NLCS-Link:

Giants überflügeln Cardinals im 7. Spiel der NLCS und ziehen in die World Series ein: DJ Short, Hardball Talk

Schade, dass Spiel 7 in einem sintflutartigen Regenguss enden musste. Es waren die Baseballgötter, die über die Eliminierung der Cardinals schluchzten. Die Giants stehen jetzt bei 6:0 in Eliminierungsspielen. Die Serie endet in der World Series.

Spiel 7 der NLCS war kein besonders spannender Wettkampf, denn die Giants schlugen die Cardinals heute Abend im AT&T Park in San Francisco mit 9:0, holten sich die Meisterschaft der Nationalliga und zogen in die World Series gegen die Tigers ein.

Die Giants sind das siebte Team, das einen 1:3-Rückstand aufgeholt hat, seit die LCS 1985 von fünf auf sieben Spiele erweitert wurde. Bruce Bochys Team hat sich daran gewöhnt, in dieser Postseason mit dem Rücken zur Wand zu spielen und konnte auch während der NLDS einen 0:2-Serienrückstand aufholen und die Reds schlagen.

Detroit Tigers-Links:

Aufräumarbeiten: Grantland, Jonah Keri

Der De-facto-Closer der Tigers bekommt seine wohlverdienten 15 Minuten. Je mehr ich erfahre über Phil Cokedesto mehr mag ich ihn. Es hilft, dass er das lebende Klischee des exzentrischen, leicht aus dem Gleichgewicht geratenen linkshändigen Relievers ist.

Doch als seine Aussichten besser wurden, wurde das Geld noch knapper. Die Yankees hatten eine Regel, die es Spielern untersagte, während der Saison zu arbeiten, und wollten, dass sie sich im Frühjahr und Sommer auf Baseball konzentrierten. Eines Tages ging ein Mitarbeiter des Teams durch den Parkplatz des Hotels, in dem die Trainer während der Saison wohnten, um etwas Müll in den Müllcontainer zu werfen. Er blieb stehen, als er jemanden sah, den er erkannte. Es war einer seiner Pitcher, der sich von Ellbogenproblemen erholte und alles tat, um seine Rechnungen zu bezahlen, während er versuchte, wieder in Form zu kommen, um in der High-A Tampa zu pitchen. Er arbeitete als Hausmeister und trug einen Overall mit dem Namen des Hotels darauf. Es war Phil Coke.

Scherzer, Anibal, Coke werfen im zweiten Trainingsspiel: Jason Beck, DetroitTigers.com

Apropos Cola …

Phil Coke, der die letzten drei Spiele der American League Championship Series mit einem Sieg über die Yankees beendete, war ebenfalls in einem Inning dabei und sorgte auch für komische Momente. Sogar in einem simulierten Spiel stürmte er wie verrückt aus dem Bullpen. Dann, nachdem er drei schnelle Outs geschafft hatte, verlangte er den Ball zurück, damit er noch ein paar Würfe für ein weiteres Out bekommen konnte.

Nach einem weiteren Groundout versuchte Coke es erneut, doch sein Antrag auf ein Inning mit fünf Outs wurde abgelehnt.

Tigers-Pitcher konzentrieren sich beim heutigen Training aufs Bunting: Anthony Fenech, Detroit Free Press

Falls Sie sich gefragt haben, wann ein Artikel über das Schlagen der Pitcher der Tigers erscheinen würde, können Sie Ihre Fragen jetzt beantworten.

Die Detroit Tigers haben heute ihr Training im Comerica Park mit Bunts begonnen.

Viele von ihnen.

Mit … anfangen Rick Porcelloübten die Pitcher der Tigers heute vor dem Schlagtraining das Bunting mit einer Pitching-Maschine und bereiteten sich darauf vor, am Mittwochabend in die Batter’s Box zu treten.

Gedanken vor der World Series: Es ist dumm, Pitchern beim Schlagen zuzuschauen: Matt Snyder, Motor City Bengals

Wort. Verdammtes Wort.

