→ August 20, 2020
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Port Royal.

Port Royal came out in 2014 and was brought to the US in 2017 by Steve Jackson Games, one of the oldest extant board game publishers, who first rose to prominence with the 1980 game Car Wars and have since had success with the extensive line of Munchkin games. Designed by Alexander Pfister (Isle of Skye, Great Western Trail), it’s a very simple press-your-luck card game with a pirate theme to make Sid Meier proud, where players draw cards from a common deck and take one per round, but you can bust if you push too far when trying to draw something better, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first player to accumulate 12 victory points from cards and expeditions.

That deck has three main card types: ships, persons, and expeditions. The ships all have gold coin amounts ranging from 1 to 4 coins, and if you choose to take that ship, you get that many coins, represented by cards drawn face-down from the deck. (Their face-up side has no meaning when they’re used as coins.) They can also show a number of crossed swords on the bottom of the card, ranging from 1 to 6, or just a skull and crossbones. If you draw two ships of the same nationality on your turn, however, your turn ends immediately and you get nothing.

The persons can cost anywhere from 3 to 9 coins to hire, and they come in seven basic roles. The most common are the Sailors and Pirates, who are worth one or two swords each, respectively. You can use all of your pirates together to ‘repel’ any ship with a sword number equal to or less than your pirates’ total number of swords, discarding that ship card but keeping your pirates. This is one way to reduce your odds of busting on a turn, although you can’t do anything to repel ships with the skull & crossbones on them.

Other people you can hire give you lasting benefits for future turns. The Settler, the Priest, and the Captain all can help you complete Expedition cards, which require two or three of those in a specific combination and grant you 4 or 6 victory points. The Jack-of-all-Trades costs a bit more but is a wild card that can represent any of those three people for the purposes of fulfilling an expedition. The Governor lets you take a second card on your turn. The Admiral gives you 2 extra coins if it is your turn to take a card and there are at least 5 cards in the display. The Mademoiselle lets you pay one fewer coin to hire a person. The Jester gives you 1 coin if there are no cards in the display when it’s your turn to take a card – even if that’s because you busted. Traders give you an extra coin if you ‘trade with,’ meaning take the gold coins from, a ship of their matching nationality.

Once you’ve completed your turn by taking a card, if there are any cards remaining, all other players get the opportunity to take a card from the table by paying you 1 coin and then paying the regular cost to hire a person or simply taking a ship and receiving its gold value. This means what you leave on the table might be a consideration for what you take, or how far you keep pushing your luck – it may be better to keep going rather than take a mediocre return and leave a valuable card on the table for another player who has the coins to buy it.

Pushing your luck can yield another benefit as well. If you can get four ships of different nationalities on to the table without busting, you get to take a second card on that turn; if you get ships of all five nationalities, you can take three cards. There are also a couple of taxation cards in the deck, where all players with 12 or more coins must give back half of their stash, and either the player with the most swords or the fewest victory points gets a one coin bonus.

Person cards can be worth 0 to 3 victory points; expedition cards are worth either 4 or 6 points each, although they require you to turn in Settler, Priest, or Captain cards that are worth 1 point each, so taking an expedition adds 2 or 3 net points to your total. The official victory condition is 12 points, after which you complete a full round so every player has had a chance to be the start player an equal number of times. You can also just agree to play to any point total you like, or to say you can’t win without completing an Expedition, two popular variants.

I’ve played more than 100 games of Port Royal online, and I own the physical game as well (which is just a deck of cards, so it’s really portable). I definitely have my preferred strategy, and I think the Just One More Contract… expansion helps address some of the base game’s issues with certain cards being too valuable. But even the base game is still kind of a blast, because it’s a gambling game at heart. Every turn is a bet, one you can make a little smarter by collecting swords and maybe keeping an eye on what ships have gone by, but ultimately it’s no better than smart luck, and I find it very enjoyable even when I bust a few times and know I can’t come back to win. (Although I did do that once, busting three times early in a game, taking more risks after that to try to get extra cards, and storming back to overcome an 8-point deficit. Good times!) If you’re into push-your-luck games, like the Quacks of Quedlinburg, Clank!, or Can’t Stop, I definitely recommend Port Royal.

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→ August 19, 2020
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The Glass Hotel.

Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven is one of my favorite books of this century, a gorgeous, lyrical story about a global pandemic (!) that leads to an improbably swift societal collapse, and small graces of humanity that survive it. Her long-awaited follow-up novel, The Glass Hotel, appeared this spring, and it’s far more grounded in the mundane realities of our world now, revolving around a Ponzi scheme run by a Bernie Madoff proxy character and a remote hotel he owns in British Columbia. Once again, the prose is beautiful, and the characters well-developed, but this time St. John Mandel has a harder time with the resolution, with an ending that felt far less satisfying no matter how I chose to interpret it.

As in Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel lacks a clear, single protagonist, instead giving us a wider array of characters who’ll flit in and out of the story as she moves around in time. The novel begins with the half-siblings Paul and Vincent; he’s a would-be musician and a bit of a ne’er-do-well, she’s a high school student who later bartends at the hotel, where she meets Jonathan, a financier several decades her senior who happens to be running a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Jonathan is widowed and makes Vincent an offer for her to serve as, for lack of a better term, a kept woman, appearing in public as his wife but not so in legal terms, which she accepts and seems to enjoy until his arrest and her return to a life of self-reliance.

Although the downfall of the Ponzi scheme has its appeal – I love a good story about con men or other frauds – the stories of Paul and especially Vincent are just more interesting, because their characters are more interesting. We don’t get any insight on why Jonathan would run this scam, and defraud hundreds of clients, many of whom lose their life savings because they put it all in his fund for its impossibly high (and consistent) rates of return. Paul screws up royally in the first proper chapter of the novel, and then ends up working with Vincent, briefly, at the hotel. Vincent has fallen off the side of a boat in the prologue, although the explanation of how she got there waits until the very end, but she returns in the next several chapters as we get her backstory along with Paul’s.

