The 2021 Brewers

It’s that time of the year again!  Opening day of Major League Baseball is upon us.  I couldn’t be happier that a full season is – if not guaranteed – at least a possibility.  Rewind a year ago and things were looking mighty bleak.  This year, I fully expect to attend a few games up in Milwaukee once I receive my second vaccination and give it a few weeks to do its magic.  Can’t wait.

A week or two before the 2020 baseball season was called, I predicted 74 wins for the Milwaukee Brewers, good enough for fourth place in the NL Central.  They ended the abridged season at 29-31, the equivalent of a 78-win season, and they did indeed finish in fourth place, earning a playoff spot due to the expanded format and losing to the Dodgers in the first round.  Making the playoffs – even with a sub .500 record – was a minor miracle given the dreadful team batting average of .223.  Even Christian Yelich couldn’t put wood on the ball, batting .205.  I gotta believe that this year’s team, while not expected to be an offensive juggernaut, will perform better this season.  If they can, the Brewers have a chance to contend for the NL Central division title.

General manager David Stearns only made a few moves this off-season, most notably the signing of second-baseman Kolten Wong, which moves the poor-fielding Keston Hiura to first base.  This is a huge step up for the Crew, both offensively and defensively, though Brewers fans will likely cringe each time a potential double-play ground ball is hit toward Keston.  Brace yourselves for a few errant throws into the outfield.

The other pickup is outfielder Jackie Bradley, a signing that was likely influenced by the question mark surrounding Lorenzo Cain’s return to center field after a year off.  Bradley is a career .239 hitter, so I wasn’t exactly wowed by the signing, but the former Red Sox player is terrific defensively and helps provide insurance and flexibility.  He also bats lefty (as does Kolten Wong), allowing manager Craig Counsell some latitude with late-inning matchups. 

Stearns tried to sign Justin Turner at the hot corner, and this would have been quite a thrill, but for now Travis Shaw returns after a year in Toronto.  His batting average went up a bit last year, so perhaps he’ll return to 2017-2018 form, when he provided significant pop from the left side before struggling mightily in 2019, when his average plummeted to .157 over 230 at-bats.  Overall, this looks to be the weakest position in the Brewer lineup.

Otherwise, Milwaukee’s lineup is adequate. Orlando Arcia and Luis Urias will likely share shortstop duties, Manny Pina and Omar Narvaez will man behind the plate, and Yelich, Cain and Avisail Garcia will join Bradley in the outfield.  If a few Brewers manage to have career seasons, it could be a decent lineup, but outside of Yelich, it’s certainly not an intimidating offense.

The pitching also has some concerns, but again, if a few of the starters can have career years and if the staff can stay healthy, they could be effective, if not dominate.  Last year the team ERA stood at 4.16, good for sixth in the national league (but a full run behind the Dodgers).  Incidentally, the seven best NL ERAs all made the playoffs, while five of the six worst run-producing teams made the playoffs.  Pitching matters!  Luckily for the Crew, all of last year’s starters – led by Brandon Woodruff and Corbin Burnes – are returning, though for now Freddy Peralta and Josh Lindblom have swapped starter/reliever roles, and last year’s core of effective relievers return as well. 

One pitching question mark is last year’s NL rookie-of-the-year, reliever Devin Williams, who posted a phenomenal 0.33 ERA as a setup up man for closer Josh Hader, and who’s returning after sitting out the playoffs last October due to a shoulder injury.  We shall see if he can stay healthy for a full season and achieve some degree of success.  Hader’s dominance of 2017-2018 has taken a few modest hits, but he’s still a hell of a good closer, and if he manages to make his changeup a more significant part of his repertoire – as he claims he will – watch out.

All in all, this should be a Brewers team that’s entertaining and competitive, though not awe-inspiring, and with Craig Counsell at the helm and a lot of match-up opportunities, I think it’ll be an exciting season that ends with the Brewers in the hunt for a playoff spot.  Give them 84 wins, perhaps enough for a wild card.

One final note: 2021 will be the first Brewers season without Ryan Braun in the lineup since 2006.  I could not be happier about his absence.

3 Books on Filmmakers

You may have heard some recent buzz about Mark Harris’s book, Mike Nichols: A Life.  It’s a great read, and it also serves as a gateway to two other books on filmmakers authored by Harris: Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution.  I wish there were more, as over the past six weeks I’ve immersed myself in film history and wish I could stay a little longer.  Harris’s gift for writing accessible yet meticulously researched prose, while providing historical context and contemporary criticism, makes for quick and enjoyable reading; it’s not often that I devour 1600 pages over three books so willfully.

