Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1

“Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” is the first of director Kevin Costner’s planned four-part western series. Given the project’s enormity, and expected enormous overall length, there was apparently talk along the way of making it a television miniseries instead only for Costner to insist it remain a big screen experience. And that is where “Chapter 1” debuted back in June, as did “Chapter 2” just recently at the Venice International Film Festival, on the big screen. As a proponent of the big screen experience myself, I admire his commitment, as I do him plunking millions of his own money into the endeavor. And while it feels a little harsh to judge this massive tetralogy after but one movie, like adjudicating a ginormous puzzle based on nothing but its border, he’s asking for quite a down payment on an ultimately uninvolving and unimaginative three hours. As it happens, this winter I watched all 15 hours of Rainer Werner Fassbender’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980) not just for the first time but in a movie theater. Based on a book, it was divided into 12 chapters rather than four, but it was remarkable how each chapter worked unto itself even as they gradually added up to something bigger. What’s more, despite premiering on television, it felt cinematic, utilizing technique and tone, which as much as anything, is what’s missing from “Horizon,” the ultimate irony. “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was shown on TV, but feels like a movie, whereas “Horizon” was shown in movie theaters, but feels like TV.

“Horizon” is set against the backdrop of the Civil War but given that events take place in and around the Arizona and Montana territories, the conflict feels distant. That can sometimes come across like an oversight, if not a cop-out, a movie set during the most fraught period of American history eschewing politics, even if just as often it evokes “Horizon’s” most pointed realization. Though calvary and infantry Col. Albert Houghton (Danny Huston) never delves into specifics of the “important” work he and his men are doing on the far-flung frontier, Huston carries it in his air, nevertheless, that whenever the war between the states resolves itself, Manifest Destiny will continue apace, one original sin giving way to the other. That sense of Manifest Destiny is explored through its various storylines, brotherly vengeance that entangles a grizzled cowboy and a woman, the eponymous settlement at odds with the indigenous, and a wagon train on the Santa Fe Trail. The latter stood out to me, if only because of Luke Wilson as the wagon train leader, his unique kind of amiability suggesting both someone you might want to lead you into the great unknown but also someone who might well be in over his head. Seeing how it all works for him is just about the only thing that might get me back for “Chapter 2.”

The two qualities I cite, however, also speaks to “Horizon’s” problem, relying on Huston and Wilson to imbue character and meaning where there is none. No doubt Costner intends “Horizon” as something akin to Larry McMurtry’s celebrated 1985 novel “Lonesome Dove” but whereas “Lonesome Dove” lingered in the presence of its characters, took interest in what they had to say, drew its complications and situations with color and eccentricity, “Horizon” does nothing of the sort. That also speaks to just how little Costner uses his expressly chosen medium to his advantage. The locations are frequently grand, but just as frequently Costner fails to render the scenes involving these locations, or any others, with any sense of grandeur. His image-making is purely functional, not using them to tell his story, or even enhance or underline it, but merely recount it, a full three hours of advancing a labyrinthine plot, little else. It all ends with scenes that have been clearly culled from the next movie, the most evocative visuals by far if only in so much as they are manifestation of how “Chapter 1” has been in service of nothing more than getting us to “Chapter 2.” Close your eyes and you can virtually hear Costner saying: “Next week, on ‘Horizon.’”

Friday's Old Fashioned: Opening Night (1977)

“Opening Night”  blends a backstage farce with a backstage melodrama in the vein of “All About Eve.” But in straining those elements out, writer/director John Cassavetes proves to have concocted something altogether different and original, a rumination on performance, and the performer, all brought to life in an electrifying performance by Gena Rowlands who sometimes seems to deliberately let the seams of acting show and then, just as easily, make them disappear. She is Myrtle Gordon, a celebrated stage actress, but also a tormented alcoholic, and if in some moments Rowlands conveys steady elegance, in others, she is on the verge of emotional collapse, if not collapsing already. She is readying a new play in previews, but one requiring her to play a middle-aged woman, which as a middle-aged woman, gives her pause, terrified at being typecast for the rest of her life, underlined in how both her leading man (Cassavetes) and director (Ben Gazzara), with whom she’s had prior romantic entanglements, have broken those off, pointedly deeming their relationship “professional.” These worries are exacerbated when her car hits and kills a young adoring fan, an accident which she flees. What ensues, however, is less murder mystery than ghost story as the deceased girl’s visage haunts Myrtle like an apparition of her youth. 