Following those two characters, even with the unnecessary jumping back and forth in time, is the real appeal of The Glass Hotel, especially since the hotel of the title isn’t even in the book all that often – it’s the setting where Vincent meets Jonathan, and where Paul commits a crime of vandalism that only becomes more serious in our eyes much, much later in the novel. If anything, I wanted more of Vincent, both because her character is so solid and complex, and because her arc, from an unhappy if comfortable suburban life to bartending at a hotel to sudden wealth beyond anyone’s imagination to an equally sudden fall, is itself more than enough to support an entire story.

There’s a section detailing the implosion of Jonathan’s scheme, bringing in several new characters and one or two we’d seen previously, that just flies, almost as if this were an action sequence rather than the end of a long white-collar crime, although I did get the sense that the collection of people involved in the fraud were a bit too diverse – we get an array of possible responses to imminent arrest and possible incarceration, but they’re also too distinct from each other, giving it the subtle feel of something that was carefully plotted rather than created organically. That same feeling comes up several times in the book, where the prose is so lovely but you can’t help but catch glimpses of the structure and foundation beneath the novel.

I do love St. John Mandel’s writing, and tore through most of this book in three days while we were away for the weekend; an uneven book from her is still a solid read, and her skill for creating compelling characters is itself reason to pick up anything she does. There’s even a brief David Mitchell-like reference to the pandemic of Station Eleven, and I assume to her earlier novels as well. Vincent deserved a better ending here.

Next up: N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.

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→ August 18, 2020
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She Dies Tomorrow.

She Dies Tomorrow is the latest film from actress/director Amy Seimetz, her first since 2012’s Sun Don’t Shine, both of which she also wrote. It’s a strange, subtle psychological thriller that doesn’t quite stick its landing but still gives the viewer plenty to ponder beyond the strange behavior on the screen.

The protagonist Amy (Kate Lyn Shiel) wakes up at the start of the film and realizes that she is going to die tomorrow, a fact she repeats regularly through the rest of the film, and she drops steeply into malaise, which scares her friend Jane (Jane Adams), who then breaks into Amy’s house to try to save her. Unfortunately, whatever has convinced Amy that she’s at death’s door is contagious, and Jane begins to say that she is going to die tomorrow, exchanging her fairly cheerful demeanor for a flat affect, eventually leaving her house in her pajamas to go to her brother and sister-in-law’s small cocktail party. She’s not exactly a hit there, telling everyone she’s going to die tomorrow, but when she leaves everyone else who was there has caught the bug too. Each of them devolves in their own way, and the film is deliberately ambiguous about some of what happens, but it doesn’t really go well for anybody.

She Dies Tomorrow is the slowest of burns; there are long passages where it seems like nothing is happening, such as when Amy plays the same classical piece four times in a row without any other action on the screen. It’s dark, but also often quite funny, as in the bizarre dolphin discussion at the cocktail party, or Jane’s reaction when the lights go out, or, depending on your perspective, in Amy’s obsession with having her skin made into leather goods after she dies. But the plot itself is short – not thin, but brief, with the spread of this fear-virus just about the only real thing that happens before the last few scenes. (There’s one brief bit of violence, but it’s off screen, and I think the script leaves it unclear who actually perpetrated it.)

The point of this film isn’t what happens, however, but how the characters react to this intense conviction that their deaths are imminent. Most tumble quickly into a “nothing matters” reaction, giving the entire movie a Camus/Sartre sort of atmosphere, although Jane’s reaction is a more intriguing combination of numbness and hilarity (which is why Adams is the real star of the movie, even if she’s not the one on the poster). Amy decides to joylessly try some dangerous activities, and eventually goes back to the vacation home she’d visited with her then-boyfriend, who may be the person who gave her this contagion. Jane’s brother and sister-in-law understand she gave them the pathogen, and believe she also gave it to their daughter, and discuss this with absurdist nonchalance, even as they consider whether to seek some sort of revenge. Jane eventually wanders into a house occupied by two women who say they also have the fear-virus, and who are confronting their imminent demise with thoughts of what they’ll miss about life, even without really considering whether there would be any ‘them’ to miss it. Jane’s response is to ask to swim in their pool, which produces a tragicomic scene as she does so while the two women sit outside and talk, apparently oblivious to and unperturbed by their visitor.

The ending of She Dies Tomorrow contributes to this terse script’s ambiguity, as we see Amy waking up on the rocks by the sea in a dress, and it seems like at least some of what came before this might have been a dream, which is extremely unsatisfying when it comes to plot; if you’re going to do that, just lean into it and put Bobby Ewing in the shower. The film works much better instead if you view it as an interpolation on several responses we might have to realizations of our own mortality and the finite nature of our lives, to how we might react if the plans we’ve made for the future turn to dust before an empty hourglass. She Dies Tomorrow doesn’t judge its characters or advise us on how to cope with the calamity of so long a life when it may be cut short at any moment. It’s as terrifying as any stock serial killer wearing a mask and wielding a weapon.

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→ August 15, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 8/15/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the demotion calculus in a short season with no minor leagues, plus notes on Spencer Howard, Ryan Castellani, and Luis Basabe. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast guest this week was Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, discussing concepts from her book and how baseball scouts and executives might apply them – and how to avoid the pitfalls of using “intangibles” as a cover for more insidious biases. You can buy Grit here via bookshop.org.

