A Brilliant Idea

Sometimes, you hear a brilliant idea, one that you get instanteously and have to pursue.

Watching the broadcast of this year's historic, most-boring-ever Oscars -- I mean, Martin Scorese finally wins Best Director and then they play canned music over the standing ovation and Marty stands up and thanks every agent in town, woo woo -- what got me was the Oscar for Best Short Film (or whatever that category is called). The winning nominee was "West Bank Story." I didn't get for a second and then they started showing Palestinians and Israelis approaching each other in lines, snapping their fingers.

Just like West Side Story.

That's genius. I have got to see this one.

The Perfect Song

Being the tragically unhip guy that I am, I recently have gotten into a couple of songs that I think the young people were into a year or so ago. First, I heard Modest Mouse's Ocean Breathes Salty about a month ago and started listening to that all of the time. Then, I heard the whole thing of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy for the first time and really got into that. It being an iPod world, I loaded them both onto my little external music brain in an elegantly-designed sliver and now listen to those two songs first when I get in my car or start at the gym.

And those two songs got me thinking about the kind of songs that take over your brain. There's a certain perfection to that kind of song. They're basically three (or six nowadays) minutes of perfectly-executed music. You listen to them eight times in a row. You listen to them whenever you get the chance. What is it that makes a Perfect Song?

Well, in my purportedly humble opinion, here are some things.

You have to have catchy music, of course. I thought Ocean Breathes Salty was catchy, but then I heard Crazy with its beat and the background singing and the crazy Bee-Gee-esque lead vocals. It's really good if you've got some kind of unusual musical hooks like, say, the Irish music in Dexy's Midnight Runners' "Come On Eileen," the Scottish (I think because, you know, the song is not crap and, if it's not Scottish, it's crap) music in Big Country's "In A Big Country" or the really prominent fat bass guitar riff in Cake's "Going the Distance."

You have to have some lyrics that get in your head, like Ocean Breathes Salty's "Well, that is that, and this is this, you tell me what you want and I tell you what you get, you get away from me." Such catchy lyrics, however, do not necessarily have to make much sense for a song to be a Perfect Song. Hell if I know what Ocean Breathes Salty is actually about, other than a guy being mad at a girl who may or may not believe in multiple lives like Shirley Maclaine. Other Perfect Songs are similar. I couldn't get Smashmouth's Walking on the Sun out of my head for days. It has been, I don't know, seven or eight years since that one came out and my best stab at what the lyrics mean is that things were better back in the '60s and '70s when people smoked pot instead of crack. If your lyrics are too elliptical, however, you can't be a Perfect Song. It's been about 19 years and I still have no idea what U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" is about.

The problem with Perfect Songs, however, is that times change and more Perfect Songs come along. For example, I was in the grocery store today waiting (and waiting) at the deli counter for a sandwich and Human League's "Don't You Want Me" came on. Now that was a Perfect Song in 1982 or 1983 when it came out. I mean, you have these great half-way disco beats going over this awesome he-said-she-said exchange where the only thing that the starcrossed lovers can agree on is that he found her working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. But, geez, does that song scream 1982 or 1983 or what? It's in there with Level 42's "There's Something About You" and Kajagoogoo's "Too Shy" as Perfect '80s Songs that still sound great, but definitely are of a time.

Now, what you've undoubtedly noticed here is that I'm talking about a lot of one-hit wonders as Perfect Songs. That is no coincidence, I think. I would bet that each of those bands just worked and worked on their babies to make sure that they were Perfect. Eventually, they were polished like a gem stone. But, then, suddenly, it's a big hit and you don't have the time to both make your song perfect and hit the market when you need to do so. Your next song isn't Perfect and someone else's is.

