Bobby Abreu, we hardly knew ye...

It's been a weekend of mixed emotions for the die hard Phillies fan such as myself. First, David Bell was traded to Milwaukee for nobody, which is a shame because it came right as he finally got on my good side for the first time since 2004 by playing like a competent major league third basemen.

The big shebang was yesterday, of course, when the Phillies traded Bobby Abreu and Cory Lidle to the Yankees for four people of little consequence. Finally, Rheal Cormier, who, like Bell, had finally gotten back on my good side after a disastrous 2005, was traded to Cincinnati for a prospect of middling talent.

So holy crap, where do I start?

First of all, I'm sadder than anybody to see Bobby Abreu go. We sports fans of Philadelphia like to pride ourselves as being more knowledgeable than the average fans, but the way we treated Abreu never really reflected this. He's been one of the best hitters in all of baseball for almost a decade, and what do we do? We rag on him because he doesn't dive into the right field wall like Aaron Rowand would (apparently we'd be better off with more players who play hard-nosed defense and have an on base percentage of .322 and less players who play average defense (and yet have an amazingly strong arm) and have an on base percentage of .427 and also hit 100+ RBI every year). Any team in the league would be happy to have Abreu, and any team would be better with him than they are without him.

If it's true that he was traded to free up the money that we would pay him, which it seems to be, this reflects extremely low standards by the Phillies' GM, Pat Gillick. Remember when he vowed not to trade Abreu unless he could get a top tier starter in return? That standard sure dropped. It seems like these days all he's worth is a shortstop who might someday hit in the 8 hole for a team like Pittsburgh. And hell, let's throw in Cory Lidle too! It's not like the Phillies have any problems with starting pitching...

So here's what to expect from Bobby now that he's joined the Evil Empire: he'll be rejuvenated, find his power stroke again, be a 30/30/.300 guy again, and win a World Series or two.

Are we used to seeing former Philadelphia athletes win elsewhere yet? Curt Schilling sure didn't mind leaving. Scott Rolen doesn't have a ring yet, but does play for one of the most consistently great teams in the league. And we didn't get anything of value in return for those guys either! (Placido Polanco excluded, but we traded him for a relief pitcher who's currently in jail in Venezuela.)

So with the Phillies having emphatically declared themselves "sellers" and not "contenders" (check back in '08, says Gillick), here's the shortlist of teams with old allies to root for during the remainder of the 2006 season:

- Detroit Tigers - They have the aforementioned Placido Polanco, plus they're the feel-good story of the year, considering how badly they've stunk for quite a long time. They now have the best record in the league.
- Cincinnati Reds - Another story of a rising underdog, they also have former Phillies Eric Milton and Rheal Cormier.
- Boston Red Sox - Curt Schilling, Mike Timlin, and manager Terry Francona are the old pals here. But they all were with the '04 team that won.
- New York Yankees - It's time to think the unthinkable. The Yankees have Abreu and Lidle. They have Phillie fan favorite Sal Fasano, who's not quite the same without his hair and fu manchu, but is still the same Sal Fasano who busts his ass for every single foul ball and who used to drink 30 beers every day. Their third base coach is former Phillies shortstop (1970-1981) and former Phillies manager (2001-2004) Larry Bowa. And on top of all that, I find myself almost feeling sorry for Douchebag Supreme Alex Rodriguez, who really, truly has no way to stop fans from booing him. He could hit .400, and people would complain that he still got out 60% of the time. In other words, he's a little like Bobby Abreu was in Philadelphia. Except that Bobby Abreu wasn't a pretty boy douchebag, no matter what some people said. But still, with all that, let's put it this way: if the World Series comes down to the Yankees and the Mets, we have a clear choice.

Finally, one more note on Abreu: did anybody see his post-game interview with Harry Kalas and Chris Wheeler yesterday? Bobby proved himself a man of utmost class and dignity, and deserves all the respect that any of us can possibly give to an overpaid professional athlete. I'm going to miss him, and even knowing that he'll be playing for the Yankees, I'll still root for him.

Fiery Furnaces & Man Man update/the one-year anniversary of tomsmashblog

A month ago today, I saw the Fiery Furnaces and Man Man at the Theatre of Living Arts in Philly. I wrote about it on this site a couple days later.

Well, guess what! Now you too can feel some of the immeasurable insanity that I experienced that night, thanks to National Public Radio! Here is your link. You can download or stream live sets from both Man Man and the Fiery Furnaces, played live at the 9:30 Club in Washington three days after I saw them.

I tell you what, that stuff is going straight onto the ol' mp3 player.

In other news, my own blog turns one year old today. For nostalgia's sake, here is the somewhat uninteresting first post here. As you can see, the idea to post on a regular schedule fizzled out almost immediately. Oh well. Let's see if I make it another year.

Ever wonder how on Earth you got to where you are?

Sunday night was an interesting night for me. I know I said when I started this here blog that it wouldn't be an account of my day-to-day life, but I promised to several people that I would post this.