You can also buy my new book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us about Ourselves, which came out this April, via the same site. I’ll send out the next issue of my free email newsletter as soon as my fall board game preview comes out over at Paste.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Carina Chocano spent hours taking MasterClass sessions and wrote about the product for The Atlantic, asking what it is they’re really selling since they’re not selling actual education.
  • Novelist Chimamanda Adichie suffered a concussion earlier this year, and wrote about the experience, including the introspection that came with the temporary loss of part of her brain function.
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→ August 14, 2020
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Or What You Will.

Jo Walton’s Hugo-winning novel Among Others   is one of my favorite novels of any genre, a beautifully written story around two incredibly compelling characters that just happens to have a slight element of fantasy to it. It’s an exemplar of genre fiction in that the fantastical parts of the book accentuate the plot but don’t define it. That book led me to pick up her 2019 novel Lent, which delves into Renaissance and Roman Catholic history and, again, uses a fantasy-like twist to tell a better story, but where the main character is the real star. And that, in turn, led me to her brand-new novel Or What You Will, which seems like an even more serious novel while drawing on the great history of metafiction in literature, going back to Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds to explore life, death, and meaning in new ways.

Or What You Will gives us Sylvie, the author, in her 70s, widowed, writing her new novel while visiting Firenze, which serves as the inspiration for her fictional duchy of Thalia and a series of novels set in the equivalent of the Renaissance, featuring several characters borrowed from Shakespeare’s plays (notably The Tempest and The Twelfth Night, the latter of which gives this book its title). The narrator and protagonist, however, is a voice in Sylvie’s head who has become many characters within her novels, and who realizes that when Sylvie dies, he will too, so he hatches a plan to make them both immortal through her writing – not just through fans, but a form of actual immortality in a Thursday Next-like world inside her books.

The chapters alternate, roughly, between scenes from within this new Thalian novel, which include Orsino and Viola (The Twelfth Night), Caliban and Miranda (The Tempest), Geryon (Dante’s Inferno), and the real-world Marsilio Ficino; and conversations between Sylvie and the narrator that unfurl the former’s life story, including an abusive first marriage and an idyllic second one, a brutal and unloving mother, and a late-blooming yet successful literary career. Those introspective chapters, which I assume at least draw a little from Walton’s own life (she didn’t get her first published novel until she was 35), are clearly the superior ones here, implicit meditations on life and legacy, unfolding a fascinating personal history of a three-dimensional character. The chapters set in Thalia are strongly reminiscent of Lent, which was set in Firenze during the Renaissance and featured Ficino and Pico della Mirandolo, who also appears in this book, but there are a couple of twists to life in Thalia versus that of real-like Italy that put it strongly in the realm of science fiction or fantasy. The characters in Thalia are aware that their world is different, and that other worlds exist, although they only know Sylvie as a god. It becomes a bit like Lisa Simpson’s “I’ve created Lutherans!” experiment; we’re looking down at these people, waiting for them to figure out what we already know, and knowing that they’ll have to figure it out for the book to end. There’s a separate intrigue around the rivalry between Orsino and Geryon, and the sudden appearance of Caliban from beneath the ground, which is moderately interesting but takes a clear back seat to the main storyline.

Walton manages to keep the narrator’s specific plan to save Sylvie’s life, and thus his own, out of the novel until close to the end, and introduces a clever wrinkle for the narrator to surmount for the entire plan to work. The conclusion is a bit beside the point, however, since it doesn’t work in our world and thus prompts you, the reader, to think about your own mortality and legacy, something that has at least been on my mind more than ever this year, between the pandemic, friends losing loved ones, and changes in my own life. That’s really why the novel works even with its implausible fantasy elements – that, and Walton’s typically lovely writing, especially when it comes to describing our world’s Firenze, a city she clearly loves – these themes are universal and timeless, and the way she presents them is both novel and still as comfortable as the familiar routines of Sylvie’s writing life.

Next up: I’m halfway through Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel, The Glass Hotel.

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→ August 13, 2020
→ By

Klawchat 8/13/20.

My latest post for The Athletic subscribers looks at the difficult demotion calculus teams face with young players now, as well as notes on Spencer Howard, Ryan Castellani, and Luis Basabe.

Keith Law: Klawchat. Breathing life into your nightmare.

Heather: Do you think there will be HS/College baseball in the spring?  It would be just like the Red Sox to finally get a top three pick, and then not have anyone for their scouts to watch.
Keith Law: At this point, no, I do not. That could change with the results of the election, and/or a fresh surge in cases in the northern hemisphere as the weather turns cold. (Wasn’t the heat supposed to shut the virus down? How’d that work out?) But we’re not prepared for what we really need right now, another 4-6 week lockdown.

Mark: Just finished with Empire Falls from your recommendation and loved it. If I recall ,you proceeded to read all of his books after that one.I;’m going away on vacation, what might be a strong second choice by Russo?
Keith Law: Nobody’s Fool is his second-best book; Straight Man is his funniest.

Joe: Nats promoted Seth Romero.  Think he is ready for the bigs?
Keith Law: On the mound? Changeup was always big-league quality, probably a 70. Control is iffy. Off the field is another matter.

Ben (MN): Does your love of coffee spread to espresso? If so, any espresso recommendations? I am just starting to get into espresso in the mornings instead of coffee because the acid in an entire cup coffee is doing a number on my stomach as I get older. So far the only “good” brand I know is Intelligentsia. I’m starting to explore local coffee shops in the Twin Cities but many don’t have their own espressos.
Keith Law: Dogwood’s Neon blend is a great, workhorse espresso bean. They’re local to you. And yes, I love espresso, and it is definitely easier on my stomach.

Jones: I’m surprised nobody’s picked up Folty since his DFA.  Any insight?
Keith Law: He was down 2+ mph.