Now, it's very interesting to compare Perfect Songs to songs that most everyone agrees are classics, timeless, Great Songs. It's weird, but Great Songs don't have to be Perfect Songs. Let's take the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." This is a Great Song. It has just layers and layers of music. Mick really outdid himself on the lyrics, weaving in Pontius Pilate (and thus Jesus), Anatasia, Nazis and the Kennedy brothers, among others. Then you overlay all that with the fact that you've got one of the biggest bands ever putting themselves in the shoes of Lucifer. That is one ambitious song, but they pulled if off.

Is Sympathy for the Devil, however, a Perfect Song? No, it is not. The "woo-wooing" toward the end is too loud, goes on too long and is too lame for "The World's Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band."

You can think of other Imperfect Great Songs. The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" has been exalted in this space, but it is not a Perfect Song because it has that totally superfluous part at the end after the music goes quiet. (The Mermaid says that part is scary and asks us to fast-forward through it every time. You can't be a Perfect Song if you scare my kid.) The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter?" Great Song, but not Perfect because it has that loud, jarring harmonica solo. It just doesn't take much to prevent a song from being a Perfect Song.

In fact, it seems pretty rare that a Great Song is also Perfect. I can't think of too many. Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On? The Rolling Stones' Jumping Jack Flash. U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. (A song's title can't prevent it from being Perfect or else U2 would have gotten dinged for the preposition at the end of that one, which brings me to a totally unrelated point. Have you heard these commercials for orange juice where the slogan is something like "Completely Unfooled Around With?" They make me want to tear large patches of hair out of my head every time I hear them. Read Strunk & White or Eats, Shoots and Leaves, for God's sake. You're college-educated advertising people. Stop dangling your prepositions.) Knowing just enough about rap to be dangerous, I'd say The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" is both a Great and Perfect Song, while Coolio's "Fantastic Voyage" is Perfect, but isn't Great.

There are fence-sitters. Does the weird fact that Stevie Wonder's "You Are The Sunshine of My Life" -- a certified Great Song -- opens with singers you never hear again prevent it from being a Perfect Song? Close one. Is OutKast's Hey Ya -- a pretty damn Perfect Song -- too loopy and cute to be a Great Song? I'd said "yes," partly because I think Gnarls Barkley made a similar and better song.

Now, I know that not everyone -- maybe not anyone -- will agree with this particular musical theory, but, hey, you try to get Crazy out of your head.

Sports Oddity

There's a very odd phenomenon in sports, one that just played out in the NFL playoffs. The big story was, of course, Peyton Manning and the Colts getting the monkey off their back by winning the Super Bowl. Yeah for them. Go Colts. But what's weird is how they did it and how similar it was to other teams who had monkeys on their posterior sides.

The Colts had to go through their nemesis, the Patriots, who had beaten them like a drum for a few years, at least a couple of times in the playoffs. Moreover, they had to beat the NFL's big man, the NFL ursa major, Tom Brady, who had just won a game for the Patriots against the Chargers that the Patriots never, never should have won. Now that's not very unusual. To be the best, you frequently have to beat the best. When Steve Young finally got the 49ers to the Super Bowl, they had to go through the Cowboys team that had beaten them the previous two years. Back in the early '90s, the Pistons first had to get through the Celtics after years of trying to get to the NBA Finals, then lost to the Lakers, then had to beat the Lakers. Michael Jordan's Bulls then had to get past the Pistons to win a ring. So going through the best team to win a ring obviously isn't that unusual.

What's unusual is how teams with monkeys on the backs go through the most spine-wrenching contortions to do it. Specifically, the monkey-laden teams dig themselves big holes, deep dark holes and then climb out of them in unreal, karma-changing ways. The Colts, of course, got themselves down 18 points to the Patriots in the first half of the AFC championship game and then came back to win in the biggest comeback in the history of that game.

