Back to the Bandbox

We parked on Brookline Ave, as usual, roughly a one-mile walk from the park.  I had a mask with me—as one does—but wasn’t planning to wear it until we arrived at the gate.  However, upon seeing virtually every fellow pedestrian in sight with his or her face covered—possibly because they were standing in the shadows of the Longwood Medical Area, the nexus of elite healthcare in New England—I caved to peer pressure and slapped mine on as well.  You know, just to fit in.

I have attended at least one Red Sox game at Fenway Park every year since 1997, along with concerts by Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney and (for some reason) a Harvard-Yale football bout.  Tragically, that streak ended in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic prevented anyone from attending anything, and I was denied my annual pilgrimage to America’s oldest, greenest sports palace—a place John Updike famously described as “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.”

The unusually long wait to return to Fenway—combined with the continued logistical nuisances of COVID—made for a most peculiar sense of anticipation as we made our way to Gate E.  Knowing the capacity for the evening’s matchup against Oakland was capped at 25 percent—a doubling of the previous limit—we expected far less hullabaloo than usual both inside and outside the stadium.  And boy, did we get it.

On both Lansdowne Street and Brookline Ave—the most commercially bustling blocks that abut the 1912 structure—diners enjoyed meals on umbrella-capped outdoor tables that didn’t exist pre-2020, while modest hordes of pedestrians shuffled about in all directions, some headed to the game, others to the commuter train for their trip home.  While hardly a ghost town—the gift shops were profitably selling their wares and the aromas from the sausage vendors were as pungent as ever—the neighborhood nonetheless exhibited a subtly muted atmosphere compared to the raucous, festive pomp that one expects from supporters of a team that is currently first place in the entire American League.

In any case, the true pandemic-induced surrealism occurred inside the park, which we entered after completing a digital health survey through a glitchy MLB app on-site (…which security staff proceeded not to check).  Apart from the Samuel Adams beer corner—where I purchased my inaugural $11 can of Summer Ale—the stadium’s concourse was all but deserted once the game began, with rows of refreshment windows sealed shut and acres of standing room space roped off.  With only 9,000 souls allowed inside the premises, why bother?

In the seats, each “pod” of fans numbered either two or four, with ample real estate separating each party.  While official policy required patrons to wear face coverings at all times except when eating or drinking—an injunction that, by my reckoning, was largely followed—this hardly stopped the nearby loudmouth in the $200 jersey from barefacedly bellowing the usual R-rated chants every few seconds.  In fairness, you’d hate for that sort of language to be muffled.

Circling the innards of the park during the middle innings, studiously taking in the weirdness as I went, I was slightly surprised how grateful I felt simply to be there again and (attendance notwithstanding) to see how little the joint had changed since my last visit.

Indeed, as any viewer of “Field of Dreams”—specifically James Earl Jones’s closing speech—well knows, the whole point of baseball is that it’s always there and never fundamentally changes.  While the reality of that sentiment is dubious at best—I certainly don’t remember digital pitch clocks and instant replay reviews from my early days as a spectator, let alone such ridiculous terms as “exit velocity” and “wins above replacement”—America’s pastime still occasionally retains its essence as the quirky, conservative, pastoral athletic endeavor that it was when it was invented—albeit apocryphally—on a cow pasture in a tiny hamlet in Upstate New York.  Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve noted previously that, despite my unbroken-except-for-COVID streak of Fenway trips over the last quarter-century, I haven’t deeply cared about or followed the travails of Boston’s hometown nine since their initial modern-day championships in 2004 and 2007.  In a post-Curse of the Bambino era, I just don’t feel the same urgency and angst about the team’s fortunes year in and year out.  While I can still recite their late-1990s starting lineup from memory, I couldn’t name more than a handful of the current roster, nor would I recognize them walking down the street, in or out of uniform.

But Fenway Park itself—so far, at least—is eternal.  First opened to the public the same week the Titanic hit the iceberg, the lyric little bandbox has undergone various tweaks and upgrades through the decades—from the Monster seats to artisanal food options beyond “a dog and a beer”—but is otherwise pretty much the same cramped, whimsical green Easter egg it has always been and, in all likelihood, always will be.