Pictures at a Revolution tells the tale of the five Best Picture nominees for 1967 and how they represented a shift in Hollywood from the old system of strong studio moguls to an auteur-led revolution influenced by European filmmakers, a movement that was enabled by the unravelling of the production code of self-censorship that had entrenched itself in Hollywood for thirty-five years.  The book is also a lens into how films are made.  How?  Almost always painstakingly.  Threads of a film are woven, untangled and woven again, screenwriters are hired and fired, studios and directors are wooed and wooed again, budgets are slashed, insecure and egotistical actors are mollified – it’s a wonder that films get made at all.  Bonnie and Clyde took five years from its inception to its completion, and even then it required Warren Beatty’s indefatigable drive, charm and the threat of a lawsuit to overcome dismissive reviews and lackluster studio support to get the film widely distributed. 

Most interesting to me was Harris’s portrayal of actor Sydney Poitier, who appeared in two of the five nominated films that year – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and winner In the Heat of the Night – and who was the biggest box office star in America in 1968, the year I was born.  His success and exposure came at a price, as Poitier struggled to toe the line of pushing for more three-dimensional roles that would still play well with white audiences, while simultaneously taking heat from a black populous who was tired of being patient with racial progress.  Poitier was quoted at the time, “Wait till there are six of us – then one of us can play villains all the time.  First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.”  Namely, maids and butlers.  I can not imagine what Poitier must have gone through, and I may have to read his memoir next.

If the stakes seem high in Pictures at a Revolution, they are off the charts in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, a book that documents how five Hollywood film directors offered their services to capture war footage and produce films for U.S. soldiers and citizens during World War II. Once again, Harris provides the social context of the time, when there were strong forces opposing any effort to promote the war – especially by Jewish studio heads – and he also illustrates how the challenges of filmmaking were no less arduous within the bureaucracy of the military than within dictatorial Hollywood studios.  Budgetary and supply constraints, inept leadership and egos make the art of movie making difficult in any situation, and certainly more so when the state of the world is at stake.

Five Came Back helped to humanize directors who were only names to me: I feel like I have a better understanding of who John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler were, and I also have profound respect for their sacrifices and heroism. Wyler shot footage from bombers flying over Germany (and suffered major hearing loss as a result).  Stevens and Ford were on the beaches of Normandy.  Huston made an important film about returning soldiers suffering from mental ailments. (Unfortunately, the film wasn’t released when it could have done some good.)

But here’s the added bonus: not only is Five Came Back a stellar book; it’s also a three-part documentary, currently streaming on Netflix.  But wait…there’s more!  You can also view the films that the book references, from John Ford’s Battle of Midway to George Stevens’s important footage of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that forever shaped the director’s life.  Between the book, the documentary and the original films, it’s an abundance of riches for film buffs and historians alike.

I’m looking forward to Mark Harris’s output in the coming years.  If there’s one minor quibble I have, it’s Harris’s penchant for offering attributions deep into a long quote, so that the reader doesn’t initially know who’s doing the speaking.  I wish he’d rectify this habit.  But hey, he writes better than I do!

I highly recommend all three of Harris’s books to date.

Journey's "Too Late"

For a couple of decades, it was in vogue to trash the band Journey.  With their at-times schmaltzy lyrics, histrionic videos and sappy ballads, the band were easy targets and critics were quick to dismiss them, but I’ve always felt that Journey were a cut above their arena rock peers; their musicianship alone took them beyond bands like Head East, Def Leppard, Loverboy, Foreigner and April Wine.   And during the transitional period from their fusion prog-rock roots to radio-friendly AOR during 1978-1980, they achieved – in my mind – rock gold with the studio albums Infinity, Evolution and Departure.  Subsequent years would bring the band greater success, but I love the period when Steve Perry shared vocal duties with keyboardist Gregg Rolie, culminating in 1981’s live Captured, which I received as a present for my thirteenth birthday that year.

It’s this live album that came to mind recently as I drove from Chicago to Cincinnati, where during the commute I spied the exit sign for “Dixie Highway,” which also happens to be the title of a song off of Captured.  For the next hour of my drive, my mental jukebox went through the entire album track by track, and then replayed a song that I’ve always loved but is largely absent from radio these days, not to mention Journey’s setlists.  Journey may have experienced a resurgence over the past decade in a half, perhaps even garnering some respect that had been denied the band early on, but along the way some of their old radio standards have gone by the wayside.  One such song is “Too Late,” one of my favorites off of Evolution, and while I replayed the song in my mind several times during my trip, I noticed a nifty melodic trick that the band employs.