It sounds dark, and it is, though it’s also surprising just how much “Opening Night” opts for something unexpectedly liberating as Myrtle seeks to literally exorcise the apparition all while rebelling against the play, and the director, and the playwright (Joan Blondell), and all of it building, as the title suggests, to opening night. You might recall that the fourth-season finale of Larry David’s HBO comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm” was also called Opening Night, in that case referring to the overriding storyline of David starring as himself in a stage production of “The Producers.” It initially goes awry when David panics and forgets his lines, only to save the day by essentially breaking the fourth wall, segueing into a standup comedy routine, winning the crowd’s approval, and then segueing back into the show. I don’t know if David had or has ever seen “Opening Night,” but I could not stop thinking about how in its own unlikely way, that climax echoes Myrtle’s climactic first show moment in which she tears up the play in the middle of itself and makes something else by drawing on the play and her own past and present, living the role by refusing to forget herself.

In Memoriam: James Earl Jones

Darth Vader’s introduction in “Star Wars” is so iconic that you hardly need me to provide a detailed explanation, but for the purposes of this post, let us say that it’s wordless. It’s a moment rendered entirely through aesthetic – costume, music, and the how the camera angle remains low to make him larger than life as he processes through the alley of fallen rebels. But that means when he finally does speak, his speaking voice has a lot to live up to. And it has even more to live up to given what he’s doing when he breaks his brief silence – that is, lifting a hapless rebel clean up off the ground by his throat. “Where are those transmissions you intercepted?” the Sith Lord demands, speaking of the plans for the vaunted Death Star. “What have you done with those plans?!” It’s the last word – “plans!” – which really resonates, figuratively splattering against the wall the way he splatters the hapless rebel against the wall after he snaps his throat. The voice, by the grace of James Earl Jones, meets the moment. As it does throughout the movie. My favorite line (reading) comes later, during the big Imperial morning meeting, the one where Admiral Motti is crowing about how the Death Star is the greatest thing since green milk and Vader says, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Jones enunciates every word. Listen to it and you can practically see the bass notes moving on the speaker; he’s scaring you with elocution. That’s not easy.

When we talk about about seminal voices of the silver screen, who are we talking about? We’re talking about Humphrey Bogart delivering dry witticisms, of course, and we’re talking about Jean Harlow sassing everyone in sight, sure, and we’re talking about James Earl Jones saying, well, anything as Darth Vader. “No disintegrations!” he booms so suddenly at the bounty hunter in “The Empire Strikes Back” that it becomes the improbable vocal equivalent of Marty McFly strumming the first note on Doc’s giant amp and getting blown backwards. That’s what makes it at least partly astounding that for those first two “Star Wars” movies, at least, Jones did not even get a credit. But then, that was his own request. By his estimation, he worked no more than a couple hours on the first movie, brought in during post-production when the voice of English actor David Prowse, who was inside the Darth Vader costume, did not, unfortunately, meet all those moments. And Jones, ever noble, knew that Prowse was the one who sweated it out day after day inside that costume. Even so. I mean no disrespect to Prowse, whose own relationship to the role proved bitter and complicated over time, but as crucial as his own physical work was in bringing Darth Vader to life, Jones is living proof how much difference a voice can make. His voice fills up that costume, creates a character more machine than man. You see him – you see him – because of Jones. And when his face is revealed in “Return of the Jedi,” through no fault of Sebastian Shaw, the English actor chosen to be the one under the helmet, it’s inevitably disappointing. There was no way, none whatsoever, that Darth Vader could live up to the way James Earl Jones made him look in each one of our minds.

