Recap of the Brewers' 2016 Season

That the Milwaukee Brewers managed to win 73 games in 2016, a full five games ahead of their disastrous 2015 season, is nothing short of miraculous when considering that the team they fielded consisted of so many players with little to no major league experience. Add to that the mid-season trades of four of their more productive players – Aaron Hill, Jeremy Jeffress, Will Smith and their all-star catcher, Jonathon Lucroy (all of whom played for teams that made the playoffs this year; more on that in a moment) – and it’s amazing that the team was able to finish as strongly as they did. At the July 31 trade deadline, the Crew was 47-56, on track to win 74 games.  They finished just one game short of that pace during the remaining two months of the season despite fielding a team made up of players who had just spent time in the minors.  Hell, they even took care of the Cubs and Pirates during September. Pretty incredible.

Front and center of the team’s return to somewhat respectability is Hernan Perez, a jack of all trades defensive player who since coming from Detroit a year ago has shown that he belongs in the Major Leagues. Jonathon Villar isn’t far behind. He strikes out a lot, but the guy was one home run away from the coveted 20-60 clubs of 20 home runs and 60 stolen bases, finishing with 19 and 62, respectively. Not too shabby. Strong finishes of Keon Broxton, Domingo Santana and rookie Orlando Arcia, plus a return-to-form season for Ryan Braun – a few nagging injuries and regular off days aside – helped the Brewers hold their own for the most part, even down the stretch. Second baseman Scooter Gennett also proved himself as a capable starter by figuring out how to hit left-handed pitching. His status as an unmovable infielder may make him a short-term contributor to the team as it positions itself for the future, but Gennett has clearly proved himself as a legitimate starter or platoon player somewhere, if not Milwaukee. Chris Carter, who amazingly finished tied for first in the National League in home runs, also led the league in strike outs and batted .222 with only a .321 on-base percentage. A contributor, for sure, but not exactly the first baseman the Crew has been longing for since Prince Fielder’s departure five years ago. If the Crew hopes to compete in a year or two, an upgrade at first base may be needed.

On the pitching side, manager Craig Counsell was able to piece together just enough starting pitching to hang in there until the sixth inning, when he could hand the reigns to a fairly solid relief core that was initially hampered by a bizarre injury to Will Smith but bolstered by performances from Tyler Thornburg, Carlos Torres, and Jeremy Jeffress. Starter Zach Davies proved once again that he’s a force to be reckoned with, and the big surprise of the year goes to starter Junior Guerra, who at age 31 had rookie-of-the-year type numbers before exiting due to injury. I had hoped the Brewers would trade him at the end of July when he was hot, but who knows – the guy could end up being a contributor for years to come.

As a Brewer fan, watching former Milwaukee players enjoy amazing seasons and careers is a constant source of frustration. Last year's Brewers shortstop Jean Segura had a terrific year for Arizona – leading the league in hits and batting .319 – and left fielder Khris Davis finished with 41 home runs for Oakland (along with a piss-poor OBP).  Carlos Gomez finished strong with the Rangers, and don’t get me started on the former Brewers who’ve played with the Royals the past four or five seasons, plus JJ Hardy is still having a great career with Baltimore, etc.  It begs the question: is there something wrong with the Brewers’ coaching staff that can’t get the best out of their players while they’re in a Milwaukee uniform? Add up all the former Brewers in MLB, and you’ve got yourself a pretty damn good team. Of course, being among the smallest two markets in baseball, Milwaukee can’t afford to keep most players around too long, but lately general managers Doug Melvin (until last year) and now David Stearns have been dishing players off before they’re even arbitration eligible, much less free agents. Probably not a formula that can continue for too long if the team hopes to compete in the near future, and one has to wonder if the Brewers could have actually competed this year had they kept onto some of their core players. Perhaps not, and perhaps in a few years fans will reap the benefits of rebuilding, but the organization is going to have to find a way to tap into the talent of players while they’re in Milwaukee instead of seeing glimpses of talent that end up maturing elsewhere.

Still, as a fan, it was a fun season to watch, in that I had absolutely no expectation for this team. Watching young guys compete can be a satisfying endeavor even when the end results aren’t perfect. The Brewers could manage to get back to a .500 team next year and perhaps manage a winning season in 2018, but it’s going to be a tough road. We’ll see if the Cubs continue their hapless ways in the playoffs this year, but make no mistake – they are going to be good for a long, long time, and with a one-game wildcard playoff (which I hate), it may be a long while before the Brewers actually get to play a legitimate playoff series again. GM Stearns may be ahead of where many of us expected the Crew to be at this point, but he and the team still have a long way to go.

Either way, I’ll be watching and likely losing more hair in the process.

A Recording of my Short Story, "James's Arrival"

Ten years ago, after writing fiction for a number of years and working with a local writers group, I received my first little success, winning the James Jones Short Story Award for my story, "James's Arrival." At the time it was a great thrill, but more importantly, it spurred me on to continue and try to reach the next level. Ten years later, I'd be lying if I said I've reached the goals I'd hoped to achieve, but like I've said repeatedly, I'm not dead yet. 