Bob: Important pizza question. I’m on the east coast and will probably never be in AZ to eat Pizzeria Bianco right out of the oven. I just noticed one of those food delivery services offers to ship 4 pies for a pretty hefty price of $135. I’m willing to bite the bullet on the price, but will the pies be anywhere close to restaurant quality so that I can say I’ve actually tried Pizzeria Bianco? Never settle for less than fresh or accept this is the best I can do?
Keith Law: If you can afford it, try it. It won’t be as good as fresh, but you’ll still get the fresh ingredients and the high quality of workmanship that goes into it. But I’d also encourage you to look in your city for a Neapolitan-style pizzeria you could support.

Joe: As a fan, it seems like Deivi Garcia has been passed over as a rotation piece this year in favor of Clarke Schmidt even though he has actually pitched at AAA and is already on the 40 man.  Can you see Garcia helping the Yankees at all this year?
Keith Law: Yes, maybe in a long relief role. I don’t think they trust his command or his fastball’s ability to keep missing bats.
Keith Law: I like him a bit more than they do internally.

Nate: Watched Vlade Guerrero Jr. over the weekend against the Red Sox.  I guess he gets his metabolism from his mom’s side of the family.   He’s gotta be three hundred pounds.  He won’t be in the league in five years at this rate, right?
Keith Law: He’s big, for sure, and that’s why I’ve been saying for almost two years he will end up at DH. You can be heavy and still be a very good hitter, and it’s also not unlikely that at some point he’ll realize he has to get himself in better shape.

Kyle KS: In your opinion what is better for almost ready or MLB ready prospects, to be at an alternate site getting some sort of consistent reps or being at the MLB level but not playing frequently?  I’m thinking of Knizner and Carlson on the Cardinals when they were actually playing.
Keith Law: I wouldn’t call up Carlson unless he was going to play regularly. Knizner I could see using part-time, because there’s always work for other catchers to do – he could help in the bullpen, for example, and learn to catch better stuff & work with pitchers there.

Guest: OK, at what point (if any) does MLB look at the Cardinals situation and say that there is no way they can qualify for the post season due to the lack of games they can play.  

Do you think they privately have a hard number minimum?
Keith Law: I don’t know and I haven’t heard anything at all about this.

JJ: Was Andrew Benintendi always overrated?  I’ve been hearing for three years that he’s on the verge of stardom, but all I see is a league average player, who hasn’t improved at all since he first came up.
Keith Law: He hasn’t improved since he came up, but I don’t think he was overrated. Everyone, myself included, assumed he’d continue to adjust, and he hasn’t.

James: Can Trent Grisham be a dude? His underlying stats look really encouraging.
Keith Law: Yes.

Gary: Hey Keith- have you gotten to watch any Andres Gimenez? Man is he fun to watch. Glove looks like a 7
Keith Law: Yes. Not a 70 defender.

Guest: Who is hurt more with lack of a minor league season: low level prospects or triple a guys?
Keith Law: Low level prospects. They don’t get the year of repetitions that could lead to significant improvements and accelerate their ascents to the majors. It’s quite possible some of these guys will start 2021 no better off than they were at the start of 2020.

Brian: Is Detroit really gonna manipulate Mize’s service time in a year when they could legitimately make the playoffs and the back end of the rotation has been positively dreadful?
Keith Law: Seems like it.
Keith Law: They should have Mize, Skubal, and Manning up now, replacing Boyd, Nova, and Alexander. They’d probably be better off; they’d certainly be more interesting.

Jason: What is Luis Urias’s ceiling?
Keith Law: Above average regular at 2b.

Kevin: What position does Austin Martin play for the Blue Jays?
Keith Law: They’re going to try him at SS, I think, but I would bet on 3B in the long term.

Andrew: Does Realmuto break Posey’s record catcher deal?
Keith Law: He should.

TC: Gimenez off to a nice start for the Mets, and his defense definitely plays. His bat’s always been the question mark. Is there something you’ve seen in his at-bats so far that accounts for the small sample size success but could be a good sign for the future?
Keith Law: No, he’s been Madrigal-like, it’s all batting average, below-average power, doesn’t walk or even seem to work the count that much.

James: I think your scouting series is so popular because we can actually watch what you’re seeing.
Keith Law: I’m just glad you guys are enjoying it. I was certainly concerned about providing enough value to subscribers in a year without the minors.

Zach: The Daniel Bard story out of CO is pretty darn cool. Did you ever scout or watch him as a young player? (Also, amazing how much money the Rockies spent on bullpen help and this guy may wind up being their stopper.)
Keith Law: Yes, saw him both summers he was an amateur, with Team USA and on the Cape. Saw him hold mid-90s up to 98 with life as a starter, secondaries were always inconsistent, arm slot was kind of a problem. I believe I wrote him up as a potential starter, though, because the velocity was so easy and he was supposed to be a smart kid. Who knows what really went awry – was it just Lancaster? Was it the arm action? Something we don’t know about? – but I will say, in hindsight, he had a long way to go to get to three legit pitches and enough stuff to get LHB out to become a starter.

Jack: Any thoughts on the Laureano/Cintron incident? Were the suspensions right?
Keith Law: Yes, and yes. They’re both idiots for what they did. There’s a fucking pandemic going on, you dingbats.

Kevin: Is there an early indication on the baseball being used? Happy fun ball or scaled back?
Keith Law: Rob Arthur has written that it’s less happy-fun than last year’s.

JT: Trump is intentionally murdering the post office to ruin mail in voting and circumvent democracy. Whither the NRA and the defense from tyranny?
Keith Law: He and his cronies are explicitly talking about reducing voting rights, but that’s fine, because it’s the voting rights of brown people.

Michael: The top of the 2016 draft was terrible, but after round 1 you had Dustin May, Pete Alonso, Bo Bichette, Shane Bieber, Zach Plesac and more. How are MLB teams so bad at this crucial part of building a team?
Keith Law: That’s not really fair. Alonso looked quite different physically and didn’t bring all that huge power to games. Bichette was a first-round talent, and some teams saw him that way, but he tried to deter some teams from drafting him so he could sign with an organization he liked (Toronto being one). Bieber had a 45 fastball. May had athleticism and a great arm but some head-whack and no real delivery consistency. You cherrypicked, with hindsight, five guys from rounds 2 and beyond. That’s five successes out of, what, 500+ guys just taken in rounds 2 through 10?

