Tuesday, May 28, 2013

TR SNIPPET BOYD CASINO AND THE MOVIES


One the treats of long Vegas trip is taking advantage of the $4 movie special at the Orleans on senior day right after a fine half priced buffet or the $3 senior movie at Sam’s Town.  Back home I go less and less to the movies because we have all these fine movies right in our living room using Netflix streamed through our Roku without commercial interruption.  And the Spectrum theater, the place for our sort of films is farther from home than it was when we lived in Delmar.

The experience is not equivalent to at the movies, however.  At home the phone rings, or we walk stop the film to use the bathroom or make popcorn.  In the movies we are just gone, absorbed into the world of the movie.

In none of the hotels I stayed in this trip was there the Turner Classic Movie station where a movie might be watched without commercial interruption. 

So the Orleans or Sam’s Town theaters are just delightful.

Wild Bill and I have totally different interests in films, but I always insist that he picks what he likes, and I get to see something that I normally would not see.  However, this time 42 was up at the Orleans and it was a movie that fit easily into both our tastes for film.  I love such stories and Wild Bill is absorbed with baseball. 

He loves the game and he knows plenty about it, spending a good part of his time as a fan following the players and the strategies and a good part of his retirement as a Little League or girl’s softball coach.   He knows a good bit of the history as well.

I am warming to some interest in the sport after spending most of my life not paying much attention to it, in spite of having a father who was a professional baseball player long before I was born.

My father played ball long before Jackie Robinson, but he was personally familiar with how racial prejudice blocked the best players from playing in the major leagues.  When he played with the House of David, the team barnstormed with the Kansas City Monarchs playing some of the first night baseball in America in every state in the union and every province in Canada.  So he played with Satchel Paige and Bullet Joe Rogan and many other players who he said were the best in baseball and should have been allowed to play in the majors.

In fact, dad’s photo with the Monarch team is in the Black baseball section of the Cooperstown Hall of Fame.  Pretty ironic that he doesn’t make it into the majors but he gets in the Hall of Fame anyway.

Dad was only five foot three and he was told by a scout that he played well enough for the majors, but they just did not want to take anyone so short, a “tiny” catcher as we recently found him called in a newspaper interview.

So he knew about exclusion, seeing it in the baseball around him and feeling a small part of it himself.

Dad stopped playing in 1934.  He did not talk much about anything. Luckily I asked him some questions, and so I have some stories about Grover Cleveland Alexander (who resented Black players) and Babe Didrikson who toured with the House of David as a novelty woman pitcher.

 

But I did not ask enough.  Dad was not really a baseball fan like Wild Bill either.  It had been more a job to him than a passion.  And he discouraged me from sports and encouraged me to get an education.  I don’t think he understood that both are possible. 

I wish I could have Wild Bill interview him.  Bill has both a passion for baseball and education.

The previews of coming films were nothing like the film 42.  All of them looked like Star Wars done again only at a faster pace and with more of the glory of war and the joy of winning by killing the demonized enemy. 

We humans do love war. 

We love killing our enemies or sending in troops and cheering them on to victory.

In one film clip a father and son form a team to go to war and end up fighting on Earth with creatures in future time who had evolved to kill humans. As well as a celebration in war, it is a celebration in dominating nature.

 In another some warrior pilot manages to squeeze his airship into a tiny space between mountains.

In others there were huge explosions and people flying everywhere and somehow living, I guess, with all their limbs intact.  None of them looked like the bombing victims looked in Boston.

I am sick of all of it.

But even the baseball is a modified version of war, a refined way in which humans can compete against one another.  However, I’ll take 42 over all these violent movies.  In baseball the competition we love in war is played out in a much more pleasant manner.  And all the rest of the movie celebrates non violence, peace, and the courage not to seek, “good old fashioned revenge” as I also saw glorified in a preview clip.

And in Boston as well, the contrast was there.  There was the marathon itself, competition that satisfies the human need to be winning against others in a more civilized fashion.  There was even the more advanced idea of everyone winning in the sense that anyone finishing the Marathon was seen as a winner and not just those first few to cross the line. 

And then there was the other human need I see in these movie clips, the need to have some ideological reason to identify and blow up a demonized enemy. 

I was surprised in the movie 42 that there was very little gratuitous violence even from racists.  There is enough to reflect some of the history, but the movie does not focus on the horror of racist violence as much as the possibility for appealing to other human attributes more praise worthy.  This was a human movie where the human character is complex and not just about killing.

Playing video poker (another metaphorical reduction of the competitive human need to win)  in the D I heard the music of the 60’s and thought about how far we had come from the Age of Aquarius and the hopes in my youth that we might finally evolve into a people who knew how to cooperate, celebrate beauty, and love each other.

“Come on people and smile on your brother.  Everybody get together now and love one another.  Right Now!!”

Seems pretty ancient philosophy in an era of drones and guns and jehad.

And “Come senators, congressmen, please hear the call…don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall seems totally out of date.” What really happens to “he who has stalled” in modern America is that he gets reelected.

But this movie, set back well before those Age of Aquarius times of my youth, develops the idea of change through peaceful methods.  Gandhi would have approved this film.

I want to ask my father this.  In  April of 1946 Jackie integrated baseball and in October I was born, a surprise child to an old man and his late in life third wife.  It must have been some year. Tell me about that, dad.   Well, dad is long gone.  In November he would have turned 116 if there were not so many limitations on human life. 


 

Mud was a different sort of story.  It was from a kid’s point of view and reminded me of Twain and the characters in Huck Finn.  I liked it very much. There is violence, but it is kept to a minimum.  The relationships and the movie commentary on them were rich and complicated. 

I bought a large popcorn at the Sam’s Town movie and afterward had a refill for the room that lasted a few days.
 
 

 

 

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