It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. We’ve still got a couple of tables available. The hostess will seat you know. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party
started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you about the Cubs signing reliever Aaron Bummer to a minor league deal. Fifty-six percent of you thought it was a big “meh,” which makes sense considering it’s a minor league deal. Thirty percent of you thought signing Bummer was a bummer, while the other 14 percent shouted “Bummer!” with joy.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. You’re free to skip over that if you want. I always say that but to tell you the truth, you’re free to skip over the baseball stuff at the end if you’d like as well. I wouldn’t blame you if you just came here for the jazz and movies.
I will get to a tribute of the late Sonny Rollins, who was really the last survivor of the old bebop artists of the late-forties, although his long career took him far beyond just bebop. But before we do that, I want to finish my tribute and look back at the career of Miles Davis, whom we honored on the 100th anniversary of his birth last week.
In a Silent Way moved Miles into the world of electric music and jazz fusion with rock and funk, but his next step was even bigger. Bitches Brew (1970) was a revolution in both jazz and rock. If In a Silent Way was contemplative, moody and well, silent, Bitches Brew was a loud, brash explosion designed to be played in big arenas. It’s the record that got Miles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and that was before that institution just took any musician who could sell tickets regardless of genre. Neither fully a jazz nor a rock album, Bitches Brew was its own thing.
It should be noted that Bitches Brew is not without controversy. While Miles’ electric period was definitely a part of his lifelong instincts to never stay in one place and to always move the music forward, it was also driven by commercial interests and Miles desire for the big paychecks that rock musicians were getting at the time. But beyond the purists’ complaints, others who like the other works of Miles’ electric period find Bitches Brew to be unfocused. It meanders, and not in a good way according to them. It also features tracks that range from ten to thirteen different musicians all contributing. Yes, they are all incredibly talented artists (Miles had a fantastic ear for recognizing talent) but putting that many instruments on one track has them tripping all over each other and not getting a chance to shine, according to the critics.
Those that praise Bitches Brew far outnumber its critics, however. It’s the album that pushed jazz/fusion in to the mainstream. It’s as influential in the world of rock music as it is in jazz. It’s something you can listen to many times and always pick up on something you missed before.
There are many videos of Miles playing stuff from Bitches Brew live, but I maintain that it shines most as a studio creation, and producer Teo Macero deserves a lot of credit for that. So here’s the first track off of Bitches Brew “Pharaoh’s Dance.” For this track, Miles is on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on soprano sax, Bennie Maupin on clarinet, Joe Zawinul, Larry Young and Chick Corea on left, center and right electric piano, John McLaughlin on electric guitar, Dave Holland on bass, Harvey Brooks on electric bass, Lenny White and Jack DeJohnette on left and right drums, Don Alias on congas and Jim Riley (aka Juma Santos) on shaker.
There aren’t many sequels to great movies that live up to the original. There’s The Godfather Part II and well, not much else. The Empire Strikes Back qualifies, I guess. The best you can hope for is something that’s still pretty good like Furiosa. To be clear, there are many sequels that are better than the original. Mad Max: Fury Road was the fourth Mad Max film for example, but I’m talking about sequels to all-time great movies and not just good ones.
Director Wong Kar-wai’s 2004 film 2046 falls into that “still pretty good” category of sequel. As the follow up to Wong’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love (and 1990’s Days of Being Wild, which I haven’t seen), 2046 has all of Wong’s eye for beauty, but the underlying story of Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-Wan’s life after the events of In the Mood for Love doesn’t hit with the same emotional impact that the other film had. I guess every film is worse for having less Maggie Cheung in it.
2046 has almost the same style as In the Mood for Love. Wong uses bright colors, obscured camera angles and a disjointed narrative structure to create a kind of beautiful kaleidoscope. One trick that Wong uses is to “frame” a character almost literally by shooting them through a window or door that obscures half or more of the screen. The character we do see is often speaking to someone whose back is to the camera or, more often, standing unseen in the spot obscured by the wall. Wong also loves to use thematic colors in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock did.
2046 is the story of Leung’s journalist/writer Chow Mo-Wan picking up his life after the events of In the Mood for Love. Maggie Cheung only makes a small cameo appearance at the beginning of the film. She already had one foot in the door of her quest to be the Greta Garbo of Hong Kong by 2004, in that she went from being one of the biggest stars in the world to retiring around this time and almost completely disappearing from public life a decade later. So instead, Chow embarks on a series of relationships—both physical and otherwise—with women played by Faye Wong, Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi and Dong Jie. Gong Li’s character, nicknamed the “Black Spider,” is later revealed to have the exact same name as Cheung’s character, although the film makes it clear that they are different people. Just echoes of each other.