Danny: I’m a Yankees fan and just saw Touki pitch this week for the first time- he’s fun as hell to watch. Have I missed out? his pitches have great movement and he’s really athletic on the mound
Keith Law: I still really like his future as a starter. Three potentially plus pitches, great athlete, still struggling a bit with consistency in the delivery, and I feel like he defaults a bit to power rather than location/setting up hitters.

Zach: Do you think Ryan McMahon will make enough contact to be an above-average regular?
Keith Law: I do.

jimmyb: At what point do the Angels get concerned about Adell? His defense (even on the wall catch yesterday) has been bad. And he looks sort of lost at the plate. Is it just about adjustments at this point?
Keith Law: Small sample but my impression is that he’s overmatched at the plate and not ready yet.

CG: It really seems like people get a kick out position players pitching (like Gyorko for the Brewers last night).  It seems more prudent this season than any other season, with the compressed schedule.  Do you enjoy it as well?
Keith Law: I enjoy it but it becomes less fun the more common it is.

Ben: There a lot of talk in Tigerland these days about wishing Boyd was dealt (before his current downturn started in the 2nd half) at last years deadline. My question to you is, do you know what level of prospects (if there actually was interest) were actually being offered then? If it was similar to the Greinke package, with all the financial negatives, I’d say Avila was right to sit. Do you think the Tigers could have gotten a better deal then the Greinke deal last summer for Boyd?
Keith Law: I don’t know, but I don’t blame Avila for not foreseeing Boyd turning into a pumpkin.

Guest: Why not push the end of the season a week or so to allow teams to complete their seasons?  They could then get a playoff bubble in one or two cities and make sure that completes to get all their money.
Keith Law: Television contracts.

Joe: Since Tatis missed most of the last two months I forgot how much fun he makes baseball, doesn’t he? I think Paddack’s curve looks different this year and it seems to be fooling people. Is it moving into that average pitch territory more consistently?
Keith Law: No, not an average CB, a 45 for me. Probably good enough for what he is.

Andrew: Any chance MLB will have fans in the stands come April 2020?
Keith Law: Realistic answer? Maybe. Scientific answer? They shouldn’t.

Fitch: Keith, as an outsider looking in (from UK, we have our own problems). When did Republican start to = idiot? Any post i see online or news clips you seemingly have to be thick, all lives matter, anti science, anti mask etc to be a Republican. Has Trump hardened these lines or did this start before him?
Keith Law: At some point in the Bush presidency, 2000-2008. This isn’t the Republican party of the 1980s or even 1990s. Now, some of it – the fealty to the religious right, general opposition to anti-discrimination laws, smaller government and less social safety net – has been part of their platform since at least the 1960s, but this anti-science, conspiracy theory-toting lunacy is a new feature.

Justin: Bought and loved the book.  Just in the last couple of days I’ve heard on the Mets broadcast that their biggest issue is that they can hit, but they can’t hit with runners in scoring position.  Also heard the Rockies say of course a close pitch would go Story’s way, he has 600 games in the big leagues and the other guy has 6.  My volume down button has never gotten more use.
Keith Law: You’ve made several good decisions there.

Braves Pitchers: Lucas Sims was pretty critical on Twitter of how he was handled by the Braves and they really only have Fried and Soroka to show for their pitching-focused rebuild.  Are there issues with the Braves’ front office re: developing pitching or is it just sour grapes from Sims?
Keith Law: That sounds a bit like sour grapes to me. And they still have some pitching coming, in the majors (Touki, Wilson) and minors (Anderson, Davidson).

Michael: Re: The draft, I’m talking about compared to the top of the draft with Moniak, Pint, Ray, etc.  But you can do the same exercise for any year and find tons of great talent that reached the majors shortly after being picked.
Keith Law: That year had a very weak top 10 and we knew it at the time.

Charlie: Vlad Jr is 21, but 2 very sloppy errors at 1B make me concerned about how hard he works at his craft…
Keith Law: I’ve heard for years that he really works at hitting. That’s great – make him a DH.

Tom: evan white looks very overmatched right now as well
Keith Law: Yes he does, and worse, it’s overmatched by velocity.

Jake: There were some stories from spring training that Gabrial Arias achieved some PD goals in terms of pitch recognition. That’s a big thing holding him back. If everything clicks, what kind of player could he be?
Keith Law: It’s just stories until he does it in games.

Andrew: Trading Max Fried will end up being Preller’s worst trade, wont it?
Keith Law: That would be saying something for the GM who traded Trea Turner for Wil Myers.

Michael: Have you watched Crip Camp on Netflix?  I had no idea the opposition to ADA laws and how it all came about. Amazing what we don’t learn in schools
Keith Law: I have not – heard it’s good, though.

Jay: How do you see the trade deadline playing out?  Very few teams will be out of the playoff picture this year, but you know the billionaire owners won’t let their GMs spend any money.
Keith Law: Probably just encourages more deals where GMs trade players and pay most of their salaries to get prospects back.

Guest: After reading your latest article regarding young MLB prospects and no AAA, would you call up Pache and let him get “real experience.”
Keith Law: I would. It’d help their defense, which in turn would helpt heir pitching too.

Andrew: Is Naylor done for with the Padres? Mateo. Almonte and Profar all ahead of him. If he doesn’t get ABs with universal DH then what is the point?
Keith Law: I think I’d still prefer Naylor’s bat, but I don’t know what they think internally on these guys.

