The Half-Baked Spring Preview You've Been Waiting For

There are plenty of awful things about January, but it's not all bad. As we stagger across the hellish waste that is the first month of 2013, there are plenty of things to look forward to. More specifically, there are four.

Once, summer was dead. Heat choked New York City, forcing culture-consuming citizens to flee boiling theaters for polo grounds of the Hamptons or the sideshows of Coney Island. Even after air conditioning made culture possible year-round, the arts have never really given up the summer break. Opera is strictly a cold-weather pursuit. Almost no Broadway plays dare risk a July opening. Until cable TV upended the schedule, summertime on the tube meant reruns, game shows and more reruns. Even film, which feasts on summertime, follows its own nine month schedule, with January, February and March serving as the dead period.

There is something reassuring about all this. How nice it is, at season’s end, to look back over the last nine months and remember when it all began. To rank your favorites, to remember the worst of the bunch, to mourn those plays or television shows that closed before their time. But even better is to be where we are now—in the middle of it all. The holidays, thank God, are behind us, and the next great wave of new stuff is about to hit. We have new plays, new operas, new TV shows, and the worst movies we will see until August. Some of it will be worth remembering—most of it will be trash. In either case, this is what I’m looking forward to loving or hating, across four formats—because in 2013, all culture is the same, so long as it’s longer than 140 characters.

But what are they, you ask? Bwahahahahahahahahaha. You have to click on it to see.

I Quake At The Thought of Dancin' Pinstripes

Because the happiest kind of Mets fan is a rabid Mets fan, part of me welcomed the news, announced a few months ago, that the Yankees are coming to Broadway. When a fan's team is failing—and the Mets look to fail for the conceivable future—the only solace is sports hate, and there is no fatter target than the Bronx Bombers. I thought that Yankee narcissism was maxed out in 2010, but a Broadway play, produced by the same team responsible for Lombardi, promised to take tone-deaf hagiography to the next level.

But what would it be about? Would it give Act I to Murderer's Row, Act II to Mickey and Maris, and Act III to Big Stein and the Core Four? Would it focus on an imagined father-son-duo, who learn to love each other by rooting for the easiest-to-root-for team in sports? Or would they take the Moneyball route, let Bill James write the libretto, and treat the audience to three hours of songs about the poetry of UZR, BABIP, and 162WL%?

New details emerged today about the play that is tentatively titled The Yankees. Well, they sort of did. The off Broadway Primary Stages announced their 2013-14 lineup today, and The Yankees is batting second. But beyond that, we learned little. To wit:

The Yankees tells the generational story of a most extraordinary baseball family, and the game itself. Follow the revered New York Yankees Yogi Berra as he struggles to keep the focus on the team, transgressing the tricky world of dreams, celebrity, and the ever-changing landscape of this beloved American pastime.

A few things are clear. Mentioning this "most extraordinary baseball family" in the first sentence suggests that this play will paint the Steinbrenners in as affectionate a light as the United Scenic Artists can provide. The story will be pegged to Yogi Berra—as good a choice as any, due to his quotable charm and stubborn refusal to die.

(As an aside, let me present my favorite Yogi Berra story, from a Joe Posnanski profile from a year or two ago:

Or the time in Boston that it was so hot that Berra decided to get thrown out of the game. The umpire that day was Cal Hubbard, a former football player who did not listen to much talk before throwing players out of games. Berra figured it would be easy. So he made a few cracks. Hubbard didn't say a thing. Then, Berra started openly arguing about balls and strikes. Again, Hubbard didn't say a thing. Finally, Berra turned and tried to show up Hubbard, the surest way to get thrown out of the game. Hubbard calmly said, "Berra, if I have to be out here in this heat, so do you."

Heh.)

But that one paragraph description raises questions. If the story is pegged to Yogi, does that mean we skip Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio? What does a "generational" story mean, exactly? Generations of Steinbrenners? Generations of Berras? Generations of Yankee fans throwing beer at generations of Sox fans?

As a Met fan, I'll hatefully feast on whatever they put forth. As a theater-type, I'm less gleeful. On the one hand, I'm all for theater companies producing work not targeted at typical theatergoing audiences. It's a fabulous way to make money and introduce new people to the art form, and both of those are nifty things to do. In a way, this kind of fawning sports dramatization is in the tradition of movies like Knute Rockne: All American and Pride of the Yankees. 

