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During the American Masters profile of Johnny Carson last night, Conan O'Brien, in one of his appearances, got closest to the secret of the man. O'Brien said that Johnny could do something silly (like appear in a sketch dressed as an old lady) and still be cool.
He didn't go on to say that Carson - like Jack Paar and Dick Cavett and even Steve Allen (the silliest of them all) - never forgot that he was an adult. Adulthood was not just an ideal, it was the norm; when you watched their shows you heard adult conversation and you saw adult behavior (which made their occasionally childish antics even more effective). Today's talk show hosts, like most American males, even (if not especially) the elder statesman Letterman, still aspire to adolescence. (Those suits are nice, but they're not fooling anybody.) It's our pernicious youth culture, though I don't know if it shapes, or is shaped by, the entertainment industry.
Speaking at his induction ceremony into the Golf Hall of Fame Monday night, sportswriter Dan Jenkins suggested a possible epitaph for his tombstone: I knew this would happen.
Last night's Comedy Awards were quite funny, which wasn't really surprising. Though it was interesting to note how much funnier the show was than most of the sitcoms and movies it honored. Comedy works best in short form, as countless Eddie Murphy movies have powerfully demonstrated. Also, the best comedy is subversive, and the subversive is antithetical to producers' desires for huge box office hits. Bridesmaids (despite its various awards last night) took tired, scatological humor and simply switched genders. That wasn't subversive; that was hard cold business. The movie should be given an economics, not a comedy, award.
I was wandering around the Westin Diplomat in Hollywood on Friday, watching Sam Donaldson walking purposefully in dark jacket and trousers among the sunbathers by the pool and then, in the lobby, gazing at the Lufthansa flight attendants who sat silently in a group, each one focused on her smartphone.
For years, whenever I'd go to a bar or restaurant that had a TV I would be amazed, and annoyed, by how often my eyes would drift toward the screen, even when it was showing something I had no interest in. It never occurred to me to wonder what would happen if someday everybody could walk around with a screen. We have become like Isaac Newton in the famous William Blake painting, so concentrated on a diagram (app) that we're oblivious to the great world around us.
My neighbor, who recently had shoulder surgery, asked me what kind of exercises my doctor had me doing after telling me I had frozen shoulder. When I showed him the one in which I put my left arm behind my back and hold it there he nodded knowingly and said, "That's the one my therapist says is so painful for men because it's how we reach for our wallets."
What bothered me about the Sports Illustrated story on the Marlins last week was not the fact that they put it on the cover. (The jinx, I'm sure, has an expiration date.) Or that they chose two newbies to represent the team (manager Ozzie Guillen and shortstop Jose Reyes). Even the new uniforms are starting to grow on me (except for that ridiculously over-sized, simpleton M on the caps).
What bothered me was the line in the story that said that the roof of the new stadium would remain open for only 10 games. I had heard that the roof would be closed a good deal, but fewer than a dozen games during which you can see the sky, breathe fresh air, watch baseball the way it's supposed to be watched is outrageous.
My least pleasurable baseball experiences have been watching teams that play (or played) in indoor stadiums: the Mariners, the Blue Jays, the Rays. I don't even like watching indoor games on TV. There seems to be something artificial, illegitimate about the whole affair.
Isn't the superiority of outdoor sporting events obvious? The most popular hockey event of the season - outside of the playoffs - is the game they play in a wintry baseball stadium. (Which Sports Illustrated always runs a stunning photograph of.) In Minnesota the Twins ditched their sad, prophylactic dome and built a new ballpark open to the northern sky.
A retractable roof for a summer sports team in the subtropics makes perfect sense. It's just that I thought it was to protect the field from the occasional shower, not to keep coddled millionaires from working up a sweat. Isn't the whole point of a retractable roof its ability to open and close, not close for five months? We thought we were getting a state-of-the-art stadium when in fact it's a throwback to the old days when businesses in South Florida would close their doors for the summer.
Management claims that the possibility of getting wet, and having to wait through rain delays, kept fans from coming to games in the past. Now we'll see if the impossibility of watching baseball in the great outdoors does the same.