Jocko Homo?

Queen Eye for the Straight Guy
Last night as I was watching the World Series go into extra innings (the White Sox won in the 14th, if anyone cares), the Houston Astrodome P.A. system started blaring out Queen's "Under Pressure." To my ears, this was a new twist on the fairly predictable jock rock soundtrack and a very appropos tune as the score was tied 5-5 and there was considerable pressure for the Astros, already down 2-0 in the Series, to pull this one out.

And, predictably, it involved Queen, a band with a big sound seemingly made for stadiums. Now, as everyone knows, there are two Queen songs that are staples of all sporting contests. One is the let's-get-pumped-up "We Will Rock You" and the other is "We Are the Champions," the obligatory post-game or post-Championship anthem played for any team anywhere after winning something. It's so obvious that even Homer Simpson has sung a not-so-modest refrain of "I am the Champions" after some self-congratulatory, rub-it-in-the-face-of-the-other-guy moment on The Simpsons. (Also in that rub-it-in vein is another Queen song, "Another One Bites the Dust," sometimes used after a baseball pitcher is given the hook.)

But it's always struck me as funny that Queen, who started out Glam Rock and were fronted by Rock & Roll's first superstar AIDS casualty, the flamboyantly gay Freddie Mercury, have always been associated with testosterone and sporting events. Equally perverse is the stadium soundtrack popularity of kiddie porn-felon Gary Glitter, whose "Rock & Roll Part 2" ("HEY!") is a fixture of sporting contests. Is alternative sexuality a prerequisite for anthemic jock jams?

I was never a Queen fan and really only knew a handful of songs before I met my girlfriend Amy, who is the world's biggest Queen fanatic. My ex-wife turned me onto "Killer Queen" from SHEER HEART ATTACK (which I liked and thought was similar to the quaint riffs and wordplay of Sparks), and I knew "Bohemian Rhapsody" from its highwater mark attained in WAYNE'S WORLD. But I loathed the stripped-down, foot-stomping banality of "We Will Rock You," which I always seemed to hear everytime I turned on 98 Rock and thus associated with the kind of bad, populist Album Oriented Rock that used to bore me to tears on that station, along with the constant playlist of Pink Floyd, Heart, and Heavy Metal. "We Are the Champions" left me neither hot nor cold, it was just expected after a championship or big game. To leave it off the P.A. playlist would be a sin of omission.

Now, thanks to my my girlfriend, I can appreciate the bigness, the campness, the pomp and circumstance, of Queen, a band that has made the world its stage and defines the term "Stadium Rock." But it still makes me smile to think that so-many red-blooded, beer-guzzling, Playboy-reading, homophobic All-American types who fill the seats at baseball, hockey, football and NASCAR events are getting pumped up and filled with sporting glory swagger from listening to Freddie Mercury, a guy who used to wear feather boas and leotards and sport The World's GAYEST Mustache back in the day.

For more on arena rock anthems, see Sports Illustrated scribe John Rolfe's The Original Soundtrack: Theme Song Suggestions for teams and Players

Yes, I Am Blind

Yes, I am blind
No, I can't see
There must be something
Horribly wrong with me?
- Morrissey

Doctor my eyes
Tell me what is real
I hear their cries
Just saying "It's too late for me"
- Jackson Browne

Yes, I am blind. No, I can't see. How blind am I? So much so that today I waved to what I thought was a blonde at the end of the hall, only to find out, when I got closer, that "she" was actually a vase of flowers. Pathetic.

Want more? The next day I thought I saw my ex-girlfriend at the library. There was a woman with dark brown hair, about the same height and body type as my ex, or at least I thought so from way aross the main hall of Pratt Central. I saw her talking to a librarian about something, then went up afterwards and asked the librarian, "What did that lady want? I think that may have been my old girlfriend." "I don't think so," he replied, shaking his head. How would he know, I thought? Then when I asked again, he rolled his eyes and mentioned how she was mumbling to herself and stumbling around in a daze. While I have been known to have an effect on women, it had never been this severe, driving one to a mental breakdown. The next day I saw the woman close up and realized my mistake - she was one of our junkie regulars who spend all day surfing the Internet in the computer room. No wonder the librarian doubted my romantic past with this poor woman.

Anyway, while I'm on the subject of my diminished eyesight, here are a few notes about famous people who went blind (not that I'm famous, but I can dream, can't I?), as taken from Jim Lehrer's NewsHour special Dying of the Light," in which Lehrer and essayist Roger Rosenblatt discuss former Time editor-in-chief Henry Grumwald's book about going blind, Twilight:

John Milton wrote a famous sonnet on his blindness ("When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"), the one that ends "They also serve who only stand and wait." But the sonnet begins, "When I consider how my light is spent," a line that suggests how precious the light is.

