A Crosby Sweat-uh

While literally stepping onto a bus late afternoon on Friday I got a telephone call from my friend and pastor telling me the Penguins had won the draft lottery. I laughed loudly and spontaneously. How else do you respond when something as fickle as the bouncing of ping-pong balls determines that a natural-born superstar will put on your team's sweater instead of that of the any of the other disappointed teams? It's pure luck. The Penguins didn't even have to lose a large quantity of games to get into this position, as they and several other teams would have readily done, and as the Penguins admittedly did during the middle and late stages of the 1983-84 season, when they lost their way to the top draft pick that allowed them to grab Mario Lemieux. That move paved the way to the franchise actually accomplishing something, and even if that "something" included the initiation of a draft lottery in the NHL, well, it was undeniably worth it.

There's something approaching consensus among hockey insiders that Sidney Crosby has the sort of can't-miss, destined-for-stardom skillset that hasn't been seen in a teenager since Lemieux himself and Wayne Gretzky before him. Of course, that's the standard accolade trotted out for special prospects at draft-time, and it made the rounds as recently as last year, when Russia's Alexander Ovechkin's ball bounced to the Capitals instead of the worst-overall Penguins. The label has also been applied to some first-overall picks who became real stars, like Ilya Kovalchuk, some star-caliber players who were never quite able to get their arms around the needed leadership qualities, like Eric Lindros, and also to players who were simply busts, like Alexander Daigle. Of course, it's quite conceivable that Crosby's the product of unfair and inaccurate hype and that he won't detonate the league scoring records, but it's difficult to imagine him having a more opportune situation than this team and this season.

Unless they're able to adapt quickly, it won't be a good regular season for the Devils and the Wild and everybody else making a living off clogging the neutral zone, hooking everything that moves and holding on to 2-1 leads. As much pleasure as it gives me to write that sentence, it comes with the huge caveat which reveals me to be the naive dreamer I am: for the game to change, the League must make the officials change; there can no longer be any question about who controls the way the game is played. After the way in which the League waited out the NHLPA and forcefed the NFL financial model to the players, I'd hate to see them lose all resolve in dealing with the officials.

Back to my naive dreaming: Crosby will skate center on a line with Mario, who'd generally prefer to play wing these days anyway. There's buzz about the team signing a free agent or two; names like Alex Kovalev, Ziggy Palffy and Scott Niedermeyer are being repeated. A curious report in the Post-Gazette had the team making a run at signing aging pugilist Tie Domi for superstar protection. Had a parallel move been made in 1984-- if Mario had been given his Marty McSorely-- it might have saved hundreds of unavenged cross-checks to his wonky back and some of those surgeries and missed games might not have been needed. So protection for #87 will be a given. And with the return of Mark Recchi, the emergence of Ryan Malone and the question mark of three young Russians-- Aleksey Morozov, Konstantin Koltsov and Evgeni Malkin-- there's some developing or developed goal-scoring skill already on the roster to complement him. The team still has significant weaknesses on paper-- the defense corps needs a veteran presence or two, and the goaltending tandem is wildly talented but unproven-- but spending time under the tutelage of Mario Lemieux on a team that's always encouraged offensive creativity in a League newly and desperately looking for high-octane offense should be the best possible thing for Crosby.

It's funny to think of how many of the most significant events in Penguins history have been tied to the draft. Eddie Johnston, then-GM, has all but copped to a series of intentionally-terrible personnel moves during the 1983-84 season which put the team in position to finish worse than every other team in the league. While it's worthwhile to ask how that strategy differed from their management strategy every other year up to that point, and for a few after, it's clear that when first prize is Mario Lemieux and second prize is Peter Stastny, you should pull out all the stops. For several other years, the team had no first-round pick at all after trading it for some nondescript grinder. Then in 1990, right when the team had started to assemble the pieces of a strong supporting cast, the four teams drafting ahead of the Penguins decided that Owen Nolan, Keith Primeau, Mike Ricci and Petr Nedved had more promising careers ahead of them than did Jaromir Jagr. Those four are all very good players, but none of them had or has Jagr's game-breaking ability and leadership-by-example, at least as he displayed those qualities before he left the Penguins. Does the team win Stanley Cups in 1991 and 1992 with one of those other guys in Jagr's place in the lineup? I really doubt it. None of those players had the sort of immediate impact Jagr did, and over a decade later I can still remember his almost ridiculous strength in winning battles for the puck along the boards and scoring big, timely playoff goals in those two years. Plus, for the rest of the nineties he won at least three playoff series by himself.