Hier ist mein Gedankengang während des zweiten Innings von Spiel fünf der NLCS:

„Wow, die Cardinals haben Läufer auf der zweiten und dritten Base und nur ein Aus. Wenn sie diese Runs erzielen, könnte die Serie vorbei sein.“

„Moment mal, die Giants lassen Pete Kozma absichtlich laufen, um die Bases im ZWEITEN INNING zu füllen? Ach ja, Lance Lynn ist an der Reihe. Er hatte was… oh DREI HITS die ganze Saison über?”

„… und ja. Er schaffte es durch einen Groundball in ein Double Play. Das muss man sich mal vorstellen. Der Typ mit dem Schlagdurchschnitt von .060 konnte keine Runs erzielen.“

WS-VORSCHAU-KOLUMNE: Ich habe meinen Platz verloren. Machen wir immer noch das „Fire Leyland“-Ding? Out of Left Field, Matthew B. Mowery – The Oakland Press

Mowery ist auf Twitter sehr aktiv und hatte an der Social-Media-Front schon mit der lächerlichen „FIRE LEYLAND!“-Brigade zu tun, er weiß also, worüber er schreibt.

Hmm. Nun, er kann vor der World Series gefeuert werden, oder? Ich meine, es ist noch Zeit. Er führt im Alleingang ein Team auf World-Series-Niveau in den Ruin (das wurde mir zumindest gesagt). Man kann ihm unmöglich erlauben, IN der World Series als Manager aufzutreten. Ich meine, das wäre heuchlerisch.

Jim Leyland-Kostüme sind der letzte Schrei in Detroit: Kevin Kaduk, Big League Stew

Trotz seiner derzeitigen Popularität wird es, wenn die Tigers das erste Spiel der World Series verlieren, Sport-Talkshow-Radio-Anrufer geben, die Leylands Entlassung fordern werden. Sie wissen es, ich weiß es. Das ist es, was die Leyland-Hasser tun: Sie lauern und sind bereit anzurufen, sobald Leyland etwas tut, was sie für falsch halten. Dafür leben sie anscheinend.

Während die Tigers auf ihren Termin für die World Series warten, ist es interessant zu sehen, wie sich Leylands Meinungsumfragen komplett geändert haben. Schließlich ist es noch nicht lange her, dass Leyland ein leistungsschwaches Team trainierte, das Gefahr lief, die Nachsaison zu verpassen, weil er negative Zeichen setzte, die sein bester Feldspieler nicht mehr anwenden konnte.

Tiger Stadium lebt weiter und weckt alte Erinnerungen: The Detroit News, Neal Rubin

Dies ist nur der erste von voraussichtlich einer metrischen Unmenge an Kommentaren über das alte Tiger-Stadion-Gelände in Corktown, während sich die Medien auf die Ankunft der World Series in Detroit vorbereiten.

Da Baseball in so vielen Köpfen ist und eines der Tore des Stadions auf der Michigan Avenue-Seite offen steht, war das Feld in den letzten Wochen so etwas wie ein Ziel für Besucher. Stunden zuvor standen im Regen ein junger Mann und ein älterer Mann auf der Shortstop-Position und imitierten den langen Wurf zur ersten Base.

Werden die Tigers-Fans Delmon Young jemals lieben? Dan Holmes, Detroit Athletic Co.

Nein. Nächste Frage.

Es war schon immer die Art und Weise, wie Young Dinge tut, die viele Tiger-Fans frustriert. Young hat einen fast zwanghaften Zwang, beim ersten Pitch zu schwingen. Nichts ärgert die Tiger Nation mehr. Sie vergessen die Tatsache, dass DY 2012 mit 97 First-Pitch-Schwüngen einen Schlagdurchschnitt von .362 mit 10 Extra-Base-Hits erreichte, sie erinnern einen lieber an die sechs Male, als er beim ersten Pitch einen Groundball in ein Double Play trieb. Young hat einen Bauch, der den Spott einiger Tiger-Fans auf sich zieht, die sich gerne über die Art und Weise lustig machen, wie er die Linie entlang rennt. Brandon Inge hüpfte wie ein Kreisel über das Feld und hatte Ohren, die ihn aussehen ließen, als wäre er ein 7-Jähriger in der Little League, aber die Tigers-Fans liebten ihn. Nicht so bei DY, der ein viel besserer Schlagmann ist, als Inge es je war.

