1. Why The Philadelphia Phillies Should Hire Me
My plight as a die hard fan of the Phillies should be instantly recognizable to anyone who's ever been in an abusive relationship. Suffice to say: It's not fun. Thursday night, I caught my Phils against the Mets at lovely, state-of-the-art Shea stadium. We sat in the upper deck behind home plate, surrounded by blue-collar Phils phans and what appeared to be every automotive shop worker in Queens. A few quickie observations:
- Sweat bands are apparently still popular.
- If you've got a hairy chest, flaunt it.
- Shea Stadium makes a surprisingly serviceable sausage sandwich, priced quite reasonably at about $4.25.
- It's hard to get the idiot sitting behind you to stop kicking your seat if he doesn't speak English.
- After about 500 flights pass directly overhead, I'm still fascinated that humans can do that.
- Paul LoDuca is an annoying, preening little baby.
- Mets fans still do the wave.
- Everyone who attends NYU is apparently an unbelievable asshole.
I realize most of you aren't baseball fans, so I'll spare you a treatise on how improbable that sequence of events was in the first place. What I'm getting at is that this is like the third time my exit has inspired a preposterously unusual Phillies comeback. Pat Burrel must lead the major leagues in Dramatic Home Runs Hit After Josh Has Left The Building. It's downright incredible. I can barely get my mind around it. And so I offer my services to the Phillies. Please hire me. I will attend each game, home and on the road. In the event of a tight contest, I will leave the stadium promptly in the bottom of the 8th inning, thus inspiring a come from behind win. This can't miss.
All right, I sort of blew through that, but I really want to get to our next issue:
2. Why The Sopranos Finale Was Detestable
First off: *****Spoiler Warning***** If you don't want to know what happened, stop reading NOW.
All right. That was a slap in the face to everyone who's spent 8 years loyally following the show. I'm not even sure exactly what to say about the abomination that appeared on our television screens last night, it was so mind-blowingly atrocious, but I'm going to give it a shot.
First off, I'm not one of those people who needed every little detail to be neatly tied up. In fact, I've always bristled whenever I'd hear something like, "What happened with the Russian?", as if it were impossible to imagine this fictional world as being as complex, sprawling, and untidy as real life. Strands lead nowhere, things happen, others don't, we all keep plodding forward. Fine.
That being said, with a series of this magnitude drawing to a close, and with the time the audience has invested in these characters, last night's final scene came off as a major F-You to everyone who bothered to care. The level of contempt the creator of the show displayed was like nothing I've experienced prior. Whether this was the intention, or whether the ending was supposed to come off as some supremely impressive, intellectual anti-ending, the likes of which Has Never Been Seen On Television, really makes absolutely no difference to me. I'm not a media critic or an academic. I'm just a guy watching TV on a Sunday night. Let the intellectuals debate this (if there's indeed anything to debate). I'll maintain my opinion that it was a lazy, uninspired slap in the face.
And what's worse, it was manipulative in the extreme. You want to have no ending? You want to show how above it all you are, how you and your amazing TV show need not traffic in the usual, admittedly cliched Big Finale ending? Fine, good. But that's not what happened last night. That final scene was crafted (expertly, of course) to deliberately build upon and play off the audience's desire for a Final Act, only to culminate in a rip off of epic proportions. I haven't felt that palpable a sense of tension since the Firecrackers scene in Boogie Nights. I don't think I breathed once during the sequence. Each moment, each shot, each beat, designed to ratchet up our anxiety. The final scene turned our passion for the show against us. To watch the Sopranos regularly was to grow accustomed to its rhythms, to its pacing, to the way its most violent acts were preceded by dreadfully serene glimpses of normal life. When Bobby went to shop for trains, an innocuous activity, yet one we hadn't seen him do before, you just knew something terrible was about to happen. You could feel it. Meadow parking her car last night had all the hallmarks of a typical Sopranos pre-violent moment. Same with Tony in the booth, the guy at the counter, the eery Godfather allusions as he made his way to the men's room, the black kids at the entrance in slo-mo (if memory serves). This is the Scene Before The Scene. What happens to Tony? The series' premier question is about to be answered. We slide forward on the couch, barely breathing. Journey's Don't Stop Believing feels absolutely perfect, our ironic passion for it (the opposite of our passion for the Sopranos?) confusing the emotions. The sense of portent was almost unbearable. All i could think what that Tony was finally going to get his, and in front of the whole family! Or Meadow, out there on the street alone...would they really gun her down? Would she die in Tony's arms? Would she pay for his sins?
Instead: NOTHING. Meadow enters the restaurant. Tony looks up. Cut to black. Silence.
What can you say? Am I an idiot? Did I not get it? Perhaps, but why, after putting in this amount of time, should it be my responsibility to "get" anything? I'm not watching a screening at the Museum of Modern Art. I'm sitting on my couch with a beer in my hand, watching gangsters on TV. The Sopranos was a soap opera. And incredibly well-done soap opera, but a soap opera all the same. We deserved better. And the show deserved better than for us to think of it, forever moving forward, as nothing more than a colossal waste of time.
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