Nick: What do you make of Rhys Hoskins’ struggles over the last half of last year into this year? Seemed so promising after his first two seasons.
Keith Law: His rookie year was pretty fluky; he’s much more of a low-average, high BB/K power hitter, and probably needs to DH. Useful player, not a star.
Keith Law: At least he spells his first name correctly.

Jason: Can Eric Lauer stick in a rotation?
Keith Law: I’m leaning towards no at this point.

Tom: Think Tony Gonsolin can be a solid starter? Looked pretty good last night
Keith Law: He definitely has the weapons to do so.

Mike: I miss minor-league baseball in the Summer.  What does minor league baseball look like when we return?
Keith Law: Short of MLB subsidies, we don’t get MiLB back until it is safe to have fans in the park, and that could be a while, even with a vaccine.

Kip: With their international sanctions ending next year, are the Braves linked to any notable prospects?
Keith Law: I have no idea, as I don’t cover that market or players under 16. Jesse Sanchez at MLB would be a better source.

Amy: Is it bad to just cheer for your team (redsox) to keep losing so they get a high draft pick? it honestly seems like the best thing they could get out of this year.
Keith Law: No, especially since they’re just not that good a team anyway.

Kevin: Nick Solak looking good with the bat  what kind of ceiling does he have and will he be better than Willie in LF ( I know not hard to do) or can he stay on the dirt
Keith Law: Maybe gets to regular status as a multi-position guy. Don’t think his glove is good enough for 2b regular.

Guest: “Say Anything” was a great read.  Are there other historical books like that, not necessarily by Keefe, you’d recommend?
Keith Law: Manhunt by James Swanson.

Mark: Thanks for doing the chat. Do you have a pizza dough recipe recommendation?
Keith Law: For a regular home oven that maxes out at 500-550 degrees, I use Peter Reinhart’s recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. For my little Ooni outdoor oven, which can get over 800 degrees, I use Marc Vetri’s Mastering Pizza.
Keith Law: You need totally different hydration levels for those two temperatures.

Luke: Is there something noticeably different about the Cubs or just a hot 15-game stretch?
Keith Law: No 15-game stretch is meaningful in terms of evaluating performance. However, it’s 1/4 of a season, so it’s meaningful in the standings this time.

Thomas: HI Keith; First off, thanks as always for these chats. Curious about your thoughts on Charlie Montoyo as a manager so far. I was really excited by his hire, and while anecdotally I think his bullpen management has been fine, his batting orders (moving hot guys down in the order so that the top of the order can bat with men on base) and bunting in extras with the new rule are just a couple of the things that I’ve noticed that seem very anti-Rays.
Keith Law: Agreed. I’ve been surprised at some of his outdated in-game tactics. The fealty to Biggio, who hasn’t performed this year and gets overmatched by velocity, is weird – he shouldn’t be leading off just because he draws walks, not when his OBP is below the league median.

A: Anything surprising about Spencer Howard’s debut?
Keith Law: See my column today.

Ben: When playing guitar are you interested in music theory too or is it more about being able to play songs for a hobby/enjoyment?
Keith Law: I took a music theory class in college but haven’t thought about that stuff since. I just play to win the game. Wait, wrong topic.

Nelson: Does Lamet need another pitch to succeed as a starter at a high level?
Keith Law: I think so. He’s been really good without it this season, though.

Michael: If the season ended today, three below .500 teams would make the playoffs.  Not great, right?
Keith Law: Eh, I’m willing to accept pretty much whatever this season gives me. We have baseball and that alone is a surprise.

Nick: Any thoughts on how Justin Dunn has looked so far?  Is his future in the rotation or the pen?
Keith Law: He’s been 90-91 a lot. This isn’t the guy he was in the minors, certainly not the guy who hit 99 in relief in college and would still sit mid-90s as a starter after that. If this is all he has, he has to go to the pen.

Brian: A couple of Brewers questions: (1) Hiura’s defense has been awful – do you DH him this year and hope the DH sticks in the NL in the long term? (2) What is Adrian Houser’s ceiling?
Keith Law: 1. Yes. 2. Fourth starter.

Dave: Are the Orioles actually interesting? That Ruiz play from last night was pretty impressive.
Keith Law: I haven’t found them that interesting to watch, in terms of players who I think will be part of their next good team or who have real trade value. And those last two games vs the Phillies were ugly all around.

Henry: Hi Keith, what burr grinder do you use for pour-overs? I’m looking to replace mine.
Keith Law: This Baratza Virtuoso. Mine is an older model without the timer. It’s been tremendous, requiring just two part replacements (a new burr, and a plastic housing that eventually cracked) in almost seven years, plus their customer service is an 80.

addoeh: A couple team below .500 making the playoffs isn’t that bad.  1980’s NHL played 80 games to only eliminate 5 of the 21 teams.
Keith Law: I made a joke about this somewhere recently, where I remembered the 1981-82 season (I think) and noticed what you just said, and felt really bad for the five teams that were left out.

Adam: Not a question, but a link worthy for your Stick to Baseball column. Talks about how fringe conspiracy sites and “news” are all free and easily accessible, while quality journalism with high standards is increasingly behind a pay wall. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-…
Keith Law: The solution, if there is one, is for sites that facilitate the wide spread of fake news and disinformation sites, such as Facebook, to crack down on them.

James: I saw you liked some tweets defending “WAP.” That song is trash; it’s not art. Cardi B has every right to put it out, of course, but why elevate or defend indecency?
Keith Law: Who are you to decide what is “art?” I actually don’t care for the song, although Megan Thee Stallion is a far better rapper than I realized. But it’s not really a genre of music I especially like, and so much of that song’s meaning is about female sexuality, and I’m really loath to call that “trash” especially when we’ve had several decades of songs where men extol their own sexual prowess without comparable criticism.