Jones, though, was not just Darth Vader. The Mississippi native was an immensely talented and versatile actor who got his start in the theatre, speaking to how he could physically live a role too. I never saw him on the stage, but My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, an avid theatergoer, did in London’s West End in “Driving Miss Daisy” circa 2011 and will testify to his brilliance. I can only imagine how his voice might have resonated in person. Despite the context surrounding his famed sermon in “Field of Dreams,” a black man praising a long prejudiced sport, his baritone rendered the game’s myth tangible. His voice could lend gravity to middling 90s thrillers, provide dignity to corporations in various commercials, and honor the Olympic Games. Reader, I confess, in that miserable Olympics-less summer of 2020 when the Tokyo games were postponed, I must have watched and/or listened to the monologue Jones delivered for NBC’s prelude to the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics opening ceremony a hundred times. His concluding intonation to “let the games begin” was perfect. Unadorned, he just said the words, bearing witness to their meaning, and showcasing just how much spine-tingling power his natural, unembellished voice could imbue. Much as the voice of Bob Sheppard was still used to introduce Derek Jeter even after the longtime New York Yankees announcer passed, Jones should have been grandfathered in for American television to say “let the games begin” for eternity.

 

The voice of Jones was so potent that it could swing both ways. Much as “The Lion King” enlisted his one-of-a-kind verbal command to animate Musafa, or various Tom Clancy screen adaptations recruited him to inject authority as the CIA deputy director of intelligence, Phil Alden Robinson’s comic thriller “Sneakers” called upon Jones to project gravitas as the NSA director of operations. His character was forced to work with and then mollify a motley team of hackers making increasingly kooky demands for covert services rendered, like one essentially asking the US Government to buy the world a Coke, leaving Jones’s character dumbfounded, enraged, but grudgingly acquiescent. If it had been any other actor in the role, the moment would have been funny, but because it was Jones, it was funny and profound. You’ll never understand authority better than when one of the most authoritative actors loses all sense of it.

James Earl Jones died on Monday. He was 93. 

Janet Planet

“Janet Planet” begins with 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) away at summer camp. Homesick, she calls her mom, Janet (Julianne Nicholson) in the middle of night, threatening to kill herself if she is not picked up and taken home. By the time Janet arrives, Lacy has changed her tune, but nope, mom says it’s too late now, she’s made her choice and they hit the road. It’s a deft introduction, encapsulating in Lacy that old adolescent feeling of angst, melodrama, and misery. It also establishes the relationship between mother and daughter as the movie’s most important, evoked in how we first see Janet in sun-dappled long shot, suggesting Lacy’s idealized view of her. Their rural western Massachusetts home undergirds a sense of isolation and dependence on one another, the two often sleeping in the same bed. Is it any wonder that Lacy refuses to board the bus when it’s time to go back to school? That moment departs from Lacy’s point-of-view, seen its own long shot, as if going back to school is an out of body experience. And so, whether the title of writer/director Annie Baker’s feature film debut was culled from an Outkast lyric, or the nickname Van Morrison gave his wife, I don’t know, in the context of “Janet Planet,” it denotes a daughter essentially gravitating in the orbit of a mom.

Lacy, though, is not the only satellite in Janet’s orbit. In what passes for plot, three different people pass in and out of mother and daughter’s lives. There is Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s terse boyfriend, Regina (Sophie Okonedo), Janet’s old friend and an ex-hippie who is part of a commune that may or may not be a cult, and Avi (Elias Koteas), the leader of the commune or may or may not be a cult who takes interest in Janet. None stick around too long. If they bring their own annoyances or aggravations to the mix, Baker is keen to show just how much Lacy annoys and aggravates them. There might be a palpable menace in the air when Wayne lashes out at Lacy for asking him pointed personal questions despite his suffering an intense migraine, but it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for Wayne too. Being with Lacy is a challenge, and Baker makes it as challenging for us as much as them to be so much in her prickly, possessive presence. And even if the world of “Janet Planet” is of a decided bohemian, liberal bent, no doubt Baker at least partly writing what she knows, this idea of raising a child as endurance test is an idea with which everyone can identify.

Gradually, though, Lacy drifts further and further from her mom’s orbit. If this marks “Janet Planet” as akin to a coming-of-age story, it’s notable how many of the genre’s trappings Baker eschews, like pop hits of the era for lazy hits of nostalgia. No, this movie is firmly in the present, and in Lacy’s presence, though even then, it never quite lets us all the way in. There is no voiceover to provide Lacy’s perspective, and though occasionally Baker writes dialogue that elucidates the character, she just as frequently envelopes scenes in an unsettling silence. The way Lacy watches Regina while eating an ice cream cone is a quirk or two away from full-on horror. This approach, though, means that “Janet Planet” is often enigmatic to its own detriment. It’s telling how many reviewers have relied on Baker’s explanations of ideas in interviews to fuel their own interpretations. Yet, if that inscrutability can be frustrating, it can also be freeing. Throughout, Lacy returns to a small shoebox theatre in her bedroom, arranging her figurines and then pulling the curtain closed, a profound metaphor for every child’s churning secret drama. Adults yearn for access, much like viewers of “Janet Planet” might, and Lacy is unwilling to grant it. 