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Latin American writer who died in 1986, wrote a beautiful essay on blindness in which he cited the realm of the blind as "inconvenient." Colors were confused for him. Worse, he was losing his eyesight just at the moment he was appointed director of the national library in Argentina. It was the job of his dreams, which were dimmed by irony. "There I was," he wrote, "the center, in a way, of 900,000 books in various languages. But I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines." (Reminds me of the "Time Enough At Last" Twilight Zone episode in which bookworm Burgess Meredith is the lone survivor of a nuclear holocaust and is surrounded by all the books he has been trying to read, only to break his eyeglasses!) Geeze, I work in a library and can relate, but even more so when I think of my film library at home. All those movies, all those porn tapes, all those images, now just a blur.

Homer - he made the world envision the indispensable sea voyage in The Odyssey and the fundamental war in The Iliad.

James Thurber - he saw into the magnificent nonsense of the mind most clearly, even as his own light failed.

Roger Rosenblatt closes his NewsHour review with these insightful lines:

Love is blind. Justice is blind. Samson was blinded. The absence of sight can be made into a virtue, but reality bites. "I was blind, but now I see," goes "Amazing Grace." But the truth is that one wants to see actually as well as spiritually. I don't know if the great blind people of history would've traded insight for sight, but in any case, they had no choice. So one is left staring inwardly at all the astonishing objects they discovered in the dark. In a way, they became remarkable sights themselves. One could not take one's eyes off Helen Keller in her struggles, watching a human being deprived of the essential senses displaying what being human is about-- adjustment to misfortune, courage in the night.

This is the season of the dying of the light. From now through the end of the century, the sky closes down and the world comes up with faith to see it through the winter solstice. Henry Grunwald would say that this is a valuable time of year, when one is aware of how much light means and yearns for the light as all creatures do. But his book makes a less abstract and more useful point. "One must measure and conduct one's life on its own terms," he writes. No one sees clearer than that.

OK, time to don my reading glasses and read today's redesigned Baltimore Sun newspaper, whose editors, in a recognition of the increasing age of their decreasing readers, have made everything BIGGER in the daily rag - from Humongous Headlines that take up half the page and full-color graphics to Large Type Print that I think even Stevie Wonder could read - that make it seem like it was put together by the editors of USA Today, Reader's Digest and Highlights magazine. It's telling that my eyes are so bad that I didn't even notice the change; in fact, I liked it! Me and the retirees!

Enoch Pratt: Best Cinema Verite Secret

I work in the Audio-Visual department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Central Branch, and was surprised today to see that we had a framed award for "Best Cinema Verite Secret" from the Baltimore City Paper. The secret is our amazing collection of films by documentarian legend Frederick Wiseman (shown here), titles too expensive (starting at $400 per film) for most institutions or commercial video retailers to carry. Following is the text accompanying that award, taken from the September 21, 2005 "Best of Baltimore" issue of the City Paper:

Best Cinéma Vérité Secret
Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Frederick Wiseman collection
400 Cathedral St., (410) 396-4616, website

Film geeks love to jock the work of documentary pioneers the Maysles Brothers, especially the shudderingly bleak Salesman and the gleefully grotesque Grey Gardens. But while less of a household name, documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s astonishing body of work has consistently delivered dozens of movies in a similar vein and of the same very high caliber. Unfortunately for the average consumer—and perhaps for the director’s own reputation—Wiseman controls his own catalog and sells his titles at exorbitant prices (often several hundred dollars a pop per VHS cassette), designed to keep all but serious organizations (film schools, libraries) away. Which means you won’t be able to grab the likes of 1967’s Titicut Follies—which exposed brutal conditions at a mental-health facility, and culminates in a vaudevillian variety show co-performed by employees and patients of that same facility—from Video Americain over the weekend, let alone Blockbuster or Netflix. Thankfully, the Enoch Pratt has plopped down a good chunk of change on Wiseman’s work over the years, allowing us to sample seminal late-’60s-to-mid-’70s works such as High School, Hospital, and Law and Order, as well as 1989’s six-hour-long Near Death. All of these films, freed from narration, on-screen text, incidental music, and talking heads, make us feel like all-seeing eyes, guided by Wiseman’s camera work and cutting through troubled institutions during even-more-troubled times. Trust us, once you’ve worked your way through the Pratt’s holdings, you’ll be considering sending Wiseman a few hundred bills for the ones the Pratt doesn’t own, such as Meat—or at least pestering the Pratt’s A/V guys and gals to order them. Hint, hint.

Hint taken! And thanks to whoever the secret verite-loving City Paper reviewer is. I have a hunch it was one of those Video Americain guys - Scott, Eric, Michael, or Scott Wallace Brown - because the Wiseman tapes are the only videos those completists don't have (and believe me, it's pretty tough to top Video Americain in any category!). Was it you Eric Allen Hatch? If so, thanks!