There is real comfort and reassurance in this fact—in knowing that, even amidst the pain and turmoil of a once-in-a-century plague, one can still wander down to Jersey Street for three hours to see two ballclubs hash it out over nine innings, as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring.

Beyond its function as a commercial venue, Fenway is a symbol of continuity and institutional fortitude in a society that insists on plowing ever-forward, as if the past really were a foreign country (to coin a phrase). 

As such, however I may feel about the Red Sox and Major League Baseball writ large, I expect I’ll continue returning annually to Fenway until one of us is dead and gone (God knows which will happen first).  In the shorter term, I look forward to my next game—perhaps later this season—hoping against hope that it will be held before 37,000 vaccinated fans, not one of whom will be wearing a goddamned mask.

A Performance From Beyond the Grave

In the six months since Philip Seymour Hoffman died, I have insisted to myself and others that he will never truly be “gone.”  Like a band that has broken up or a novelist from a bygone era, the Finest Actor of His Generation deeded us a body of work that will allow him to continue to entertain us for as long as we possess the means (and the interest) to indulge.

Sure, Hoffman’s hideously untimely demise at age 46 meant that his movie oeuvre had reached an abrupt endpoint, but what a collection of performances he gave!  From his pathetic fanboy in Boogie Nights to his appealing but possibly pedophilic priest in Doubt, from his scruffy, boisterous rock critic in Almost Famous to Truman Capote himself, Hoffman appeared not only capable of doing it all, but seemed, in his 23 years on screen, to have actually done so.

Another 23 years of Hoffman, had they existed, would have yielded countless more excellent roles, but probably not anything we hadn’t seen before, broadly-speaking.  At this point in his career, I figured, he had retained his power to impress, but had all but exhausted his power to surprise.

Then I saw Hoffman’s performance in A Most Wanted Man, and all of that thinking went out the window.  I am now somehow compelled to mourn all over again.

This movie, directed by Anton Corbijn from a novel by John le Carré, was filmed in the fall of 2012, but released only last month.  It features Hoffman in its leading role, essayed when he was very much alive and kicking, and thereby has the distinction—much like The Dark Knight in 2008—of showcasing a virtuoso performer to an audience that cannot help but view him in the past tense.

And like Heath Ledger, whose mad, manic Joker revealed an exciting, promising and altogether unexpected side to an actor everyone in the audience knew was dead, Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man allows the painful irony of introducing a whole new depth of his talent that we will never get the chance to see.

What exactly am I referring to, you ask?  What is it about his final major film appearance that so differentiates it from all that came before?

A German accent, as it turns out.

In A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman is Günther Bachmann, a German intelligence agent based in Hamburg.  He had been responsible for a major intelligence failure in the past and is now attempting to redeem himself in the present by heading off a terrorist attack in the future.  (Hamburg had played host to several key planners of the 9/11 attacks.  The film takes place shortly thereafter.)

It’s not that anyone doubted Hoffman could credibly play a spy.  Indeed, he did exactly that in 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.  Nor should anyone be taken aback by his exceptional capacity to brood, arresting our attention with little more than his mere presence and a few puffs from a cigarette.

Nope, the revelation is in the accent.  Hoffman plays a German man speaking English, and unlike virtually every other American actor to ever attempt such a stunt—including two other actors in this movie, I might add—he makes you believe he is, in fact, a native-born German.  Those who are seeing Hoffman for the first time will have no reason to assume he is actually American, just as when I first saw Titanic, I had no idea that Kate Winslet is actually British.

Obviously, that’s not all there is to the performance, nor is Hoffman all there is to the film, which is engaging and politically astute even when Hoffman is nowhere to be found.

But it’s worth underlining all the same, because Hoffman in his movies—unlike, say, Meryl Streep in hers—was not known for speaking any way except as he actually did (Capote was an exception).  That he could pass so persuasively as a European, while unsurprising in retrospect, was not something to which we had been subjected while he was alive.  Now that he’s dead, we will forever be tormented by the gazillion additional turns his career might have taken.  The infinite possibilities.  The prospect that he was an even better actor than we thought.