Anderswo im Baseball:

Hochgeschwindigkeits-Videoclips der NLCS 2012: Die Physik des Baseball, Alan M. Nathan – University of Illinois

Ein Wort der Warnung: Das vollständige Laden dieser Seite dauert eine Weile und bringt einen langsamen PC in die Knie. Aber das Warten lohnt sich.

Diese Seite enthält Clips mit Hochgeschwindigkeitsvideos der NLCS 2012. Fox Sports verwendet eine Kamera mit 5000 Bildern/Sekunde. Die Super-Zeitlupen-Natur der Bilder enthüllt oft interessante physikalische Phänomene, die mit bloßem Auge nicht zu erkennen sind. Sehen Sie sich einige der interessanten Clips an, die ich gefunden habe, zusammen mit meiner physikalischen Erklärung dessen, was vor sich geht.

Drei Statistiken und du bist raus: Sports on Earth, Will Leitch

Eine nette Abfuhr für die Rundfunksprecher, die glauben, Sabermetrics sei das Stiefkind des Baseballs. Oder genauer gesagt: das Stiefkind eines Stiefkinds.

Es ging ungefähr so: „Also … [audible snort] … da sind all diese Leute mit ihren … [choked-off inhale, as if he had entered the Cardinals clubhouse bathroom right after Lance Lynn had left it] … Mathematik, versuchen zu verstehen … [grasping of the microphone as if it is the neck of Bill James] … das Spiel. Es ist … es ist nur …“ Ich habe das genaue Zitat nicht richtig, vor allem, weil es schwer war, Smoltz durch die platzenden Blutgefäße und das Zähneknirschen zu hören. Wie der unsterbliche Twitter-Account @oldhossradbourn es prägnant zusammenfasste: „,Sabermetrics? Was kommt als Nächstes? Ein Tier heiraten?‘ – J. Smoltz.“

Padres stellen Mauern im Petco Park auf: Baseball Nation, Al Yellon

Lynn Henning nickt zustimmend, während er auf Comericas Power Alley im rechten Feld blickt.

Insgesamt schlugen die Padres 2012 121 Homeruns und belegten damit den 14. Platz in der Nationalliga; sie schlugen 74 Homeruns auswärts und 47 zu Hause. Diese Änderungen werden den Schlagmännern von San Diego helfen.

Die Pitcher der Padres könnten jedoch anderer Meinung sein …

Dick Bosman spricht über Strasburg, Innings Limit und mehr: Seamheads, Ted Leavengood

Interessante Meinung von Bosman, einem ehemaligen MLB-Pitcher und aktuellen Mitglied des Front Office der Rays, der seine Karriere in den vom Pitching dominierten 60er Jahren begann. Bosman spricht über die Entwicklung von Pitchern und Pitch Counts, Stephen Strasburg und wie die Rays mit ihrem jungen Personal umgegangen sind.

Er behauptete, dass die maximale Wurfzahl für einen Pitcher in der Entwicklung 110 bis 115 Würfe in einem Spiel betragen würde, „ab und zu wahrscheinlich auf AAA-Niveau“, damit sie bereit sind, auf Major-League-Niveau zu werfen, wenn sie von der Mutterorganisation dazu aufgefordert werden. Über die Wurfzahl und die Anzahl der Innings sagte Bosman: „Wir sind da ziemlich streng und haben gegen Ende des Jahres schon Leute vom Feld genommen“, sagte Bosman. „Wir haben das mit Leuten wie Shields gemacht, Matt Moore und verschiedene andere Jungs, wenn die Inning-Gesamtzahl etwas hoch wird. Manchmal gerät man dabei etwas unter die Lupe.“

Eine Sache noch:

Zum Abschluss möchte ich noch dieses Gedicht hinzufügen, das ich von einem langjährigen Tigers-Fan und Bless You Boys-Leser erhalten habe. Dies hatte „Bob L in Arizona“ zu sagen:

Ich bin Tiger-Fan, seit ich denken kann. Als Zwölfjähriger war ich 1967 am Boden zerstört, als die Tigers am letzten Wochenende der Saison aus dem Rennen waren und Boston die Meisterschaft gewann. Aber das nächste Jahr war das beste. Ich erinnere mich noch, wie der Lehrer 1968 die alten schwarz-weißen Trikots ins Klassenzimmer brachte und uns die Spiele anschauen ließ. 1981 zog ich nach Arizona und sah zu, wie die Tigers 1984 wieder gewannen, aber seitdem war es ein harter Weg. Ich glaube, das ist unser Jahr.

Mit meiner Entschuldigung an Clement Clarke Moore habe ich einige Änderungen an seinem Gedicht vorgenommen, um es diesem bevorstehenden besonderen Ereignis anzupassen.

Nur Nächte vor der Serie

Es war nur Nächte vor der Serie, als alle durch den Staat
Die Idee war, die Amis zu schlagen, das Team, das wir so gerne hassen.
Die Rotation wurde von Leyland mit Sorgfalt eingestellt
In der Hoffnung, dass die Starter einen Lauf haben würden

Die Fans lagen gemütlich in ihren Betten
Während Träume von einer Meisterschaft in ihren Köpfen tanzten
Mit der Frau in ihrem Tiger-Trikot und mir in meiner Mütze
Wir träumten von Homeruns und Hits in der Lücke

Als unten in Comerica ein solcher Lärm entstand
Wir machten uns auf den Weg zum Baseballstadion, um zu sehen, was los war
Wir fuhren ziemlich schnell die Woodward hinunter
Und kam gerade rechtzeitig, um die Geister der Vergangenheit zu sehen

Der Mond hatte Schatten in den großen Park geworfen
Aber wir wussten, wem sie gehörten, sogar im Dunkeln
Was sahen wir dann mit unseren staunenden Augen?
Ein Typ namens Sparky und einige Größen aus dem “D”

Als der alte Tiger-Manager uns einen Blick zuwarf
Wir wussten, dass er es war, der große Captain Hook
Mit ihm waren die Größten, die das Spiel gespielt haben
Und er pfiff und schrie und rief sie beim Namen:

Hey Cobb, hey Crawford, yo Greenberg und Kell
Und mit ihnen kamen Gehringer, Newhouser und Harwell
In die Batter's Box, lasst uns alle herumschlagen
Da haben wir ihn gesehen, es war der Vogel auf dem Hügel

Dann waren sie plötzlich blitzschnell verschwunden
Keine Cochrane, Schoolboy Rowe oder Stormin Norman Cash mehr
Wir dachten an Al Kaline, Horton, Tram und Sweet Lou
Von Freehan und Lolich und der ganzen “68”-Crew

Die letzten Worte, die sie sprachen, bevor wir aus diesem Traum erwachten
War “Hol sie dir, junge Jungs, ihr seid ein Meisterschaftsteam.”
Sie werden von Leyland, Dombrowski und Mike Ilitch geführt
Sie bekommen den Wimpel, und dann geht es weiter mit dem ersten Pitch der Serie.”

Die O's und A's hatten beide ein tolles Jahr
Aber jetzt waren sie weg, und man musste nur noch die Amis fürchten
Also ging es nach New York, weiter an die Ostküste
Ein weiterer Wimpel für die Yankees, die Medien würden prahlen

Miggys Augen funkelten und Prince war ganz fröhlich
Wir hatten gerade die A's mit Garcia und Berry geschlagen
Ja, sie hatten CC, ARod, Cano und Derek Jeter
Aber wir hatten die Big Boys und Justins Heizung

Die Yankees wurden vernichtet, weggefegt in vier
Sie jammerten und weinten, als man ihnen die Tür zeigte
Zu viel von unseren Vorspeisen und einem Mann namens Coke Zero
Zu viel von Peralta und Young, dem ALCS-Helden