(Fun fact: when shooting Pride of the Yankees, Gary Cooper could not, no matter how hard he tried, bat left handed. Rather than force the star to be uncomfortable, the director got him a uniform with a backwards 4 on it, and had him run up the third baseline when he hit the ball. They reversed the image in editing, and everybody was happy.)

But there's something about a project like this that smells like a rat. Will it be cynical? Will it be lazy? Well, it depends on how tough the creators are on the Yankee legend. My dream Yankees would be nothing but the franchise's dark side. Here are a few moments that I would pay Broadway prices to see on stage:

1925. After half a decade of blistering play, Babe Ruth barely made it out of spring training. Severe gastric distress tormented him for the entire train ride back from Florida, forcing him to have intestinal surgery just after the season began. Ruth claimed he upset his stomach by eating "too many hotdogs," but it's long been an open secret that the "stomachache" came from some combination of boozing, whoring and overeating. 

Mickey's Outstanding Experience. In 1972, the Yankees sent form letters to ex-players, asking them to relate an "outstanding experience" from their time at the Stadium. Mickey Mantle replied, "I got a blow-job under the right field Bleachers, by the Yankee Bull pen." As the invaluable Letters of Note relates, his recollection got filthier from there. And by filthy, I mean filthy, so the delicate among you should cover their eyes.

It was about the third or fourth inning. I had a pulled groin and couldn't fuck at the time. She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do with the cum after I came in her mouth. I said don't ask me, I'm no cock-sucker.

Signed: Mickey Mantle, The All-American Boy

The Wife-Swap. 1973's Spring Training opened just as cheerily as 1925's, when pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich announced that, as was the style at the time, they had decided to trade wives. It's a well-known, rather sad story, which Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have talked about turning into a film. Based on the superb '70s hair that distinguished Argo, I imagine Affleck would do a knock-up job.

The 1980s. If postseason success were chest hair, the Yankees would look like Austin Powers. But despite their tradition of smothering success, there are a few bald patches. They never played in the World Series until 1920, when they picked up Babe Ruth, and the decade between Mantle and Jackson was a dry one. But there was no more impotent stretch than the '80s, when the Yankees were, briefly, the second-best team in New York. Also, this happened. I doubt the slow roller towards first will get much stagetime. 

Howie Spira. New York sports were more fun when George Steinbrenner threw his weight around. In 1990, he was banned from day-to-day management of the team for paying gambler Howie Spira $40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, a big-name player who Stein felt was underperforming. The magnificent pettiness of that action, which saw him kept away from the team for three years, is the kind of savory delight that could keep The Yankees from giving audiences a toothache.

Despite their squeaky-clean, sideburns-free image, the Yanks have their dark places. (Particularly the spot under the right field bleachers.) The irony of a show like The Yankees, or whatever it ends up being called, is that is the dark side that makes a character, or a team, palatable. A whitewashed stage show may sell tickets for a few months, but will only be as memorable as Babe Ruth's 1925. 

Now Is Your Chance To Think About James Bond

Continuing my tradition of breaking news harder than any other typist in New York City, I have cracked open an early candidate for scoop of the year.

Spy books are awesome.

Zero Dark Thirty goes into wide release next week, and viewers across the country can expect something that has been lacking from this year’s Oscar season: a movie with some meat on its bones. In terms of running time, that’s a bad thing. No movie has any right to be 160 minutes long. But in terms of storytelling, it’s a positive. This is a war movie that doesn’t hold your hand. Its first two hours are obsessed with the grit of intelligence gathering, and shot through with lingo that will be incomprehensible to all but the most devoted viewers of Homeland. But even when it’s difficult to follow, the film has two things that carry the viewer through: a strong central character, and a touch of authenticity that is, in espionage thrillers, impossible to do without.

Nobody else is telling espionage stories this compelling. For its feverish, brilliant first season, Homeland had this. But by the end of season two, the tension was gone, and the authenticity followed soon after. Skyfall was as gritty as any James Bond film since The Living Daylights, but the villain’s absurd plan meant that it was, when the credits rolled, just a very good Bond movie. For those who like their spies cold, their villains believable, and their armories gadget-free, may I suggest turning to the golden age of espionage: the Cold War.

If you are positively nauseous with boredom, here are three books that can help.

Stupid Stuff I've Done, Illustrated!

A site I've been doing some work for, Narratively, solicited their writers this week for stories about all-nighters. I picked over my brain, looking for memories of all the times in college when I partied 'till dawn, and was finally forced to conclude that partying 'till dawn was just not something I did. 'Till 3, maybe, but seldom dawn.