Brandon: Yeah absolutely nothing can backfire with having Facebook determine what is and isn’t real news. For such a smart guy you really are extremely naive sometimes
Keith Law: Good comment, Brandon, thanks for making something personal that didn’t need to be. I never said “nothing can backfire.” I am arguing that Facebook and Youtube and Twitter would do better to police content posted on their services instead of letting Miracle Mineral Solution (bleach as a fake health cure) and QAnon (a domestic terror movement) use their sites to spread their messages and recruit new followers.

Andrew: Is it even possible for baseball to do a bubble like the NBA?
Keith Law: I don’t think so, although that’s a better question for scientists in that field. It strikes me that it’s easier for the NBA with rosters less than half the size of MLB rosters.

Dodgers: What makes their player development system so great?  The talent they’re producing is incredible.
Keith Law: They have drafted extremely well in the last few years, and their player development system is one of the best at integrating analytics, mechanics, and traditional methods.

Big Fan: Great article today.  Can Austin Riley be fixed?
Keith Law: His issues with velocity are tied to bat speed, and that’s not an easy fix.

Rick: Brandon Marsh an impact guy? Seems like the Angels should’ve given him a chance over Adell.
Keith Law: Yes, he is. Not sure I agree on him over Adell to start, but switching them now would make sense.

JR: Any idea what AZ will do with Varsho? Seems tough to develop a C in the bigs. Are they resigning themselves to using him as IF/OF?
Keith Law: Plus his speed might be better used at another position. And Carson Kelly is really good. Their alternatives are better than they would be for most teams.

Ridley: I’d put the Republican party’s change all that way back to Goldwater’s defeat. That was the end of the intellectual conservative movement-the party made a conscious effort to be a grass roots, pro-religious-freedom-and-we-know-what-that-means and anti-civil rights party. My parents were part of that movement. They recognized that you don’t start a movement at the top; they organized at the local level, winning schoolboards, winning county posts, and setting the agenda in state agendas. Reagan was their first victory, and he was as anti-expert, anti-intellectual as Bush 2.
Keith Law: It sounds like you know this stuff better than I do – and I’ll at least plead age, since Goldwater’s defeat was 9 years before I was born.

Jackie: Can Charlie Blackmon hit .500?
Keith Law: He can definitely hit .400.

Will: Do you agree with Mo Rivera that a team can’t be a world champion in a sixty game season?
Keith Law: No, and it’s not even the biggest thing on which Mo and I disagree.

Jay: Basic policing of content is not hard.  When a toxic source like the two you mentioned becomes prominent enough to get attention, drop the ban hammer and don’t look back.  A gazillion other sites already do it.  Facebook simply doesn’t want to.
Keith Law: Exactly. And Youtube doesn’t either. I’ve reported videos promoting MMS, which their policy explicitly bans, and nothing happens. I don’t like the idea of the government creating new regulatory structures but maybe that’s the threat we need to get these companies to step up their own enforcement.

Brian: The Mets have started Dom Smith at DH and Pete Alonso at 1B in each of the past three games.  Is the wrong thing to do because Smith is objectively a better defender?  Is it the right thing to do because Alonso may not perform as well if he’s only DHing (which is speculation, for sure), or because they may not have the benefit of the DH next year and Alonso needs to maintain his skills in the field?
Keith Law: My guess is that it’s status quo bias: Alonso was the primary 1B last year and moving him to DH would constitute a change. I don’t know anyone who’d argue Alonso is a better defensive 1B than Smith; Smith is probably a 70 there. Even if you love Alonso’s glove, it’s a 50, and I’d argue it’s less. So  what explanation is there? Inertia.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for your questions and for reading. Please stay safe, stay distant in public, and wear your masks. Someday we will meet again.

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→ August 10, 2020
→ By

The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ August 9, 2020
→ By

Music update, July 2020.

It seems like new music releases might be slowing down now, perhaps a lagged effect of the pandemic, although I still see a half-dozen or more albums coming out in the rest of 2020 that I’m excited to hear. As always, you can listen to the playlist here if you can’t see the Spotify widget below.

The Beths – Dying to Believe. The praise for the Beths’ new album Jump Rope Gazers is a bit ahead of my opinion of the album, which I liked, but wouldn’t say I loved it; they’re so much better when they use their energy and go uptempo.

Doves – Prisoners. That’s two strong tracks of the three singles they’ve released so far off their comeback album, The Universal Want, due out on September 20th.

Space Above featuring Boyboy – Movements. Aaron Short, who records as Space Above, may sound more like early The Naked and Famous, the band Short left, than TNAF does today – and I’m here for it.

The Naked and Famous – Everybody Knows. And here’s the remaining duo, with one of their most melodic songs since their debut album in 2010. Their latest album Recover, features this, last year’s “Sunseeker,” “Death,” and “Bury Us.”

Everything Everything – Violent Sun. This latest single from these British avant-garde rockers definitely grew on me over multiple listens, further reason to be eager for their fifth album, Re-Animator, which drops on September 11th.

Nation of Language – The Wall & I. Nation of Language’s latest album Introduction, Presence came out on May 24th, and closes out with this track, which feels heavily influenced by peak New Order.

Jorja Smith – By Any Means. This was the singer/songwriter’s first single on her own since last year’s hit “Be Honest,” and I hope it signals her sophomore album will come soon.

Black Honey – Beaches. More indie-pop goodness from one of my favorite bands of 2018.

San Cisco – Messages. Scarlett Stevens takes on lead vocals on this very sunny pop track, although I think her lack of vocal depth shows here when she doesn’t have Jordi Davieson to share singing duties.

PAINT – Strange World. This really sounds like a lost Badly Drawn Boy track from 2000. PAINT is Pedrum Siadatian, formerly of the Allah-Las; this is the best track from his first album under the name, Spiritual Vegas.