Er könnte im Schlagkäfig pummelig oder mollig aussehen
Aber er ist auf dem Weg zur Series, der größten Bühne des Baseballs
Mit einem Glanz in den Augen und einer Krone auf dem Kopf
Er ist der beste Schlagmann der Welt, Tiger-Fans haben nichts zu befürchten

Nein, es sind keine Lances, Blackjacks, Willys oder Kirks
Aber Ramon, Worth und Kelly werden bereit sein, zusammen mit Max und Dirks
Benoit und Valverde, sie werden nicht besonders hoch geschätzt
Aber auch im Stall sind Ricky P, Dotel, Al Al und ein Kind namens Smyly

Bald werden Fister, Sanchez und Omar gegen die NL-Champions antreten
Avila, Laird und Jackson werden unter einem Vollmond harken
Dann geht es zurück nach Motown, um den Kampf zu beenden
Wir machen es in fünf Minuten und wünschen der A-Nationalmannschaft eine gute Nacht.

The post Detroit Tigers hyperlinks: It is the Giants, Phil Coke was a chimney sweep and we’ll by no means love Delmon Younger appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

This piece contains language that some readers may find offensive.

When Matty Healy told an interviewer recently that he’s obsessed with the duality of having a dick, was he joking? It’s hard to tell. A little context: In that conversation, as throughout The 1975’s new album, the singer was commenting on the curses and blessings of his gendered existence. The potency and fragility of it; also the pleasure. Masturbation jokes abound on Being Funny in a Foreign Language, adding a certain saltiness to its passionately delivered romantic catchphrases, expressions of loneliness and self-doubt, protests against being misunderstood and pleas for forgiveness. It all adds up to a disquisition on what it means to be a man — to be Healy, specifically, white and entitled, a media darling and cannily self-made bad boy — in 2022. Masculinity can be comical, Healy loves to point out, even when it threatens relationships, inner peace, the world itself.

Dick jokes aren’t universal, no matter how artfully Healy deploys them throughout Being Funny alongside allusions to his bisexual imagination and examples of women breaking his heart with a carelessness that equals his own. As one of pop’s designated millennial spokespeople, he’s happy to confront his own limitations and connect them to the era that made him — alongside familiar 1975 themes like The Problem of Being Extremely Online, this album addresses cancel culture, climate crisis and gun violence — but this time, he speaks from his body’s center when he confronts these universals. Some of the jokes and a lot of the pain on the album can cross gender lines; anyone with a broken heart might, as he poignantly puts it, take solace in conjuring the presence of an ex by “coming to her lookalikes.” Elsewhere, though, Healy’s definitely talking about masculine problems and missteps.

Across the course of the album’s thornily seductive dance-pop bops, he expresses anxiety about being “cucked,” offers a take on incel mass shooters which is somewhat muddled in its mix of outrage and empathy and invokes the word “ego” as a marker for male arrogance more than once. Tightening up the genre-swimming sprawl of previous 1975 albums, Being Funny is romantic music for cynical observers ready to give love a try, and Healy’s honest move throughout is to acknowledge that even when he’s at his most tender, his manhood gets in the way. “I would go blind just to see you,” he moans in “Happiness,” a song that bubbles up like Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” only to wind up not in a pink-lit nightclub but back with Healy, alone at home, wallowing in stimulating memories. “God help me, ‘cos I’m never gonna love again,” he exhales at the song’s peak. It’s a buoyant anticlimax, and it is pretty funny — a self-critical takedown of the urges that embarrass and drive him.

Clutching himself to himself, the Matty Healy of Being Funny aims to be earnest, to open up in a way that he insists only love can make him do. In these songs, though, he mostly remains alone inside memories, fantasies, dreamed-up dialogues. This is an album about breakups, equal parts wistful and fatalistic; that part of Healy’s current art is apparently autobiographical, since he recently ended a two-years-plus long relationship with his fellow millennial pop protagonist, FKA twigs. But it also articulates an existential stance. There’s a name for the kind of guy Healy tells us he is within these deceptively blithe ballads and dance floor burners; it’s one that’s suited rock stars like him, with their disheveled charisma and well-annotated little black books, for years. Critiquing masculinity while maintaining his position within the enduring hierarchies that put those bad boys on top, he’s the one you love to roll your eyes at. He’s a dirtbag, baby, in a long line of antiheroes who interrogate the shapes of male privilege from the inside, even as they benefit from its persistence.