But then I remembered—all night stories don't have to be fun. In fact, it's better if they aren't! So I sharpened my brain-pencil and got to work telling the story of one of the dumbest things I've ever done, which started with an all-nighter and ended in anguish on the Jamaica LIRR platform.

No matter how neatly they rhyme, don’t trust friends who say, “Early flight? Stay up all night!”

Leaving New York after my freshman year at NYU, I booked an eight a.m. flight and was foolish enough to let my best friend turn my ordeal into a party. With the graceless vigor of those young enough to still have a metabolism, we threw ourselves into an all-nighter fueled by Talking Heads, lamb gyros and the world’s worst Manhattans—an abominable mix of Canadian whiskey and dry vermouth that only a freshman could love. But my friends fell well short of greeting the dawn.

“It’s past two,” they whined. “We’re going to bed.”

Half-drunk and fully alone, I put aside my wistfulness and whirlwinded around the apartment, cramming my crap into any bit of luggage that could hold it. Just before dawn, I staggered out of my dorm for the last time, dragging two rolling suitcases, a three-ton duffel and a Duane Reade bag full of sneakers. Unable to carry my Totally Awesome dorm room posters, I left them behind, and my dorm rooms were never Totally Awesome again. I hailed a cab for JFK and slipped into sleep.

It gets a lot dumber from there. There are nine or so other stories on that page, and they're all doosies. Mine is at the bottom presumably because it provides the kind of moral weight that you want to close a piece with.

The neatest thing, really, is that the good folks at Narratively solicited an illustration from a woman who works at Hatch Show Print, a letterpress shop that can only be called a Nashville institution. I fantasize about one day having a play produced in Nashville—Dark Horse theater producers, if you're reading this, call me—and to see my name in Hatch's big, beautiful, blocky letters. Being illustrated by a Hatch employee will tide me over for now.

The Great Whatsit, And The Evil of Mike Hammer

The last month or so, I've been obsessed with Kiss Me Deadly, an adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel that might be the rawest crime movie this side of The Killing. I wrote about it. Now you read about it.

I’m a crime fiction addict—honestly and unrepentantly—but I’ve found that some of the classics of the genre fail to get me high.  Raymond Chandler called Philip Marlowe “neither tarnished nor afraid . . . the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” That’s nice enough for Phil, but I always found it disappointing. What’s the point of a tough-talking PI if his hardboiled shell conceals a center of sickly sweet Cadbury cream?

Film adaptations of detective classics tend to amplify their hero’s moral side, making his snark into little more than bluster. No matter how hard Sam Spade might crack wise, we know that Bogie would never really do the wrong thing. Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is the exception to this—his Marlowe is truly laid back right until he becomes a killer—but it was made in the ’70s. For years, I have hungered for a film adaptation from pulp’s golden age that did justice to the fact that, to be a private detective, you have to be a motherfucker.

Goodbye, 2012; Goodbye, Jack Klugman

I've spent the last two weeks huddling in a holiday bunker, and will spend the next two in the bunker's deadline annex. Look for a few long stories this month over on—well, nevermind that. I'm sure I'll link you to them when they run.

But in the meantime, I didn't feel like starting work quite yet, and I thought I'd post something that's been bouncing around since last week, when Oscar Mad—I mean, when Jack Klugman died at 90. Most of the obituaries focused on The Odd Couple, but beyond an enduring fondness for that show's theme song, I never really connected to it. Nothing wrong with the show, of course, but it was hardly on TV when I was growing up. Instead, I watched Taxi and Facts of Life, and will sob sob sob when those cast members flit away to the great combination cab stand/boarding school dormitory in the sky. 

I know Klugman mainly through The Twilight Zone, and I know The Twilight Zone mainly through New Year's Eve marathons. So it's topical, y'hear?! Klugman is in a few classic episodes, but none better than "A Game of Pool." Here's part one:

The Twilight Zone

Here are parts two and three. Nobody does working-class pathos quite like Klugman and Serling.

Happy New Year, folks.

For Once, I Wrote Something Serious

A friend of mine at the Observer, unaware of the fact that my normal prose style is blithe foolishness, asked me to write something about escapism and national tragedy, in response to the Newtown massacre. Comedy is more my beat than tragedy, but escapism I understand.