The song’s verse has a simple chord pattern – D A  Bmin  F#min G  (I V vi iii IV) – and the chorus continues in D, employing the non-diatonic flat-7 chord, C major.  It all works well, with Perry’s singable melody working nicely on top.

What elevates the song is twofold:  first, the solo section has some fun with the chords, first transposing to the key of E and then leading us to the key of A, eventually building on a sustained E chord, begging to resolve back to an A. 

But then the second interesting thing happens.  Instead of the next verse starting on A and continuing the verse in that key, we hear the same chords as in the first verse: D A  Bmin F#min and G.  But they now sound like the song is in the key of A, so instead of hearing it as I V vi iii, we hear it as IV I ii vi.   When the band hits the A chord, it sounds like the tonic, and by the time they get to G, we’re back in the key of D, and the song resolves to the chorus as heard twice before.

How?  How the heck does this work?  I’ve tried figuring it out and it isn’t a no-brainer.  It all seems to stem from the altered melody.  If Steve Perry had sung the same melody as in the first verse, our ears would quickly adjust and accept that the band is now back in the key of D.  Instead, Perry does a wonderful melodic variation:

• The original verse has the melodic motif: F# A B A F# D F# E.  D pentatonic.  Cool. 

• But AFTER the solo Perry sings A A B B B C# B A. 

And THAT is all it takes to make the verse sound like it’s in a different key.  Why does this work?  After all, all of the notes are diatonic to both the key of D and the key of A.  What the heck is happening here?

Truthfully, I don’t know.  I’ve sung the second melody over some different chords in the key of D, and it isn’t required that our ears hear it in the key of A, but they do.  Part of it is the fact that the solo ends on an E chord, which at that point sounds like the V chord.  But dang, I find it all a bit baffling.

It just goes to show how melodic alterations can totally flip a chord progression around, and I have to give guitarist Neil Schon and vocalist Steve Perry credit for employing this technique, whether it was by design or by pure chance, and whether or not they could articulate why it works.  It does work, and that’s what matters.  I wish I could understand it enough to employ the technique to my own songwriting, but I’m not sure I’d know where to begin.

And this is one little example of why Journey was not your average arena rock band.  And why seeing a sign that reads “Dixie Highway” can take you down a long ‘journey’ of musical discovery.  Rock on.

Mental Timelines

When you picture your life, do have a timeline in your head? I do, but I’ve learned that some people don’t. During my three-year stint teaching sixth-grade Sunday school, I devoted considerable time drawing timelines on the chalkboard, attempting to place historical events in their proper context.  I had always thought that mental timelines were a natural part of people’s imaginations.  To me, being able to picture a timeline is an essential element to my being: it helps me visualize my own history in particular, but I can also visualize years prior to my existence.  If you say 1960 to me, I don’t have loads of information at my fingertips, but I immediately visualize Kennedy vs. Nixon, Psycho, The Apartment, and my parents’ first date.  Fast forward to, say, 1974, and I can tell you much more:

My first-grade class with Mrs. Davis at Marcy School
Nixon’s resignation
The Godfather Part II
The Conversation
Henry Aaron’s record-breaking home run
The third Oakland A’s Word Series victory in a row (over which team?  The Reds?  The Mets?)
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis
Relayer by Yes
Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne
Get Your Wings by Aerosmith
It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll by The Rolling Stones
Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan
Crime of the Century by Supertramp

I was only six years old in 1974, and while my timeline is unbalanced toward pop culture, I’m happy to have some sense of what was happening at the time.

Back when I drew timelines for my students, I would first try to anchor things in the context of seminal events.  For example, I’d ask them to approximate when the Civil War took place and I’d get a myriad of responses, most of them way off the mark.  I’d get an answer like the 1950s, and I’d say, “Okay, so I was born in 1968, and my parents were both born in the 1930s.  Do you think the Civil War took place just fifteen years before I was born and during my parents’ childhoods?”  They’d answer no, and gradually we’d come up with a better guess, if not entirely accurate. 

Not everyone may share the mental timeline that I can recall, though I imagine that many people could develop their own with some guidance.  When my children were young I purchased a large roll of blank white paper that I laid out on the floor and – after drawing a long line – marked the years of their family members’ birthdays, the years when movies they love were released, when various wars occurred, when the Packers Super Bowl victories took place, etc.  I hope this had some impact on their own understanding of their place in the world. 