From the first time Mick Jagger sang “The Last Time” to this year, when power players like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny are both fighting and playing with masculine stances, Healy stands out as just one guy redefining the dirtbag role, and doing it with exceptional savvy. He’s tuned into the vibe — he talks about listening to “dirtbag left” podcasts, wears the rumpled fashion, reads the right books. Throughout Being Funny, Healy teases and challenges both his listeners and himself with a portrait of a young man on the edge, but not really, because the dirtbag is that perennial outsider who’s alway really ready for center stage.

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

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Getty Images

Healy (with the title of one of The 1975’s self-aware songs scrawled on his stomach) performs at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2016.

Dirtbag Memories

I knew a lot of dirtbags in my early twenties, my wild single days. A hungry kid jumping from bar hookups to bad boyfriends in pre-techified San Francisco, I often unflinchingly leapt into their arms only to realize neither I nor anything in the universe could fill the void in their sad, guarded hearts. The term had been coined a couple of decades earlier by the mountain-climbing daredevils who sometimes showed up in the same circles as the bike messengers and skateboarders we met in our bars or at our low-wage service jobs. Yet we could instantly identify the type, also inspired by the disorderly example set by Healy hero Jack Kerouac: beautiful and vaguely smelly, possessing ropy tattooed muscles developed anywhere but a gym and one constantly worn cool clothing item (leather jacket, skull ring, motorcycle boots). Their soulful bloodshot eyes evaded the glances thrown by the unruly girls and exploratory boys who would tame them. Until they got interested, then they’d slink away with you.

We identified these dirtbags not by name, but with a nod toward whatever preoccupation guaranteed that something would always be more important to him than a friend or a lover — especially the phrase, “Oh yeah, he’s in a band.” True to their passions alone, these dissidents staged surface rebellions against the usual masculine ideals of strength, stability and openly acquired power – while ultimately reinforcing them. For the dudes who splayed themselves across the face of El Capitan in the 1960s, “dirtbag” meant anyone who put a passion for climbing above anything else: status, income, creature comforts and especially relationships. Their grimy mountaineering backpacks — their dirt bags — were home. The dirtbags I knew operated the same way to serve different passions, like writing short stories with a surrealist tinge or building sculptures out of garbage or chaining themselves to the fence at a nuclear power plant. Or, most frequently, playing music and maintaining the nocturnal, habitually high rock and roll lifestyle that went with it.

Here’s a partial list of dirtbags I knew before I turned 25: the rangy blond painter with whom I spent one night in an unheated North Beach studio, awakening surrounded by his nudes with him nowhere in sight. The fedora-wearing trash rocker who dated me for a month and then left my New Year’s Eve party at 11:40 p.m. so he could kiss some other girl guaranteed to dump him sooner than I would. The sad-eyed record store clerk of indeterminate age (32?) who invited me to his garage-slash-studio-apartment to watch Liquid Sky on VHS and slept next to me on the mattress on the floor but chickened out when it came to going farther since, I guess, I had just turned 21. The perpetually hungover singer-songwriter who didn’t let the fact that he couldn’t get over his ex-girlfriend stop him from dating every girl or boy who thought they could solve that. The scarf-wearing postmodernist who wrote me a love poem only to tell me my blue eyes were really just a metaphor for tourism and, after a long chase, proved disappointing in the clutch. For these boys with the faraway eyes, I forsook more solid suitors (a fencer! a photographer who owned his own studio!), burned an endless supply of bodega candles and wasted so much precious time.