10th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival

Today is the first day of the 49th Toronto International Film Festival, award season’s starter pistol, and blogging tradition dictates that Cinema Romantico counterprograms a film festival to be watched at home. Of course, these faux film fests, as longtime and extremely frustrated readers can attest, are generally just an excuse for me to address trending movie topics. And 2024 was no different. But also, halfway into this year’s Not-at-TIFF slate, I suddenly realized that every movie was from the 90s. At that point, I had two choices: pivot to some other decades or lean into the bit. I leaned into the bit. Here, then, is the 10th annual Not-at-TIFF film festival, All 90s Edition. You’re welcome?

Presumed Innocent (1990). Rather than screen all eight hours of the Hulu series based on Scott Turow’s novel we will instead screen Alan J. Pakula’s adaptation to remind everyone that with a little thing called craft you can tell the same story in just a little over 120 minutes. 

Island of Dr. Moreau (1996). Look, man, I have no idea how difficult Blake Lively was or was not on the set of “It Ends with Us” (if she was that difficult then what does that say about our lord and savior T*ylor S*ift?), but no matter how difficult she was, there is no way on earth she was as difficult as the king up there on this. 

Clean Slate (1994). Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night Live movie will premiere at actual TIFF, but rather than counter program with one of the SNL spinoff movies, a la “The Coneheads,” we will instead screen one of those normal movies made by an ex-SNL cast member that nobody remembers. 

Delirious (1991). Nicolas Cage is set to star in a biopic of Super Bowl-winning coach and game-changing football announcer John Madden. I am confident that Cage will acquit himself well, but honestly, I’m just sad the late John Candy never got a crack at the same role. Can you imagine John Candy with the telestrator?

La Haine (1995). It is strongly recommended, though not required, that all faux attendees binge the new season of “Emily in Paris” prior to screening. Eat your macaron; then drop acid. 

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992). Lots of 1999 was the best movie year ever takes flying around these days (I might have something to say about this at some point), given it’s been 25 years, and while some cinephiles might rebut with 1939, or 1967, or 1975 as the best movie years, hey, here’s a lukewarm counter take: what if 1992 was the best movie year ever? It’s not just “Last of the Mohicans” or “My Cousin Vinny,” the latter starring Marisa Tomei in what I 50% seriously, 50% cheekily consider the greatest movie performance of all time (eh, make that 75% seriously, 25% cheekily), it’s so much more. It’s “Unforgiven” and “One False Move”; it’s “There’s no crying in baseball” and “Wet out there to-night.” 1992 has got the best biopic, and the best Merchant Ivory movie, and the best SNL movie, and the best TNT movie, and, of course, the best First Week of January Movie (see above). These things matter.  

Chain Reaction (1996). Speaking of First Week of January Movies, what about August movies? In his Reveal newsletter, Scott Tobias argued that “Premium Rush” was the most August movie of the 21st Century. And while I do like “Premium Rush” a great deal, especially Michael Shannon as the Marx Brothers movie-ish villain convinced the whole rotten world is out to get him, it’s a little too good to be the most August movie. No, I would submit “Chain Reaction” as the most August in show, a pale semi-imitation of “The Fugitive” but set during a cold Chicago winter which is just what I’m dreaming about come August. 

As always, on the 8th day we rest by kicking back with nothing more than a YouTube video. And when it comes to the 90s, the two most 90s 90s things are the Villanova basketball logo of the era and this video of Natalie Merchant and Michael Stipe singing “Candy Everybody Wants.” 

The Faculty (1998). I won’t graft the last six letters of renaissance onto the end of Josh Hartnett’s name, here, and just observe I’m happy he’s back in the mainstream. I will also observe that the one-time impudent teen of “The Faculty” is now playing a dad taking his daughter to see Taylor Swift Lady Raven in “Trap” and where is that “Saving Private Ryan” meme?