But while I’ve always known on an intellectual level that people are different – that we all have strengths and weaknesses – it’s one thing to know this and quite another thing to stop yourself, apply the lesson and really consider others’ experiences.  I may have a decent mental timeline, but someone like the actress Marilu Henner has a condition called hyperthymesia that allows her to remember life experiences to in fine detail and with great accuracy.  According to Wikipedia, only around 60 people worldwide are thought to have this gift.  I would LOVE to have this condition, but I imagine that Marilu had to learn early on that not everyone has her ability to recall whether it was Mother’s Day in 1971 or in 1972 that temperatures plummeted and her family’s outdoor party needed to be brought indoors.  She would know this, and she may have as a young person wondered how her fellow family members could be so daft.

I would be lost without my mental timeline, just as Marilu Henner would be lost without her amazing gift, but other people have their own strengths and may wonder how others live without them.

And all this comes back to the lesson we’ve all learned multiple times but perhaps need reminding of from time to time: not to judge people, but to try to understand them.  I’ve come to learn that the people who don’t say hi to me on the street when I pass them maybe aren’t being rude, but may be absolutely terrified of social interaction.  They could also just be rude, but it does no good to assume so. Six years ago I wrote a comparison of the movies St. Vincent and The Fisher King, and concluded that “it doesn’t hurt to assume the best in people, and it could even do a lot of good.  And as contrived as this message may be, this is exactly the default setting we should be employing in our lives.”

I personally need to be reminded of this adage all the time. Fortunately, when it comes to remembering dates, I don’t need the same guidance.

Learning the Guitar - Again

For some keyboard players – me included – the guitar is a very mysterious instrument.  The visual logic of a piano, with its repeating 12-note pattern of black and white keys, each key corresponding to a unique note, is lost when trying to decipher the fretboard of a guitar.  (“What do you mean middle C can be played here…and here…and here…and here?”)

Sure, learning the basic open chords is easy enough.  Back in the late 80s I borrowed my friend Shawn’s acoustic guitar, bought a chord book, and pretty soon I was playing songs like “Driver 8” by R.E.M. and the similar jangly “I’m Looking Through You” by the Beatles, my fingertips pulsing painfully with each passing hour.  I even figured out open E tuning so that I could play Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” 

But dang, it got hard after that.  Like, REALLY hard.  As soon as I placed my fingers further up the fretboard, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.  Over the past thirty years, I’ve made a concerted effort to improve my guitar playing at least a half a dozen times.  I’ve taken lessons.  I’ve watched videos.  I’ve learned songs.  But each time my efforts have fizzled out after a few months.

But not this year.  I recently started to break down the guitar in ways I hadn’t been dedicated enough to do before.  It started with a terrific set of tutorials on YouTube by guitar instructor Mark Zabel.   This guy is terrific, and I like his instruction techniques.  Of particular help to me were his videos on “Playing the right notes” and the CAGED system of instruction.  CAGED may not work for some people, but it helped me to better visualize the fretboard, and I can now work my way up and down the guitar neck (slowly) to play different chord intervals. I also enjoyed this guy’s video:

Despite CAGED being helpful, in a way it overcomplicates things.  There are really only three shapes for major triads:  D, A and E.  C is basically the same as D.  G is basically the same as A.  At least that’s how I’ve looked at it, and it’s been helpful.   It’s similar for minor chords.  I learned the shapes for D minor, A minor and E minor.  G minor is basically the same as E minor.  C minor is basically the same as D minor. 

These videos put me on the right track, but just as important has been my commitment to learn how to shape chords depending on where the tonic is.  If the tonic is on the second string, how do I shape a major chord?  A minor chord?  A dominant 7 chord?  What if the tonic is on the fourth string?  I’ve worked hard at this, and gradually I’ve better grasped the different chord shapes. 

With the above tools, as long as I can follow where the tonic is, I’m able to play whatever triad I want.  (for CAGED 7th chords, I like this guy’s video). I’m gradually figuring out the proper hand position no matter where I am on the fret board, and over time patterns have emerged.  I’ve found it helpful to do the following:

1)      Go from a major chord to its relative minor, and vice versa.
2)      Play a I, IV, V blues patterns.
3)      Play chords over descending roots of the major scale (think the “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, and see my blog about this musical cliché here.)

Now, none of the above is going to make me a great guitar player, or even a good one.  Hell, just a few days ago I tried playing the opening lick to David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and I could not get my left had to cooperate!  I may never play a lead line that anyone would like to hear.  But my goal for the foreseeable future is to be able to play major, minor, dominant 7, major 7 and minor 7 chords from anywhere on the guitar.  If I can do that confidently by the end of year, that will go a long way towards making me moderately competent at the guitar. 

A good start, anyhow.