Of course, Hoffman is not the first great actor to shuffle off at a point when, by all outward appearances, he had plenty of life still in him.  Indeed, it was in the middle of writing the previous paragraph that I learned that Robin Williams, one of the great comic chameleons of the age, has gone off to the big genie retirement home in the sky at the frightfully young age of 63.  Who’s to say he didn’t have a secret second (or third) act in his back pocket that would have blindsided us all?

In Hoffman’s case, the loss is felt with particular intensity due, in large part, to the intensity of the man himself.  And to the paradoxical notion that, for all he had accomplished as an actor—an output so vast in both size and scope for someone only in his mid-40s—he was really just getting started.

May the Fourth

I was probably the last person in my high school to see Star Wars for the first time.  Indeed, it is rather astonishing that it took me (or anyone) until high school to enter into George Lucas’s fantastical world of Jedis and Ewoks—a land nearly every late-20th century American kid had absorbed long before he encounters the equally vexing worlds of biology and long division.

Admitting my Star Wars ignorance to a friend at the time, I received a cheeky tongue-lashing from his mother in an adjacent room:  “You haven’t seen Star Wars?  Are you an American or not?”

Today, May 4, is Star Wars Day, so established because it allows people to walk around saying, “May the fourth be with you!”

On this most sacred occasion, we might reflect upon what a dying breed cultural landmarks such as Star Wars have become in the world we now inhabit, and whether it bodes well or ill for the nation at large.

The point about the fourth of May being Star Wars Day is not that everyone thinks the pun is particularly funny, which they most certainly do not.  The point, rather, is that everyone recognizes the pun without it having to be explained to them.

Star Wars is simply a fact of American life, as surely as The Wizard of Oz was a generation before and Titanic a generation after.  They serve as universal reference points—enduring moments in American culture that bind the country together.

By no means is one required to enjoy these films—let alone to possess encyclopedic knowledge of their every nuance—but if one manages not even to be aware of them, well, that is when one becomes suspect.

Nowadays, however, this dynamic is very seldom the case.

The 21st century United States is so decentralized—such a jumble of disparate creations catering to a seemingly infinite spectrum of tastes—that the idea of collective, shared experiences has progressively fallen by the wayside, and is in very real danger of going extinct entirely.

With the singular, pronounced exception of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter—a British-based, rather than American-based, phenomenon—how many works of popular art can be said to have infected every last corner of American society?

When James Cameron’s Avatar landed in movie theaters in late 2009, Roger Ebert remarked that it was “one of those films you feel you must see to keep up with the conversation.”  Can we say with any certainty that such a momentous event has occurred since then, in movies or anywhere else?

(Sure, one can depend upon the periodic Internet “meme” to go “viral,” but these are ephemeral and can easily be ignored until they die down.)

Taking this trend to be both true and irreversible, and laying most of the blame on the proliferation of the Internet (that most durable of culprits), we are left only to wonder about the consequences.

Take, as an example, the most widely-read book in the history of the world, the Bible.  Christopher Hitchens, second to none in his hostility toward organized religion, lamented the general decline of Biblical literacy in the English-speaking world, warning that without it, one will not understand key references and allusions in the works of Shakespeare and countless other societal tent poles, and will effectively be robbed of a proper education.

(Perhaps a more troubling matter, which Hitchens also addressed, is how few of today’s young folks bother with Shakespeare at all.)

Indeed, the significance of Harry Potter (and Star Wars and all the rest) is to have created an entire world and an entire language for us all to draw from, in order to make our lives and conversation more enlivening and worthwhile.  What a pity for our world to be reduced to a billion individual lexicons, any one of which only a select few of us can understand.

This is, in its way, a consequence of multiculturalism, which the United States so often claims as amongst its proudest characteristics.  America is now a place where not everyone feels compelled to understand ”may the fourth be with you,” or to inquire why they might want to “follow the yellow brick road.”

If this is a sign that our country continues to evolve away from its cultural roots, shifting its identity from a select handful of traits to a million points of light, let us acknowledge it as the simultaneously hopeful and lamentable development that it is:  Lamentable for the common language that we shall lose; hopeful for the uncommon people and ideas that we shall gain.