The weird part of 2046 is that there’s a science fiction element that intrudes on the plot. As I wrote last time, it’s like if they decided what the sequel to Love Story needed was some elements from Blade Runner. To be clear, it appears that the science fiction parts are dramatizations from a book that Chow is writing that incorporates elements of his life. The science fiction parts serve as a kind of Greek chorus that allows Chow’s character to comment on the nature of love and life, although it’s disjointed enough that it doesn’t always make clear sense. Having said that, the science fiction parts are as gorgeous as the rest of the movie and it kind of gives you a break from the other stories.
Like In the Mood for Love, 2046 has a disjointed narrative style that jumps around in time. It can be hard to follow at times, but generally it adds to the beauty of the film.
To be clear, you watch a Wong Kar-wai film for the visual treat he provides. It helps when he tells a compelling story like he did in In the Mood for Love, but the stories in 2046 aren’t bad, they’re just a series of shorter stories that don’t hit you in the gut like In the Mood for Love’s story does.
2046 is a good film that looks incredible. That it’s not as good as In the Mood for Love isn’t an insult, it’s just to be expected. It’s still worth your time after you watch In the Mood for Love.
So here’s the trailer for 2046. You get a good sense of how gorgeous the film is from this.
Welcome back to everyone who skips that other stuff.
Major League Baseball has started their public relations campaign to get the public behind them in their attempt to get a salary cap in the next collective bargaining agreement. In particular, they posted this argument from Travis Sawchik on MLB dot com that argues that baseball needs a salary cap because it has a competitive balance problem.
The problem with this argument is that MLB has had more different champions than any other major North American sport. Much has been made of the Dodgers winning back-to-back titles the past two years, but for one, it was the first back-to-back titles in baseball since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000. No other league can claim anything close to that kind of streak. The other problem is that had Miguel Rojas, of all people, not homered in the ninth, the Blue Jays would be World Series champions. Toronto also came close to winning the game in the bottom of the ninth and tying it back up in the bottom of the 11th. They would have had a ground ball been hit just a few feet in a different direction in either inning.
But Sawchik’s argument is that while MLB has produced multiple different World Series champions over the past ten years, none of them have been from “small market” teams since the 2015 Kansas City Royals. According to his (and the owners’) argument, that the Kansas City Chiefs have won three and played in five of the past seven Super Bowls is actually an argument in favor of the NFL having more parity than MLB does. Having one team dominate is still competitive balance as long as it’s not the Dodgers or Yankees winning.
The other argument is that while the some small market teams consistently make the postseason—Milwaukee, Cleveland, Tampa Bay—they haven’t won the World Series. Of course, if you think the playoffs are mostly a crapshoot, then that’s just luck. On top of that, there are other “small market” teams like Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Miami and Colorado whose biggest problem is clearly mismanagement rather than a lack of resources. Two “big market” teams, the White Sox and Angels, suffer from the same problem (although the White Sox seem to be coming out of that).
Sawchik also makes a tendentious argument that even if small-market teams like Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cleveland and Tampa Bay are consistently successful with less money, the perception of unfairness is hurting the sport. Of course, many of those arguing otherwise would say that the reason fans perceive unfairness is because the league’s owners and executives keep pushing stories about how unfair things are to advance their agenda.
I’m going to skip the rather controversial subject of a salary cap for tonight, although the owners are clearly pushing this narrative in order to get the public to support their position that the sport needs one. Instead, I’m asking you if this is a proposed solution in search of a problem. To be clear, the reason why the owners want a salary cap isn’t because of a lack of competitive balance. It’s because a cap would guarantee higher profits for them. But that doesn’t mean that the argument that the owners are pushing that there is a competitive balance problem isn’t a valid one.
No one is arguing that a team with more financial resources like the Dodgers don’t have an advantage. But the question is whether or not that advantage is a real problem. Is it a huge advantage or a small one? Do the smaller market teams win often enough? Is the fact that the Rays, Brewers and Guardians haven’t won a World Series lately more a matter of luck than a disparity of resources?
There’s another argument here too that a lack of competitive balance isn’t really a problem. In world football (soccer), none of the major European leagues have anything close to competitive balance, yet the Premier League is more popular in the US than the much more competitive domestic MLS (with a salary cap!) is. When the Dodgers and Yankees play each other in the World Series, television ratings go through the roof—competitive balance be damned. Ratings drop hard when the Rangers take on the Diamondbacks, which was the lowest-rated World Series ever. And those aren’t even small market teams. Would a Pittsburgh Pirates dynasty really increase interest in baseball?
So does MLB have a competitive balance problem, regardless of what you think the solution shoudl be?
Thanks for stopping by. We always appreciate spending the evening with friends. Get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow night for more BCB After Dark.