Basic Analysis (1994). “One woman’s triumph over a yeast infection set against the backdrop of the tragic Buffalo Bill season of 1991.” If you know, you know. Shannen Doherty (RIP) was robbed. 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 8 redux

November 3, 1990: Georgia Tech - 41 Virginia - 38

The best moment in the best game of the best college football season does not occur in the game, per se, but still takes place on the field of play, or at least, right next to it. Five minutes remain. The top-ranked and undefeated Virginia Cavaliers trail the 16th-ranked, undefeated, once-tied Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets 38-35. Virginia has the ball on Georgia Tech’s one-yard line. The Atlantic Coast Conference championship and quite possibly the national championship are at stake. The CBS broadcast cuts to a handheld sideline shot eavesdropping on Cavalier head coach George Welsh and the camera’s invasiveness causes Welsh to break the fourth wall. “Can you move the camera, please?” he says. He sounds annoyed, even exasperated, but as the “please” denotes, he’s polite about it. And it’s that politeness juxtaposed with the appreciable tension in his voice that gets me, befitting a coach, a school, a conference unfamiliar with being on the sport’s grandest stage. College football’s biggest games can be great, even extraordinary, yet in another sense, they are often the same ol’, same ol’, the same teams playing in the same places. That is what infused the tremendous 1990 tilt between Virginia and Georgia Tech with such unique energy, two teams fretting their hour upon the stage, in a manner of speaking. In chatting with Furman Bisher of Charlottesville’s Daily Progress newspaper ahead of the game, Welsh likened it to Virginia’s “15 minutes of fame,” noting that he “never went in for that game-of-the-century stuff,” referencing the moniker traditionally applied to the sport’s most ballyhooed showdowns. And yet, him asking the cameraman to move revealed a man who unexpectedly found himself smack-dab in the middle of one anyway.  

It might seem strange here in the brave new world of 2024, when the Atlantic, underline, Coast Conference improbably stretches from its Charlotte, NC headquarters to upstate New York, to the Ohio River Basin, to the Great Plains, and all the way to the San Francisco Bay, but for the first 50 years or so of its existence, it was a homogenous conglomeration of south Atlantic schools only 300 or 400 miles apart. That is why growing up, I barely ever saw ACC teams on television, as they were generally relegated to games on the Charlotte-based syndicated sports network Jefferson-Pilot. I am almost positive that the first time I ever saw Georgia Tech play a football game was the 1990 one against Virginia. No, the ACC became known first and foremost as a basketball conference, defined by its Tobacco Road rivalries, while its football identity mostly languished. By 1990, Georgia Tech’s sizable football history had languished over the previous couple decades too, while Virginia had no real history post-WWI at all, save for losing 28 games in a row from 1958 to the beginning of 1961. Welsh brought some stability and success upon arriving in 1982, even winning the conference title in 1989, and Georgia Tech had a solid 1989 season under third-year head coach Bobby Ross as well, but this was not a game to normally move the national needle. In the three years leading up to 1990, the Virginia / Georgia Tech game was, indeed, broadcast on Jefferson-Pilot. And when 1990 dawned, JP probably figured they would be broadcasting the game again.

1990 was my favorite version of my favorite kind of college football season, topsy-turvy, not just entertaining but ridiculous, and inconclusive, all of it foreshadowed in the 31-31 tie between eventual co-national champion Colorado and Tennessee that kicked it off. The top ranking changed hands three times in the first six weeks of the season, and many of the expected contenders suffered losses or ties too, save for the Cavaliers, remaining unscathed and dominant in playing generally pedestrian competition, meaning that in week seven, with no other bluebloods for pollsters to anoint, for the first time in history, Virginia ascended to #1. Georgia Tech was not even ranked when the season began, but gradually found their way into the polls and to #11 before a tough 13-13 tie with North Carolina dropped them to 16th. That was how things stood in Charlottesville on the afternoon of November 3rd as a Jefferson-Pilot game in theory became the CBS national game of the week in reality. 