This kind of thing goes back a very long way. For example, the Dodgers lost to the Yankees in the World Series in 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953 before finally beating the Yankees in 1955. How did they do it? They lost the first two games in 1955 and then came back to become the first team to come back from a 2-0 deficit. The Cowboys had beaten the 49ers twice in the NFC championship game in the 1970's, in very painful fashion (I believe that, in one of those games, the Cowboys scored two touchdowns in the last couple of minutes to win by about four). How did the 49ers finally get to the Super Bowl? They had to beat the Cowboys with Joe Montana hooking up with Dwight Clark with 57 seconds left. (And, as I recall, all of the calls went for the Cowboys in that game, too.) After the Dodgers lost the 1974 World Series, and the 1977 and 1978 World Serieses (serieses? seria?), they had to come from 2-0 down again to win in 1981.

And, of course, there's the mother of all comebacks, the Red Sox coming back to beat the Yankees in 2004. OK, no team had ever come back from 3-0 down in a 7-game baseball series. It hadn't happened in the NBA and only once or twice in the NHL. Not only that, but the Red Sox were a run down in the bottom of the 9th with the best postseason closer ever, Mariano Rivera, pitching. That is a bad, bad, bad situation. And how did they dig themselves out? Dave Roberts stole second base. The Red Sox stole a base?!? They never steal bases. And the rest is history.

It's just very weird how teams with the monkey on their backs seem to have to go through gut-wrenching, soul-bearing crises against their worst enemies to win. And woe is to the team that doesn't pull it off. The Kings missed their free throws in Game 7 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals against the Lakers and their bodies fell apart in 2003, 2004 and 2005 until finally their players lost the mojo (and parts of their knees). Damn, that sucked.

It Doesn't Suck Too Bad, Star Wars Ed.

Once upon a time, someone in or associated with The Muse's family asked me how I liked a movie or something and I responded, "Well, it didn't suck too bad." I have yet to live that comment down. I now have decided to love my problem to death by starting a new feature here on The Webbed Toe called, surprisingly enough, It Doesn't Suck Too Bad. When you see the header It Doesn't Suck Too Bad, you will know that The Webbed Toe is rising to defend some unfairly maligned piece of our culture, political figure, sports team or other random thing about which I have decided to write. This will be a periodic feature, although it will only show up when it's interesting to me.

As you can tell from the header here, the first edition of It Doesn't Suck Too Bad concerns, as do many of the posts here, Star Wars. Today, The Webbed Toe rises in defense of The Return Of the Jedi.

As all sentinent beings know, The Return of the Jedi was the third movie of the original trilogy and is now also known as "Ep. VI," or, to some, "the worst one of the good movies," "the one with the freakin' Ewoks" or "the one that wasn't very good, but at least didn't have Jar Jar Binks." It is the red-headed stepchild of the first trilogy and stood in its accepted place as the only Star Wars movie that sucked for a very long 16 years until Phantom Menace came along and demonstrated what a Star Wars movie that truly sucks actually is.

But let us revisit The Return of the Jedi. At Enthusio's urging, we sat down and watched the whole thing a few weeks ago. Then, the movie has been on HBO this month, so the HBO Effect kicked in and I have been watching five-minute snippets of it periodically. So I'm primed for this one, baby.

Now just about everyone who has seen The Return of the Jedi admits that the first hour of the movie rocks. (Well, except for my grandma, who went with us to see the movie when it first came out because my mom decided to surprise me by taking us to see the movie on a trip to our big city in association with a more regular shopping trip. Grandma would always go on a shopping trip to the big city because, you know, that's where the closest Standard Brands was. Anyway, Grandma must not have liked the Return of the Jedi because she fell asleep. I don't know what got her, although it could have the damn Ewoks.) I mean, what's not to like?

Right off the bat, this was the first time we ever saw Jabba the Hutt. Wow, there was a creation. A giant, nasty slug who was keeping poor Han Solo frozen in carbonite on the wall. Cool! And then the good guys all show up in disguise to try to save Han. Cool! C3PO wigs out when Luke's hologram says that Luke is giving the droids to Jabba. Funny! One of Jabba's henchmen starts crying when Luke kills the giant monster thing that Jabba keeps around to eat people for entertainment. Also funny! (I know the name of that thing, but it's not coming to me right now. It's 7:20 in the morning.) "They're going to throw you in the Sarlaac, where you will be digested for a thousand years." No way! The whole shootout at the Sarlaac. Awesome! Oh yeah, and Princess Leia in the gold bikini. Young men's minds everywhere were opened to new, previously unimaginable possibilities.

