes and enjoyed hearing that song played louder than I had probably ever heard before. But by the second song of the first set, I was pretty freakin’ bored. It only went downhill from there. I swear this is true: they made “Always the Sun” which was never a heavy metal classic, sound like a Cyndi Lauper song and I am not kidding.
And all of the old New York punk bias came floating down. The Stranglers were *always* old, they had beards (Cornwall barely has hair on his head these days) and wore corduroy. And the keyboards? They actually could have used some of those. At times it was as if Hugh was trying to re-invent some of the old songs as Killing Joke songs, but that didn’t work for me either until they were joined, albeit briefly, by Frankie Fanti playing a beautiful, green Gretsch hollow-body. I took a picture of that and it was the only picture I took all night.
And to the cute young brunette who I watched worm her way in front of me, felt as she pressed back against me, but when I noticed your Angry Samoans t-shirt and realized it was most assuredly out of your father’s closet it was time for me to back up. I back up well these days…