If in retrospect it proved perhaps the season’s most crucial contest given that Georgia Tech would emerge as the other co-national champion, the Yellow Jackets’ more modest ranking in the moment, each team’s meager recent history, and the broad suspicion of the CFB commentariat that neither team was, really, all that good prevented it from being labeled as a proper Game of the Century. But then, the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was billed as the Fight of the Century and that’s not the one anybody remembers. No, they remember Ali/Frazier III, or the Thrilla in Manilla, and as it happens, in the game’s run-up, The Daily Progress deemed Virginia/Georgia Tech as the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla. Occasionally, it turns out, a Game of the Century just isn’t big enough for what transpires. 

As it happened, the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla was almost called off. Maybe endeavoring to make some sort of ill-conceived point about big-time college athletics, or possibly just acting like a dumb kid away at school, someone broke into Scott Stadium overnight and set fire to the AstroTurf, incinerating a chunk around the fifty-yard-line. In an unsightly but effective enough solution, postponement was avoided by removing a chunk of AstroTurf from the Virginia baseball field and sewing it into the football field, rendering a playable-enough surface. The weird-looking two-tone field contrasted with the brilliant fall foliage encircling the quaint stadium was captured in aerial views by the Shamu Blimp that flew in from SeaWorld, all these disparate elements giving the game an almost surreal when the circus comes to town sort of sensation. But if the field did not keep its end of the bargain, the game did, scintillating start to finish.

In a showdown of such evenly matched teams, the similarities between them were appropriate. Both were quarterbacked by a Shawn - Moore for Virginia and Jones for Georgia Tech - and both were my preferred kind of college football quarterback, dual threats more cut out for the CFL than the NFL. Both teams had a wide receiver doubling as a track and field athlete - high jumper Herman Moore for the Cavaliers and sprinter Jerry Gilchrist for the Yellow Jackets - who wreaked havoc on the opposing secondary. Both defenses were lamentable, though Virginia’s resisted enough at first to help twice provide a two-touchdown cushion, first 21-7, then 28-14 at intermission. In the second stanza, though, bright sunshine gave way to long shadows, casting a spell on Virginia as their offense began inhibiting itself with a bizarre rash of turnovers, including a pass ricocheting off running back Nikki Fisher’s hands and into the arms of a Georgia Tech defender and Moore fumbling when his own offensive lineman kicked up his right leg in falling to the ground and with his foot, inadvertently dislodged the ball from the signal caller’s hand. Georgia Tech then twice tied the score, at 28-all and then 35-all, before forging that 38-35 lead, which brings us back to Virginia at the one-yard line with five minutes left.

Boy, I miss the days when during the biggest college football game of the year they would still take a minute to spotlight the Ivy League scores.

By then, night had fallen in full, echoing a palpable sense of festering time, of quickening desperation. Indeed, the Cavaliers would make one more mistake, a procedure penalty at the goal-line negating a touchdown. Rather than go for broke and try for another touchdown, however, on fourth down, Welsh opted to play it safe by settling for three points to merely tie the game, hoping his defense could hold, get the ball back, and give his team one last chance to win. If it was sound rationale, students of the cosmos knew straight away what would come to pass - that is, Georgia Tech coolly driving to the winning field goal, 41-38. Suddenly Virginia’s fight song, The Good Old Song, set to the music of Auld Lang Syne, felt eerily apt. Midnight had struck on their dream season and their dream, in turn, became Georgia Tech’s in so much as this game would be their springboard to the split national title. 

Two years later gridiron powerhouse Florida State would join the ACC, changing the league’s perception but in coming to dominate it for a decade, also committing a kind of hostile takeover. Eventually, as the league continually grew larger, Clemson would become an FSU-like powerhouse in the twenty-tens, and though both Virginia and Georgia Tech have achieved successes here and there since, it’s never been anything like it was during those happy days of 1990. Now both Clemson and FSU are seeking to abandon the ACC, and Welsh, who died in 2019, has been proven right about the fickle, fleeting nature of college football in ways he probably never intended. The reconfiguring of CFB conferences that happens every offseason is typically deemed expansion, but what’s emerging instead is more like consolidation, the game’s biggest brands entrenching behind the castle walls. Though the sport was never a democracy, in its original raggedy confederation, almost any school could have its fifteen minutes of fame, and as a central college football hierarchy establishes itself little by little, soon a whole lot of schools will not even get that.