So it's the second hour of the movie that's the problem. Now let's dissect that. What does the second hour of the movie have? It has the speeder chase through the forest of Marin, excuse me, Endor. Pretty cool. It has the Emperor being all evil. Again, pretty cool. It has the drama that the new Death Star actually is operational. An Imperial trap! God, are they evil! Ultimately, it has the destruction of the new Death Star (and, as noted in Clerks, all those independent contractors who were still working on it because it wasn't done).

Most importantly, the second hour of the Return of the Jedi has the moment when Darth Vader saves Luke because Luke is his son and, hey you know, that's way more potent than the "power of the Dark Side." (When you read that last sentence, say "the power of the Dark Side" out loud in your best James Earl Jones impression. It will really add to the experience.) That's the climax of the whole trilogy, man. Vader picking up the Emperor as he's death-raying Luke and throwing that old SOB down into the Death Star's reactor core (or something, I can't imagine the Imperial General Services Department would be so sloppy as to design a Death Star that left the Emperor's lair open to direct access to the nuclear core -- that seems like a very good way to get fired or choked to death by the Force). That was it. The end. The thing. The moment. Good triumphing over evil. Yeah, Lando got to blow up the Death Star, but that was an anticlimax at that point. (I mean, really, Lando? What did he do to deserve the honor? Serve up Han like a pork chop? Try to use some awesome Billy Dee moves on Leia?)

So why is the Return of the Jedi considered to suck so universally? Well, I think it comes down to the Ewoks. Yes, they certainly did suck. In retrospect, they were really the first sign that George Lucas, if left entirely to his own devices, will do stupid things. (Letting your kids name the characters? That's how you end up with Sith lords being named Count Dookoo. Oooooh, real scary.) As The Muse once brilliantly asked, why couldn't Endor have been the Wookie planet? Imagine how awesome that would have been. OK, and there was unnecessary mushiness with the whole Leia-is-Luke's-sister thing. But, jeez, that wasn't that bad. It's really just the Ewoks that are the problem.

So, when we look back at the Return of the Jedi, with the perspective that comes with having suffered through Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones and some of Revenge of the Sith (because some of that movie was pretty good), I think we should all agree that we should forgive the Return of the Jedi for the Ewoks. In fact, with DVD technology, we probably can just skip their scenes now. If you do that, I submit to you that the Return of the Jedi well deserves its place in the original Star Wars triolgy. Cut it some slack. It Doesn't Suck Too Bad.

Yin, Yang and Y.A. Tittle

Besides being a Hall of Fame quarterback, Y.A. Title has nothing to do with this post. I just needed a football player whose name started with Y to go with Yin and Yang.

Anyway, the annual football-apoolza of the Super Bowl got me thinking about football. As any decent sports fan knows, football has become by far the most popular spectator sport played in the U.S., at least in terms of attention paid and money bet. (Simply due to the relatively low number of football games, I suspect that far fewer football fans attend football games than other fans attend baseball games or basketball games.) There is a special football network, NFL Network. Many football fans are in multiple fantasy football leagues, as well as football pools. Many of those football fans probably bet on football games, and not just professional football games, but college football games, too. Lots of football fans wear football-related paraphernalia, whether or not they’re watching football games or not watching football games. The craziness about football seems to have really increased in the last few years. What is it that has triggered this increased obsession about football? I mean, football more or less took off when ABC introduced Monday Night Football, which I believe was shortly after the two professional football leagues, the National Football League and the American Football League, merged in 1970. Plus, you know, the more people are obsessed with football, the more they say the word “football” because, when people talk about football, they say “football” every third word. Right, football fans of football? (I once tried to read a book about the history of salt – I’m a geek, I know, no further comment is necessary – which was called, appropriately enough, “Salt.” I stopped reading it after about a hundred pages. I had not anticipated how tiring it would be to keep reading the actual word “salt” at least twice in every sentence.)