It did not take long for me to turn off Twitter, to shut down Facebook, to ignore NYTimes.com. The Internet can be marvelous—for real-time presidential debate snark or instant updates on the latest Lindsay Lohan trainwreck—but for tragedy, it is entirely too small. I could not bear to watch the reported death toll rise, to see the hand-wringing that came when the press realized it had misidentified the shooter, or to wade through the now-predictable howls for stricter gun control. So I did the natural thing. I turned off my computer, and started watching movies.

I watched Harper, a middling Paul Newman P.I. flick, the ever-delightful Shop Around The Corner and, at my girlfriend’s stern insistence, Love Actually. During the intermissions, I glanced at Twitter for news of the impending R.A. Dickey trade, taking pains to avoid reading about anything of actual importance. For seven or eight hours, Paul Newman chewed gum, Jimmy Stewart sold music boxes, Hugh Grant made puppy dog eyes. And the outside world stayed far outside.

If your hunger for gravity isn't sated, read on. Or just scroll down and read more about The Simpsons.

Why Do I Still Watch The Simpsons? Well, I'll Tell You

It's been a horrifying week, eh? Well, I'm all for taking refuge in escapism, and for me, there's no place more comfortable than Springfield.

One of the most pressing questions of The Simpsons‘ 24 year run—besides “Why has Homer not been arrested for child abuse?”—is, “Why hasn’t Marge ever asked for divorce?” It’s possible her husband is the dumbest man in the universe. He’s certainly the least sensitive. Just off the top of my head, he once gave her a bowling ball for her birthday. When she got interested in folk art, he smashed his car into her popsicle stick sculptures. She cannot have a party without him getting blind drunk. In fact, she can’t get up in the morning without him getting blind drunk. And yet, she never clears out.

When a show runs for 515 episodes (and counting!) it’s impossible for there to be any reasonable continuity. As such, there are lots of different versions of Homer and Marge’s relationship, and different reasons for why she sticks around. In the weakest episodes, she is won over by a grand, last-minute gesture—something sweet that might make up for the horrible thing that Homer did today, but does nothing to explain away the 514 things he’s done before. In the best, the writers manage to show that for all Homer’s catastrophic imbecility, these two have a bond of genuine love.

If you'd like to know why I love Homer too, well, click here, ya numbskull.

Awesome Job Listing Posted

Do you love awesome stuff? Would you like to judge that stuff professionally? Would you describe yourself as possessing "computer literacy" and a willingess to "travel a minimum of approximately 15-20 events per year—nationally and internationally to verify records, and arrange necessary agreements for our presence"?

If so, have I got the job for you! The Guinness Book of World Records publishing company is seeking a records manager for the book's gaming section. It requires the ability to answer  7,500 web inquiries a year, to brainstorm, and to have experience in "video gaming, Internet, social media, games and past times and consumer technology."

By "past times," I assume the listing means "activities which human beings use to pass the time," and not literal knowledge of the past.

I want someone I know to have this awesome job. Please apply for it, and once you get it, please hook me up with all kinds of free records.

If Only Every Play Had This Many Fistfights

Adam Szymkowicz has the kind of last name that keeps reporters up at night. How many Ys? How many Zs? It's giving me heartburn just thinking about it.

But it's worth it, because he's a nice guy and a good playwright. I saw his Hearts Like Fists on Wednesday, and interviewed him yesterday. We talked about Kansas! 

Now Adam Szymkowicz, a playwright known for quick-witted genre play, has dipped his toes into the ever-pleasant waters of geekdom. His Hearts Like Fists has been running for the last few weeks at Long Island City’s Secret Theatre. It closes tomorrow, but like all great superheroes, Adam Szymkowicz will return—in next spring’s Clown Bar, produced by the good people at Pipeline Theater Company. We spoke to Adam yesterday, about, well, all sorts of things.

Where did this play come from?

I don’t remember, exactly. It was a few years ago. I’ve played a few times with genre—like I have a cowboy comedy Hamlet, and a film noir play. I wanted to do something with comic books. I started reading a bunch of X-Men and some other Marvel stuff, and I tried to do my own version of that genre. A world that’s normally more about action, I made about love.

Read on!

Unfortunately, Hearts Like Fists closes tomorrow. But Clown Bar, which opens in March, is gonna be even better. Watch this space for more information.

Well, you don't have to spend all your time watching this space. I probably won't mention Adam again until March. If you want up-to-the-minute information about him, you're better off hiding in his closet or just following him around. But if you're just interested in Clown Bar, check back in spring.