The team traded up to get the first overall pick in 2003, and while the extent of Marc-Andre Fleury's potential to be a game-stealing goalie isn't yet clear, it was a good pick. The team finished last overall in 2003-2004, but lost the draft lottery and the right to pick Russian phenom Alexander Ovechkin. At the time, that felt like a significant loss despite the fact that the second pick-- Evgeni Malkin-- is highly-skilled and was the consensus second-best player available. Now that lottery loss is looking in hindsight like an unbelievable win. Few details have been released concerning how the NHL structured last Friday's impromptu lottery draft. Extra balls were allotted to teams which had been the league's "worst" over the recent past, though I don't know if it's been said exactly how many seasons were taken into account to comprise that group. It seems highly unlikely to me that the Penguins would have received that sort of preferred lottery status had they won the lottery in 2004. They lost the battle and won the war.

Another big winner in this deal is Comcast. They're now guaranteed whatever hook-up fee and monthly charge I'll need to follow the team when I can't get down there. And I'll need to decide whether it's unseemly for me to own the jersey of a kid who's exactly half my age until his eighteenth birthday comes in a few months. I'm thinking if Beaks can have his LeBron jersey, then I'm not out of bounds in getting a Crosby sweat-uh. A Crosby sweat-uh. Man, I like the sound of that.

Guero

Mr. Lucas has just returned from running errands, where he does most of his intentional music listening.

Mr. L: Seriously, that new Beck album has actually made my life better.
Mrs. L: I KNOW. I was just thinking that that album is the soundtrack to my entire summer.

As usual in these matters, I was somewhat fashionably late to get here. Still, though, the last time I remember there being an album that was a summer's soundtrack it was a Screaming Trees album in 1996.

MUCK THE FETS

Walking into the ballpark yesterday afternoon I saw a guy around my age with a T-shirt bearing the above message. It was suddenly 1990 again, or the last time I saw that shirt. In '90 the Pirates were still in the East and what stood between them and their first division title since the '79 World Series team were Daryl Strawberry's Mets. Hence the shirt and the sentiment it expressed. It was ages ago that anybody'd take the Pirates seriously as a threat. That the guy had not only kept the shirt fot the last decade and a half, but also dusted it off for the occasion seemed somewhat pathetic. And with Pedro Martinez making an appearance, it seemed thoroughly delusional.

There might have been a hotter place in Pittsburgh than our seats in right field, but you'd have a tough time convincing my brood of that. They lasted five innings, which is coincidentally as long as Kip Wells lasted. Seconds after Jason Bay, Consolation All-Star, hit a Pedropitch about 393 feet to dead center field and fell five feet short of closing the gap to 5-4, I gave in to the various voices begging me to take them home. Someday they will better enjoy sitting out in ridiculously hot weather to watch baseball.

TAKING THE KIDS TO THE WARHOL

That sounds like it should be a euphemistic catchphrase, and so it will be. Now I need only to figure out (1) what it should euphemize (suggestions welcome) and (2) how to inject it into popular discourse. I'm already working on overusing another such phrase ("plays rugby for Vassar") into ubiquity.

So, yeah, we took the kids to the Warhol tonight. Ali's been teaching the older girls about art styles, and Warhol's silkscreens came up. It seemed fitting to go to where you can see a wallfull of Marilyns. It was mildly enjoyable, but it was less that what I'd hoped, and I think it's because Warhol's vision won and won big. Advertising is art now, and a degree of elevation of the common (as opposed to the uncommon or the transcendent) is part and parcel of our cultural language. It's lost its potency.

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE

I've gone through Wednesday's local movie listings and tallied the numbers. On 6/29/05, you could see Herbie: Fully Loaded on 18 screens in the greater Pittsburgh area. You could see Madagascar on any of 11 screens, and The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl on 6 screens.

You could see Howl's Moving Castle on one screen. That's the same number of screens devoted to something called Paper Clip.

Now, I'm of the mind that Academy Awards are one of the least reliable indicators of cinematic quality, but I'm also having trouble imagining another context where a director or actor whose last film brought home Oscar gold would be buried like this in a metropolitan market.

I don't even know who, exactly, to blame. Did Disney send out only a limited number of prints to hedge its bets in case the film flopped, or to keep the deck as clear as possible for the newest wacky Lohan vehicle? Are theater owners declining to book it because it runs two hours and can't be overscheduled like the typical eighty-five minute kidflick? Or are parents and kids simply not responding to it, the former disliking it because it may require answering some questions, the latter disliking it because of its complexity or uniqueness? No, let me take that back. I doubt quite seriously that kids aren't responding to the film or that they are put off by its complexity. The ultimate root causes are irrelevant, and the effect is simply dispiriting. A movie which is demonstrably vastly superior to the other three current movies aimed at children is being seen by a tiny fraction of the audience lining up for the others. The screen imbalance here is 35:1. Something's wrong with the market, or something's wrong with us.