Dirtbags often possess the very advantages that leading-man types like Harry Styles (who likes to pretend he’s one, though he can’t help his prom king genes) also enjoy. Often they also have some money, usually from family but sometimes from a lover or even a patron who believes in whatever passion might someday pull this social rebel into a position of real influence. Unlike the frat-bro alpha males who openly flex their entitlement, the dirtbag only takes that patriarchal center stage when necessary to sustain his security or further his favorite pursuits. He wants his writing to be published, his cause to win, his band to play the big venue. Opting out of power is very difficult to persuade yourself to do when the culture hands it to you as a birthright. “Am I ironically woke? The butt of my joke? Or am I just some post-coke, average, skinny bloke calling his ego imagination?” Matty Healy asks in “Part of the Band,” a song from Funny that stages an argument about privilege within a skittish arrangement recalling the elder masters of such circular inquiries, Steely Dan. The allure of the dirtbag lies partly in the fact that he entertains such questions, though he only infrequently thinks them through.

Daniel Leal / AFP via Getty Images

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AFP via Getty Images

Healy (with microphone) and the other members of The 1975 (from left: George Daniel, Ross MacDonald and Adam Hann) accept the award for British Album of the Year at the 2019 BRIT Awards.

Dirtbag Taxonomies

The “dirtbag” designation is ubiquitous in 2022, the latest Year of Our Man in Crisis. In fact, dirtbagism is often presented as a solution to that crisis, a way that men can be charmingly themselves, apart from the mainstream of male toxicity. In The Atlantic, Adrienne Mattei celebrated dirtbags as bemused nihilists who opt out of capitalism’s ideal of upward mobility in favor of living in the moment – something we worrywarts should all occasionally do. In I-D, Veronica Phillips paired the dirtbag with the post-feminist bimbo, extolling the critiques of gender roles these funny characters provide by both overinvesting in and deconstructing them. These insights into dirtbagism celebrate the lineagae as a source of fun and erotic liberation. Totally valid. Who hasn’t loved a surfer, a through-hiking would-be novelist, a guy who knows all the best weed dispensaries? These prodigals of the patriarchy present a much better set of options than the incels, macho men and Proud Boys who populate the aggrieved manosphere.

Dirtbagism remains an unstable category years after it was first codified, big enough to include many variations. Today, it mainly flourishes in three distinct ways, all of which surface in Healy’s songs. First, there’s the comic version, the teenage masturbator he celebrates and gently chides in satires like “Part of the Band.” This is the dirtbag as innocent youth, unable to articulate ambition or realize even modest desires, but not too concerned about those things. This heartwarming creature, also embodied in the “teenage dirtbag” TikTok trend and by mulletted doll Eddie Munson on Stranger Things, is all innocence and aimlessness, a hyperlink to more relaxed, if mostly imaginary, good times. He defuses male power by laughing at it through a sativa haze.

A second way to imagine the dirtbag is as an emotionally driven, harried, somewhat broken, idiosyncratic man who’s gone off the grid in pursuit of a passion that compromises his ability to fulfill the norms of success. This is Matty Healy to a T, telling his family in “Wintering” that he’ll barely be back for Christmas, sending sincere but basically useless apologies for the state of the earth to kids half his age in “The 1975.” The soulful dirtbag is the type most often seen on prestige television, in inexhaustible variations that have expanded the role and brought it up to date for a culture that values a multiracial and sexually fluid ideal. In fact, it was Donald Glover who arguably conjured the current version of this dirtbag into existence in the groundbreaking dramedy Atlanta — from his own character of Earn, ambitious but self-sabotaging, to LaKeith Stanfield’s dandyish wild card Darius, to the thrillingly unmoored and increasingly androgynous cool girl Van, so beautifully realized by Zazie Beets.