Ten years after my little blip of success, I've had a chance to enjoy my story as if for the first time due to the work of the Elmhurst Public Library with their recent addition of "Adult Storytime for Grownups Podcast!" on the library website. Actor and writer Duard Mosley does me the huge honor of reading my decade-old story and breathing new life into it, offering nuances I never would have included in my own reading of the story.

Feel free to listen and download above or go to this link and scroll down to Episode 2, starting at about minute 5:35. If you go this route, before my story is a short bit of fiction from Duard himself! Enjoy.

The Completion of my New Album, "The Palisades"

Album?  Tape?  CD?  I guess none of the above, but despite not actually making a physical product and putting it up for free on my website, I still call the project I began last October an "album." After months of demo recording and distribution of arrangements, a day in the studio to record drums and bass, followed by months of recording guitar, keys, vocals, clarinet, French horn, tuba and violin, and then a few months of mixing and mastering, The Palisades is complete.

The goal was to record an album that my wife Alice would like from start to finish. On that note, I've already succeeded. If anyone else likes it, well that would be nice, too!

Seriously, I'm happy with the result, and I'm thrilled with all the musicians who performed on the album and many others who helped with recording, equipment, or just lending an ear.

I'll highlight all eleven songs over the next several weeks. In the meantime, you can stream and/or download the album, plus check out lyrics and how the whole thing came together. Let me know what you think.

This is my ninth album, and I'm not finished yet. I think the next one is going to be a balls-to-wall rock and roller, but I'll have to see if I've got enough anger in me to pull it off. Ask me on November 9th!

Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle"

When Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was released two years ago, I had the good fortune of reading a Time magazine piece that compared the film to a book by a Norwegian author named Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Not just a book, but a 3600-page, six-volume autobiography called – oddly enough – My Struggle, (you gotta wonder if they came up with a different title for the German translation).  I socked away this little bit of information for future use, and lo and behold, while at a used bookstore in Bayfield, Wisconsin in July, I happened upon the first volume of Knausgaard’s opus and thought that for nine dollars I should give it a go.  I’m glad I did, and though I likely won’t be reading volumes two through six, I enjoyed the first volume (or the first 300 pages or so, anyhow) not only for what the author illuminates about his life, but for the way his words inspired me to consider my own life journey.  If you’re ever in want of stopping the routine of daily living, of taking a moment to self-reflect, to remember and to wonder – in the words of David Byrne – “Well, how did I get here?”, My Struggle would be a good place to start, as it holds back nothing: not a sentiment, not a doubt or desire, not a transgression or dejection, and likely not a single conceivable detail about the physical surroundings of the author's childhood.

Arthur Miller once wrote: “The writer must be in it; he can’t be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

It seems Knausgaard has no qualms whatsoever of walking on the beam of embarrassment and revealing the seedy underbelly that is his life (and is all of our lives if we’re ever to be truthful).  He writes about his daughter, “(She) can be so cheeky that I completely lose my head and sometimes shout at her or shake her until she starts crying…”  This is not something most people would admit to unless they’re discussing a past that they’ve now recovered from.  My Struggle is not one of those books.  It reveals the gory details of living.

Have you ever closed your eyes and tried to conjure up a detailed mental image of the home where you grew up?  The colors.  The texture.  The scents.  The layout.  Was the toilet of the first floor bathroom on left or on the right?  Was that the room with flowered wallpaper or the little green design that always reminded you of a military seal?  Was the floor linoleum, wood or tile? 

Knausgaard has thought through all this and more, and so much of his reminisces brought to life my own childhood.  His crush for a girl named Hanne and the desires she summoned (“There was nothing between us…but I loved her.  I didn’t think of anything else…I saw her all the time, not in a scrutinizing or probing way; that wasn’t how it was, no, it was a glimpse here, a glimpse there, that was enough”) recalls my own childhood crushes to a “T”.

Or this!  Knausgaard writes about two childhood memories that may as well have been describing my own:  “At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream” and “Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past.”  Holy crap.  That was me.

Knausgaard was born the same year I was, and though from a different country and with a very different family makeup, his life has so many similarities to mine, and – if the half a million sales are any indication – to many other people’s lives as well, that reading it is both externally engrossing and internally revealing.

The difficult relationship Knausgaard has with his father and brother and the distance between them (“We never touched, we didn’t even shake hands when we met, and we rarely looked each other in the eye”) could be describing my own complicated kinships.  His intense desire to warrant his father’s approval is palpable: “I had also wanted to show him that I was better than he was.  That I was bigger than he was.  Or was it just that I wanted him to be proud of me? To acknowledge me?”

Then there’s his description of alcohol, the substance that had killed his father: “This was a magic potion we were drinking.  The shiny liquid…changed the conditions of our presence there, by shutting out our awareness of recent events and thus opening the way for the people we normally were, what we normally thought, as if illuminated from below, for what we were and thought suddenly shone through with a luster and warmth and no longer stood in our way.”