Since our youngest was born in September of 2003, my wife and I have generally played tag team when it came to taking the older two kids out to movies. I took them to see The Incredibles, while my wife has taken either or both of the girls to see A Series of Unfortunate Events, Millions and Robots. Neither of us, however, was about to miss out on Miyazaki, so we took the 22-month old along, a risky proposition given that Miyazaki crowds include a larger number of adults without kids in tow, which makes it a bit less likely that there will be the sort of heightened expectation of ambient noise. Our babysitter doesn't arrive for a few weeks, though, so Virginia got to see her first theatrical film.

When we got into the car afterward and pulled away, Ali said something to the effect that if all children's entertainment was that good (or imaginative, or thoughtful), the entire cultural landscape of growing up would be vastly different, for the better. I completely agree. It's so easy to get wrapped up in what we saw in Howl's that you can forget what you don't see in Miyazaki's films, this one included. We didn't see a simple, mechanical plot which moved from A to B to C, stressing narrative efficiency and clarity over the ambiguity of wonder and the messy, diffuse enchantment of discovering a new world full of divergent possibilities. We didn't see characters who could be summarily identified as "good" or "bad," described in three words or less and assigned plot-roles on that basis. We didn't have to sit through potty humor or, worse, oh-so-clever humor couched in middlebrow referents or double-entendre aimed at the adults who are buying the popcorn.

But this isn't the cinema of reaction; it's an altogether different vision of what sort of things are worthy of captivating an imagination. The film continues some of Miyazaki's earlier tropes: the girl seeking to undo a spell that's both literally and figuratively holding sway over her and in the process rescue a young man caught in his development and serving an unjust master. Howl's is a remarkable example of fairy tale filmmaking, combining images of pure wonder with characters capable of inspiring trust and situations where the actual obstacle to be overcome is much larger and deeper than that show on the screen.

In Sophie, there is a poignant treatment of the way in which we grow old and confront the facets of ourselves from all our yesterdays. Her maturation is set against the backdrop of a civil war that is always in the periphery, threatening to destroy the characters but never advancing on them literally. There's something here about the way in which children-- and adults-- create realms of respite in times of strife. For a movie about war, though, the film contains very little violence.

I reread Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of the film. He quotes a Hollywood Reporter piece in which the writer wonders whether the film will work for American audiences: "Plotting is so multifaceted that it will confuse children, and it lacks the clear-cut heroes and villains tpical of animation." To his first clause, that wasn't my experience. My kids weren't confused in the slightest, and even the toddler was enraptured by the film's visual beauty. As to his second clause, his perception of the needs of children is askew. Many children (or at last mine) appreciate seeing clear-cut good guys and bad guys on occasion, but they're also capable of understanding and appreciating stores with ambiguity and complexity mirroring their developing real-life experience. Those are, not coincidentally, the same attributes that characterize adults who are appreciative of great art, so we shouldn't be surprised that Miyazaki is able to draw adults voluntarily to his animated films.

Other misc. trailer notes:
Chicken Little: I will never see this film. This film will never cross the threshhold of my house in any video format.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Well, it's a story that relies on grotesque, overdrawn characters and locales, so Burton's a natural. And assuming the script simply takes random swaths from the novel, some narrative form should adhere. Still, from the trailer alone I wonder if Depp's gone about this the wrong way by playing Wonka as modern-day Mike Jackson. Subversive, yes, but potentially very grating. I'm thinking I'll need to smuggle in a flask of Jesus Juice just to sit through it.

2005 movies at the halfway point

(a) I don't see much theatrically, and (b) the best is yet to come, but here's what I've seen of 2005 films, how I'd rank them and how I'd grade them to date.


1. Howl's Moving Castle (A-)
2. George A. Romero's Land of the Dead (A-)
3. Star Wars ROTS (B-)
4. Batman Begins (C+)
5. Sin City (C)

June, 2005 viewing

6/1 Gilmore Girls 3.13
6/2 Gilmore Girls 3.14, 3.15, 3.16
6/5 Gilmore Girls 3.17, 3.18, 3.19, 3.20
6/6 Team America: World Police
6/7 Gilmore Girls 3.21, 3.22
6/8 Rosetta
6/14 Kill Bill, Volume 1
6/16 Batman Begins
6/17 Kill Bill, Volume 2
6/20 Napoleon Dynamite
6/21 Day of the Dead
6/22 Land of the Dead
6/24 The Grudge
6/27 Bonhoeffer
6/29 Howl's Moving Castle
6/30 L'Argent