So why has the sports-loving word gotten so much more obsessed with football in the last few years?

Here’s a theory.

As we all know, football is a uniquely American game. We’re really the only place where football – not futbol – is played. Unlike our other classically American, non-football sports – baseball and basketball – football hasn’t really taken off in other countries. More than other sports, then, you would expect football to be more purely representative of American culture.

Football is a polarized, specialized game. Players generally play position and they for damn sure play on one side of the football. You play offense or you play defense. (When someone switches for any time at all, like Troy Brown on the Patriots, people behave like they have seen a unicorn. A really muscular manly unicorn, kind of like the centaurs in the Harry Potter books, because, you know, it’s football.) In fact, a lot of football players are assigned to only play on very particular offensive or defensive plays. There are “nickel backs,” who only play on defense and only when the other team basically has to pass. There are “third down backs,” who basically only play on offense and only in those same situations. There are so many substitutions going that offenses sometimes will try to run up to the line and snap the ball really fast to stop the defense from shuttling eight guys on and off the field between plays. All of these specialized guys then train their bodies to do their specialized things, so their collisions are very efficient in their speed and ferocity. This then seems to lead to a really over-the-top mentality, particularly among defensive players, who seem to relish thinking of themselves as, and being, basically guided missiles.

Why is this relevant? I think it’s relevant because, in the last few years and concurrently with football’s explosion in “importance,” our country has been very polarized. Beginning no later than Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky mess, continuing through the disputed 2000 election, and the Iraq war, and the 2004 election, and the 2006 election, we have been a very divided country. Classes of people view their roles in our politics basically as being guided missiles for their side. In this context, it seems unsurprising that the sport that best embodies these tensions has really taken off.

Now contrast football in these terms to baseball and basketball. Those sports generally require players to play offense and defense and to prepare themselves to do both. (The fact that the designated hitter messes this up in baseball is the reason why that thing is such an abomination. I agree with Crash Davis: “I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter.”) Like the Force, they require balance or at least some semblance of it. (I’ll bet you thought you might get through this post without any Star Wars reference. Sorry about that.) They have the yin and the yang.
Football doesn’t have yin and yang and our country hasn’t really in the ten years or so either. It’s like football got its chocolate in our politics’ peanut butter and everyone is having Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The big ones, too, not those little “Fun Size” ones you get at Halloween.

Scenes From The Airport

Spent some time in the airport this week. Among other things:

1. Missed an earlier flight home by 10 minutes due to a missed freeway turn and spent another three hours at the airport.

2. Security took my 5.1-ounce tube of Neutrogena shaving lotion and threw it away, while allowing me to keep about six travel-size bottles of shampoo, toothpaste, hair gel and other grooming substances because they each were under 3.4 ounces. That 1.7 ounces per bottle apparently threatens our national security. If you keep liquid explosives in SEPARATE 3.4-ounce bottles, well, that’s no problem.

3. Turned on my laptop, almost instantly identified a wireless network named “Free Public WiFi” and almost just as instantly discovered that my laptop could not connect to that network. Asked the guy at the horrendously-overpriced airport bakery where I bought a cookie if there was Internet access in the airport and was told “no.”

4. Overheard the single rudest one side of a telephone conversation that I have ever heard. To start, this was in the restroom and the caller was using the facilities. The sit-down facilities. The conversation then went something like this: “I hate when rude b**ches give me s**t like that . . . . s**t, she’s too far away to give me p***y anyway.” Click. Flush.