My Struggle is an autobiography, but novelized so that details are described and words are spoken that the author assuredly couldn’t testify transpired exactly as he recounts.  But he puts them in there, sometimes with excruciating detail:

               “Here’s your Coke,” I said.  “I’ll put it on the table.”

               “Fine,” he said.

               “What have you got in that bag?” Grandma said, eyeing the paper bag from the pharmacy.

               “It’s for you,” I said.

Most authors would have summarized this exchange: “I returned home with the Coke and gave Grandma her medication” or something along those lines.  Many editors – me included – would have told the author to back off from the dialogue that does nothing to move the story forward.  Knausgaard must have a very special editor indeed to have let things stand as he wrote them, and I wonder if much editing was done at all.

It’s the mundane stuff of life – the same “stuff” that I’ve mentioned in previous posts such as my review of the play “The Flick,” of the documentary series “Seven Up” or of Joe Swanberg’s movies – and the mundane stuff is actually very interesting.  Living is interesting.  And if captured by a skilled writer, it can even be a page-turner. 

I did lose patience with the second half of the book, much of it devoted to Knausgaard and his brother cleaning up their grandmother’s home in the wake of their father’s death, but up until about three-quarters of the way through, I was sold.  Volume two may not make it into my itinerary, but it clearly has for others.  The book has been translated into at least fifteen languages and has been uniformly praised.

The Artist vs. The Art Itself

Richard Brody makes an odd claim in this month’s issue of The New Yorker.  He posits that because Alfred Hitchcock’s directorial technique was a direct offshoot of his “own ugly fury,” that it should be less revered by current directors and critics, and that the admiration of Hitchcock’s craft is a dangerous affair.  He writes:

The cult of Hitchcock, which presses directors’ ideas and critics’ taste toward his hyperrational craft and conceals his tormented frenzy, tends to thrust some filmmakers’ impulses, and the critical response to some of the best modern films, to the sidelines.

A pretty bold – and completely unsubstantiated – assertion.

Regardless, it raises an interesting question: should an artist’s personal life influence the way we view the art itself? 

I like the art of Jasper Johns, but I know nothing about the artist.  Not a thing.  Perhaps I should, and perhaps I’d be better for it, but would anything I discover change the painting that I admire?  It would still be the same art, the same use of colors, the same shading.  My perception of the artist might change for the better or for the worse, but I would hope not my admiration for the art itself.

I heard Beethoven’s third symphony for the first time in 1986 and over time began to admire it greatly (as a young rock and roller, classical pieces sometimes took their time).  Later, I learned that it had originally been dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte for his anti-monarchy idealism, only to be withdrawn.  Should this matter one iota to my admiration for the piece?

I think not.

Awards for art, movies and books should be viewed in a similar light.  Casablanca isn’t a better film for having won Best Picture, and Do the Right Thing isn’t a worse film for not having won the same award (or even nominated!).  They are both brilliant in their own right.

Then again, I can think of examples when my admiration for a song was actually enhanced once I learn the story behind it.  There’s no way you can tell me that Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” isn’t that much more beautiful, compelling and heartbreaking when you learn that it was written for his dead son, or that Lyle Lovett’s wonderful album, The Road to Ensenada, isn’t given a bittersweet tinge after learning that it largely chronicles his breakup with Julia Roberts.  One of my all-time favorite songs, Jackson Browne’s ”I’m Alive,” is even more compelling to me when I consider his breakup with Daryl Hannah. 

What can I say?  Pop music for me is sometimes a substitute for People Magazine!

On occasion I learn about the inspiration behind a song only to wish I hadn’t.  I recently read about the Ben Folds song, “Eddie Walker,” a wonderful tune for which I created my own story, and although the true inspiration for the lyrics isn’t in a completely different universe from my own interpretation, it still clouds the mental image I’d formed and will probably do so forever more.  For this reason, I admire artists who let songs be once they’re composed and refuse to offer insight into their origins.

And then there’s the ugly side.  Hitchcock’s purported sexual harassment, for instance. But many artists have an ugly side, and it would be silly for us to view their art through that lens. Roger Waters has said some pretty controversial and stupid things over the years, but I still think The Wall is still brilliant.  John Lennon used to hit his girlfriend.  I still love “A Day in a Life.”  I haven’t spent a penny on Elvis Costello since he told an audience at The Chicago Theater to “fuck off,” but I certainly can’t claim that I don’t still love his music.  Hell, you couldn’t pay me to see a Mel Gibson movie, but there’s no denying the fact that the guy can act and direct.

My father and I recently corresponded about this subject, and he wrote: “Does it matter what Brahms' psychotherapist thought was behind his compositions? Was Shostakovitch mentally ill or sexually repressed?  Who cares?  You love his 5th Symphony for what it is.  And Wagner: let's not even get into his politics.  Too much analysis and not enough appreciation and enjoyment.”

Too much analysis and not enough enjoyment.  There you are.  

Perhaps Richard Brody should do as I did two nights ago and rewatch Vertigo – perhaps with his daughter as I did – and enjoy it for what it is: a perfectly-executed telling of a creepy story.  If someone thinks it’s the best film of all-time, fair enough.