I was at a friend's house with some other friends on Sunday night. It was normal partyish thing with normal partyish activities. Then, suddenly and without warning, and as far as I can tell, for no reason whatsoever, people's clothing started coming off. Look:


That was before the gals' pants started coming off too. There are plenty more pictures where that came from, all taken with my shitty camera phone (and many of them by other people who commandeered my phone, so I'm only sort of a creepy voyeur or something). Suffice it to say that there are more than half a dozen people who are going to have to pay me a lot of money to keep quiet if they ever plan on running for a high-profile political office. Especially Alex:


So now if anybody asks whether I have a picture of myself in my underwear, I can answer yes. Because people ask me that all the time, apparently. But I'm not posting that one.

Anyway, to the people who asked/demanded that I post this stuff on the internet, here you go. You may revel in your shame(lessness).

Final side note: the Blogger spell-checker recognizes "shitty" as a word, but not "blog."

The Flaming Lips = Gods among men

Here's a picture I took tonight of a Mr. Wayne Coyne, of the Flaming Lips. He opened the Lips' set by surfing the crowd in a giant inflatable plastic ball, and there he is.

I'll have more elaborate thoughts on my third Lips show eventually, but for now I'm just going to say that I'm once again dumbstruck with awe and joy at the mere existence of such an amazing live experience. It's impossible to feel down at this point, which for me is saying a lot. Everybody in the world should see them at some point.

I love the Flaming Lips.

Syd Barrett: 1946-2006

On March 24, 2006, I happened to be thinking about Syd Barrett. I wrote this:

"Wouldn't it be neat if, after Syd Barrett (link for those not fully aware of who that is) quietly passes away alone in his home in Cambridge, his family finds and releases a series of mind-blowingly amazing fully finished albums, proving that he never lost his gift after all? One can hope anyway, right? Happy belated 60th, Syd. (Two months late is better than not at all.)"

It's now July 11, and Syd has quietly passed away in his home in Cambridge. He will be mourned briefly by obsessives like me, and will be gone, but not forgotten, much in the same way as he lived for the past 35 years.

As celebrity deaths go, this one isn't particularly tragic, but it's sad because we never got the chance to hear Syd talk about himself. It's every Syd fan's dream to hear from the man himself about what happened to him in the late 1960s, what he's been doing, what he thinks. Our biggest loss is that we have only hearsay, rumors, and stories that may or may not be true told by people three steps removed. Syd will forever be a mystery, in death even more so than he was in life.

This is a shame because Syd is the quintessential musician who's famed more for his legend than for his music. It's a shame because not enough people will ever truly appreciate the ramshackle brilliance of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (not to mention The Madcap Laughs and Barrett). And it's a shame because Syd may have died without ever knowing that there were people who wanted more, not just more music, but more of Syd in general.

In closing, I'm trying as hard as I can not to sign off with "shine on you crazy diamond," but it's hard to find something as appropriate that works as well (for those unaware, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond was written by the Barrett-less Pink Floyd as a tribute to Syd). So go ahead, Syd. Shine on.

A Soccer-stupid American watches the World Cup final

Before Sunday, it had been at least eight years since I'd watched an entire soccer game. I know I was mildly interested in the 1998 World Cup, but even then, I'm not sure if I watched an entire game, start to finish. It's not out of the realm of possibility that I've never seen all 90 minutes of a soccer game.

So I decided on Sunday, with nothing better to do and with my beloved Phillies in a free fall, that I'd watch the World Cup final game between Italy and France. I'd been following, in my own half-assed way, the results of the tournament so far, without actually watching much other than highlight reels; I was aware that many people hated the ESPN announcers, that people were paradoxically concerned with both the excessive yellow- and red-carding and the excessive thuggery and violence (not to mention excessive diving), and, of course, that the United States didn't make a whole lot of ripples (by the way, Ghana, if you think you're so tough, you wanna throw hands, military style?). I also noticed that my buddy Jim Noir is starting to make inroads in America in the form of adidas commercials. You've got to start somewhere, I suppose...

Anyway, the first problem I encountered, which comes up so often in championship bouts in any sport, was that I didn't care at all who wins. Unless you're a die hard obsessive fan, you need somebody to root for to stay interested in the game. Only somewhat arbitrarily, I picked France's side. I'm closer to being French than I am to being Italian (French Canadian blood on my mom's side of the family, no Italian at all), I disliked Italy because of that nasty elbow from a guy whose name I think was de Rossi (no relation to Portia, I'm assuming) into the face of my fellow American Brian McBride, and, above all, the French were underdogs. Plus Zinedine Zidane's name sounds like a James Bond villain, and his sharp widow's peak helps with that image.

Of course, anybody who watched the game knows that there was a good reason to dislike France that came up in about the 110th minute, as Zidane, the superstar... Well, you probably know what he did, and words fail me when trying to describe how absurd, idiotic, and inexplicable his actions were. I guess "absurd, idiotic, and inexplicable" work. (Unintentionally hilarious side note: note that on the linked video, the French announcer immediately begins shouting "Why?! Why?!" after the headbutt.)