Go California

We have our issues here in California. Most of the water is in the northern third of the state and most of the people are in the southern third -- on the other side of 3,000 ft. mountains. Houses cost about as much as the budget of some small cities. We have earthquake faults spread around like spaghetti thrown against a wall to see if it's done. Paris Hilton lives here.

But, damn, you have to love a place where you can wear shorts on Super Bowl Sunday.

Nancy, Tony and Lovie

2007 is starting out to be a pretty decent year or at least a year of some good milestones. I speak here of course of the facts that, for the first time in the 231-year history of our country and the 218-year of our Constitutional democracy, we have a female Speaker of the House of Representatives. As the Speaker is technically the head of the legislative branch and there has never been a female President or female Supreme Court Chief Justice, this is the first time a woman has been the head of one of the three branches of government. No matter your politics, this is a big deal. Go Nancy Pelosi!

Perhaps just as historic or at least as relevant to our culture these days, we have the fact that one of the Super Bowl teams has an African-American coach. In fact, both teams do, of course. No matter on whom you are betting -- of course, with the Super Bowl, it is possible to bet on both teams in one way or another, as well as the coin flip and the possibility that there will be nudity at some point during halftime (with Prince being the halftime entertainment, I personally will be betting that something inappropriate will happen during halftime, although I doubt he'll play Darling Nicky) -- go Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith!

What is interesting is the different routes by which these things have happened.

It really wasn't that long ago that there literally were no women in congressional leadership. Nancy Pelosi was elected minority whip less than 10 years ago. From that point to the time that she ascended to the Speakership, I don't think that there were any other women in the top three or four congressional leadership spots in either party. Pelosi was more or less on her own. Pelosi becoming speaker therefore was really a very significant individual accomplishment. After the 2004 election, she, along with Rahm Emanuel, apparently decided that the Democrats needed to recruit moderate or even rather conservative candidates in a lot of districts if they ever wanted to be in the majority again. That was some thinking outside of the box, particularly because Pelosi might represent the most liberal district in the country. Pelosi becoming speaker thus seems like a very individual accomplishment.

The African-American football coaches in the Super Bowl, on the other hand, seem like more of a culmination of a long group slog. I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated from about 1979 to 1990 or so and have read it on and off since. During that time, the magazine frequently wrote articles about the lack of African-American head coaches in the NFL. I mean, they were talking about Tony Dungy as a possible head coach by about 1985. He kept not getting interviewed, not getting jobs. The Raiders finally hired Art Shell in about 1989, he stunk, got fired and then wasn't followed by another African-American head coach for years. The situation got so horrendous that the NFL adopted a rule that requires any team interviewing for a head coach to interview at least one minority candidate. And Dennis Green got hired and came really, really close to getting to the Super Bowl -- if Gary Anderson hadn't missed his first field goal of the year in about the last 2 minutes of the Vikings-Falcons NFC championship game in about 1997, the Vikings would have gone to the Super Bowl. And Tony Dungy finally got hired in Tampa Bay and had really good teams, couldn't get them to the Super Bowl, got fired and watched as Jon Gruden took his team to win the Super Bowl the next year. And Lovie Smith, after a lot of probably token interviews, but got hired by the Bears -- as the lowest-paid NFL coach.

Meanwhile, morons like Wade Phillips -- who benched Doug Flutie as QB for a playoff game after Flutie [full disclosure here: Doug Flutie is one of my personal heroes] had led the team to the playoffs -- and semi-retirees like Steve Spurrier kept getting big-money NFL jobs. (I personally found it hilarious that, in the game that Phillips benched Flutie, Phillips' team -- the Bills -- got beat on the Music City Miracle. Instant karma got him, for sure.)

So, given all of the obstacles, it really is a remarkable triumph for African-American coaches generally to have both Super Bowl coaches be African-Americans.

Futher-so, you have like a year that starts with two major glass ceilings being broken. Maybe 2007 will be a good one. Seven is a lucky number. I just hope I get 7 in a Super Bowl pool because that always rocks. That is almost always a winner.