Roll Call Regret

By the time My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I tuned into Night 2 of the Democratic National Convention from the safe harbor of our Chicago couch, they were already a few states into the roll call, meaning we had just missed DJ Cassidy playing “Edge of Seventeen” by Phoenician icon Stevie Nicks to herald the Arizona delegation but just in time to hear him soundtrack the Arkansas delegation with “Don’t Stop” by Nicks’s Fleetwood Mac, a nod to the first Bill Clinton campaign of yore. And that was generally how the roll call proceeded, with music to properly match each American state and territory. The District of Columbia, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife’s hometown, was scored to nation’s capital-native DJ Kool, and Florida got Gainseville’s own Tom Petty. Even states not scored to a native’s music, were scored to something appropriate, like Illinois being introduced via “Sirius” by The Alan Parsons Project, as if the Illinois delegates were the ’96 Bulls, or The B-52’s “Private Idaho” to accompany, well, obviously. I was getting excited about what they might choose for my native state of Iowa. And then DNC Secretary Jason Rae asked, “Iowa, how do you cast your votes?” and DJ Cassidy cued up “Celebration?” 

Kool & the Gang hail from Jersey City, of course, a good 938 miles or so from Davenport. True, Iowa does not have as many native recording artists to choose from as some other states, like Minnesota, which went with Prince, obviously, but could have gone with The Replacements, or Hüsker Dü, or Babes in Toyland, or what’s his face, Robert Zimmerman, but the Hawkeye State has enough. There’s Slipknot, the heavy metal band that formed in Des Moines, and released an album literally called Iowa. They’re no little thing, they’re big, so big that I once saw a kid wearing a Slipknot backpack in the Jardin of San Miguel de Allende in the central highlands of Mexico. There was also Glenn Miller, born in Clarinda, and “In the Mood” still slaps, as the kidz say. The folkier tendencies of beloved Iowa singer/songwriter Greg Brown might not have felt right for such a raucous affair, but hey, how about some of the stuff he produced with another Iowa boy, Burlington’s celebrated sideman Bo Ramsey, like the bluesy, groovy “Poor Backslider?” That would have fit right into the theme of the night of going forward, not backward.

 

If those native choices don’t move the needle enough, fine, the artists could have been appropriate without being Iowan. Why not an ode to Clear Lake and the Surf Ballroom with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” speaking of songs that still slap. As My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife suggested, why not go with “Our State Fair” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical? Aren’t we always telling people our state fair is the best state fair? And if that doesn’t rock hard enough, then go with “Urgent” by Foreigner, or “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon, as a nod to music you hear at the Iowa State Fair. Maybe they could have played “Flying High Again” by Ozzy Osbourne to commemorate the time he bit the head off a bat at Veterans Memorial Auditorium?

I got really upset with DJ Cassidy, and My (Poor) Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife can confirm, railing about how he didn’t do the research. Except it turns out this was not entirely DJ Cassidy’s fault. No, the New York Times reported that DJ Cassidy “worked with each state’s delegation to find a song that captured a spirit of ‘unity and celebration’ and had meaning to the state.” And that made me even more depressed. This is how the DNC Iowa delegates saw themselves and the state they were representing? As the most basic party anthem of all time? That in choosing to evince a sense of celebration they just picked the song literally called “Celebration?” As My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife remarked, “What, was it down to this and ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes?” The only way this could have worked is if the Iowa delegation had enlisted the Farmer Tan Funk Band to record a “Celebration” cover and then played that. (The real Des Moineseans know what I’m talking about.)

Playing “Celebration” at a celebration is like playing Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” when it’s the last dance; it’s like the scene in “Bob’s Burgers” when presented with myriad ice cream choices, Regular Sized Rudy marvels, “Ooooooh, vanilla!”; “Celebration” is what AI would play if you asked it to choose a song. I would expect this from so many culturally uninterested Republicans but my God, you’re the DEMOCRATS. You’re supposed to be the ones who like art and culture! My native state is one where the right-wingers in charge are working hard to make art and culture bland and vacuous, and this is your chance to say our appreciation and understanding of art and culture runs as deep as anyone and what do you do? You serve up something as bland and vacuous as possible. Is this why Democrats never win elections in Iowa anymore?

(Did New Jersey choose “Born in the U.S.A.?” Yes. Yes, it did. I give up. “Land of Hopes and Dreams” was just sitting there.)