So Italy won in penalty kicks. Penalty kicks struck me as a stupid and anticlimactic way to end a game, especially a final game. My thinking was: they just played for 120 minutes to decide on a world champion in soccer. Shouldn't they finish it by, you know, playing soccer? On the other hand, it was clear that both sides were completely exhausted by the time the extra periods ran out. France seemed to have to take out their two best players (not counting the red-carded Zidane) because they were too tired to play on. If the teams had to play any longer, the winning goal would likely have come on a stupid mistake that never would have been made if not for the exhaustion, and that would have been even more anticlimactic. So I guess I'm ok with the penalty kicks.

So did I learn anything? Am I a soccer fan now? My overall impression was pretty much what I had before: for the casual fan, soccer is a game of mind-numbing tedium, interrupted by occasional flashes of brilliant excitement (the two goals and Zidane's oh-so-close header come to mind). I'm sure that there are layers and layers of nuance and subtlety that make the game interesting to the hardcore fans (I'm constantly explaining this to the people who mindlessly say that baseball is boring), but I'm not willing to devote that kind of time or effort to soccer. I'll probably be watching in 2010, though.

Final note: some people may be riled by my constant use of the word "soccer" instead of "football." Here's the thing: In America, it's called soccer, not football. Football means something else here. If you're going to get upset about that, you might as well also be offended by the fact that I call the host nation of this year's Cup "Germany" instead of "Deutschland." Got it?

The Fiery Furnaces/Man Man - Theater of Living Arts, June 27, 2006

If you've ever heard a Fiery Furnaces album, you know how tough it would be to pull that stuff off live. To recreate something that even remotely resembled the albums, you'd need about five guitarists, two drummers, and maybe eight keyboard players. And I knew that the Furnaces only toured with a four-man band, and that their live performances didn't much resemble the albums, but I still didn't really know what to expect. So it was with a high degree of anticipation that I went to see them.

The other reason I was really looking forward to it is because I love the Fiery Furnaces. Every single album they've done is great, and they're one of the most inventive and unique bands in the world. They're one of the few bands who could pick pretty much any song from their entire catalog and make me happy. I love them enough to have written about them one, two, three, and four times at this very site.

But first (actually second, but I didn't get there in time to see the first band), I had to see Man Man. I knew nothing about Man Man going into the show other than that they're from Philadelphia (bonus points!) and that they have a stupid band name (points off!). They started playing, and I hated them almost immediately. It sounded like the Mahavishnu Orchestra trying to be the Mars Volta. It was repellent. Then they calmed down a bit and got into some actual songs, and what do you know! They're actually really good! It's easy to see why the Fiery Furnaces have them on tour with them, because they're just as batshit crazy as the Furnaces are. The phrase that kept coming to mind is "precision train wreck." They walk a perfect balance between structure and absolute chaos, and by the time four of the five members were blowing simultaneously through party favor horns (the fifth member was playing a melodica, of all things), I was smiling with glee. I'll have to check out their albums and see if they bring half the ruckus of their live show.

So then the Fiery Furnaces went on. As I'd mentioned before, I expected something different, but I wasn't prepared for how different it would be. Faced with the unenviable and more or less impossible task of recreating their own music, they did the only thing they could do: they didn't even try. Every song was restructured, often with only the melody left intact, and sometimes not even that. Maybe all those comparisons they got to the Who awhile back were actually referring to their live show, because that was really the closest reference point. If the Fiery Furnaces on record are an unpredictable mash up of every possible instrument, mood, and genre, the Fiery Furnaces live are a driving, power rock outfit with prog-rock chops.

The result was almost like watching a cover band, except no cover band on this planet would touch a song like "The Garfield El" with a 20-foot pole. I was wondering if they'd play anything from Rehearsing My Choir, and they did a three song medley from it, with Matt and Eleanor splitting the vocal duties of their octogenarian grandmother (what? she wouldn't come on tour with them?). If the songs from that album confused people in their recorded versions, I can't even imagine what they would feel like watching them performed live. Hell, even I had trouble following them, and I've heard them a hundred times.

Of course, that's true for about the entire set. The Furnaces' songs tend to take tons of undpredictable hairpin turns as it is, and live they're usually played at double time or more, with completely different arrangements. "Quay Cur" was virtually unrecognizable, as was "My Little Thatched Hut." Even songs that they could have given a fairly straight reading ("My Dog Was Lost but Now He's Found," "Tropical Iceland") were completely different (although "Crystal Clear" and "Chris Michaels" somehow came through relatively unscathed). And I was so busy wondering what they were going to do with the myriad synth parts that I didn't even think about how they were going to replicate all the backwards lyrics and stuff until they started playing "Black Hearted Boy." But ultimately, to wonder about that is to miss the point. This wasn't about replication. It was about reinvention. I should expect nothing less from the Fiery Furnaces.

Overall, I think I'll take the studio versions of their songs over the live ones, and they lack a real forceful and charismatic lead singer (although Eleanor was clearly more comfortable than Matt), but it was hard not to be impressed by the skill necessary to pull off what they did. I'd like to hear a live album from them sometime.

p.s. At the top of the post is a picture I took. I hope it works ok. I'm new at posting photos to this thing.