Inhaler – Fade Into You. It’s tough to cover a song like Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” but Inhaler, led by Elijah Hewson (son of Bono), does a very credible job here.

Hinds – Spanish Bombs. A bit of a different sound for the Spanish quartet, maybe a little more polished than their previous output, although that’s kind of a low bar.

Glass Animals – It’s All So Incredibly Loud. This song is wonderfully weird, and has Glass Animals’ trademark use of unusual percussion sounds, and the more I listen to it the more I like it. The synth lines here are relentless.

Serpiko – Sleep State. Nobody seems to know who Serpiko is, but his debut EP, also called Sleep State, has garnered some positive press for its unusual blend of electronic, funk, and jazz elements. This title track is by far the best on the record, meandering in a purposeful way thanks to a persistent percussion line.

The Go-Go’s – Club Zero. Showtime has a new documentary out on the pioneering all-girl pop/rock group, and the quintet recorded this new track to go along with it … and it’s great. Other than Belinda Carlisle’s vocals, you might guess this was something from their peak years.

Ihsahn – Spectre at the Feast. Ihsahn is one of the founding members of the Norwegian black metal band Emperor, probably as well remembered for their involvement in church burnings and for their drummer’s conviction of the murder of a man who solicited him for sex than for their four albums, the last of which came out in 2001. That’s a long way of saying that this track is nothing like Emperor’s music – it’s progressive rock, not really even metal, with clean vocals and some intriguing guitar work.

Pallbearer – Forgotten Days. The champions of American doom metal are back with this title track from their new album, due out October 23rd. This track was labeled (Edit) so I presume a longer version will appear on the full-length LP.

Ensiferum – The Defence of the Sampo. I really enjoy Ensiferum when they stick to the thrash elements more common in Viking metal and go light on the death growls; it’s like listening to strange Norse metal drinking songs.

Mastodon – Fallen Torches. This is on the heavier side for Mastodon, a previously unreleased track that will appear on the band’s forthcoming B-sides and miscellany collection Medium Rarities, which will also include the band’s cover of Metallica’s “Orion.”

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→ August 8, 2020
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Stick to baseball, 8/8/20.

I wrote another scouting notebook column for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at Jo Adell, Jesus Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Nate Pearson, Nick Madrigal, and more. On The Keith Law Show this week, I got together with my old friend Joe Sheehan to talk about this teetering disaster of a season so far.

For Paste, I reviewed Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, the newest entry in the Villainous game series, this one with five new villains from the MCU, adding some new rules that mean these villains aren’t playable with any of the previous 15. I also ranked all twenty of the villains in the Villainous games so far.

I participated in a panel at Gen Con Online on using social media in tumultuous times, and whether there’s an obligation to use your social media accounts to support causes like BLM or other social justice endeavors.

My partner and I are among the co-hosts for a virtual event and fundraiser for Kyle Evans Gay, a Democratic candidate for the Delaware Senate, who is trying to flip our district blue. If you’d like to help us out and perhaps join the event on August 15th, you can buy tickets to the virtual event or just make a donation here. If you happen to live nearby, the full tickets also include dinner from V&M, an Italian restaurant in the district that has also been a takeout machine since the state first locked down in March.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his peerless coverage of the pandemic for the Atlantic with this massive look at the United States’ epic failure this year, from a federal government “denuded” of experts to a social safety net sewn out of dental floss to one of the least efficient health-care systems in the developed world. This article is a list of failures, a maddening series of decisions not to fund basic initiatives that might have slowed the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we have 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its cases and deaths.
  • Reason looks at the emerging political philosophy of Peter Thiel, who claimed to be a libertarian but now supports nationalistic policies more commonly associated with fascism. Note that Thiel and his proxies supported travel bans to fight COVID-19; the link above this from Ed Yong explains why travel bans can actually exacerbate the spread of a new pathogen.
  • The Guardian Long Read has a mournful look at the last of the Zoroastrians, as one of the world’s extant religions is slowly dying out.
  • Politico explores how xenophobic activist David Horowitz helped mentor and create Stephen Miller, architect of this Administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies.
  • Iowa’s state epidemiologist medical director got a 45% raise plus $55,000 in overtime pay this year despite leading one of the nation’s most ineffective responses to the pandemic, which including blocking school districts from closing unless they met state standards for virus spread and refusing to implement a complete shutdown. I’m all for paying scientists what they’re worth, but Iowa is still seeing 14+ new cases a day per 100,000 residents.
  • You should not “do your own research” when it comes to science. People who say that are inevitably going to be wrong, because they lack the experience or knowledge to evaluate what they find in that “research,” and the results are dangerous to us all.
  • A Utah woman is facing life in prison for buying red paint that was used at a protest. Really – not Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or China, but Utah.
  • My friend Will Leitch wrote for New York about how watching sports simultaneously now feels meaningless and yet extremely powerful.
  • Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools for a district in the hinterlands of southeastern Arizona, told Eli Saslow of the Washington Post that there is no good plan to reopen schools, and that “it’s a fantasy” to think it can be done without people in the community getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
  • Colleges are reopening faster and more fully than primary schools, but that’s the reverse of how things should be, given how much better college-aged students can handle online learning.
  • NPR published this helpful pocket guide to COVID-19 etiquette, with tips like talking to people about ground rules when you’re going to see them later at a physically distanced gathering.
  • The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote that this was the week American lost the war on misinformation, thanks to the President’s promotion of raging quack Stella Immanuel, although I’m pretty sure we lost this war a long time ago and it’s going to take state and national vaccine mandates to stop it.
  • Board game news: Starling Games will release Flourish, a lightweight game from the creators of the amazing Everdell, some time before the end of 2020.
  • An update to Ultimate Werewolf Extreme is now on Kickstarter, funding in just 18 hours.
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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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