Since the dirtbag is ultimately an expression of male privilege, though, including racial and sexual entitlement, it’s not surprising that Glover’s hold on the category was challenged this summer by a new contender. Jeremy Allen White’s portrayal of the downwardly mobile chef Carmy Berzatto on The Bear inspired a thirsty cult and many conversations about the glory of following your dream, even if it leads to oblivion. Sleeping in his dirty chef’s clothes in a one-room Chicago apartment, Carmy never dreams of a lover, apparently, only of the macho, dead brother who broke his heart and the perfect sandwich he wants to make in his honor. That Carmy’s existential predicament — the breadth of his talent always battling his inability to get out of his own way — so poignantly echoes the life and legend of the restaurant world’s lost Odysseus Anthony Bourdain only makes his embodiment of the dirtbag all the more poignant. Like the now-mythic Bourdain, Carmy is rough but possesses a noble soul. He solves the crisis of masculinity simply by being an alpha male in softer, soiled clothing, insisting that the workaholism and self-absorption he feels no need to escape serves a higher purpose that justifies whatever harm he may do.

A third take on the dirtbag, harder to swoon over but connected to an even deeper antihero lineage, is the truly marginal man whose desire for redemption counters his genuinely nihilistic tendencies. This is the Matty Healy of 1975 albums past, the one who dabbled in heroin and imagined himself a robber and shouted, “F*** your feelings, truth is only hearsay.” It’s the new noir antihero, everywhere in crime stories true and imagined. Seriously, name one male star of a popular murder show who isn’t a bit of dirtbag, doffing his cowboy hat or hoodie toward Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces or, looking further back, Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo. The most memorable of these noir scions, like Bill Hader’s delusional hit man Barry Beckman in Barry and Domnhall Gleeson’s extraordinarily pathetic serial killer Sam Forster in The Patient, show us how far dirtbagism can go in arguing that the pressures of being a man can explain, if not wholly excuse, even the most heinous behavior.

Throughout Being Funny, Healy dips into these three variations on the dirtbag archetype to create empathy for himself as someone who feels marginalized in his own life. Of course, that feeling is at least partly an illusion, since as a white man and a rock star, Healy’s still more secure than 99 percent of his fellow humanoids. An awareness of this paradox is key to the dirtbag’s appeal. “I’m gonna stop messing it up,” Healy repeats in “Happiness” as the beat sweeps him up. But he knows that if he wants, he can go on messing things up pretty much forever.

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

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Getty Images

Healy (with guitar) and drummer George Daniel onstage during the 2016 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.

Dirtbag Beats

For all of the screen stories powered by antihero charisma, dirtbag energy has found its most powerful outlet in music, especially since rock and roll made being young and filthy an ideal. An appropriated and hybridized take on Black resistance music, early rock and roll blended various outsiders styles — Beat, cowboy, biker — with teen energy to lend cultural definition to the idea of youthful rebellion. Youthful male rebellion, that is, at least on stage. That seed remains, more than half a century after rock became a dominant force. When the fabulist and diehard rocker Baz Lurhman’s biopic of rock’s problematic patriarch, Elvis, was released this past summer, we were introduced to Elvis the Dirtbag, beautifully played by Austin Lucas with a sinuous slink and a knowing gaze. This Elvis is a wild creature, doomed to dull domesticity by a money-hungry huckster who didn’t value his natural subersiveness or the instinctively anti-racist attitudes he held before capitalism imprisoned him.

In reality, it wasn’t Elvis but the next generation of rock stars who really made dirtbagism an art. Keith Richard’s pirate schtick, Bob Dylan’s impenetrable impishness, Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic dismantling of racist cliches about Black virility — these performances by rock’s most worshiped heroes offered young fans questioning the roles their parents laid forth for them a chance to dream differently about themselves. Sharing the spotlight with women or, beyond Hendrix and a few others, non-white men was not a priority for these badasses — they were too busy elevating themselves, even when they expressed a debt to the Black men whose moves they copped. As rock evolved into gender-bending glam and socially disruptive punk, dirtbag variations proliferated and became iconic: Richard Hell declaring himself the louche hero of the Blank Generation, Iggy Pop doing backbends and growling “I need more,” Joey Ramone offering the view from the basement.

In 1980s rock, dirtbagism flourished mostly on the margins, within the indie scene. This is one of the interesting paradoxes of Matty Healy’s stance: His band’s spirit is that familiar one of indie, left-of-the-dial refusal, even though its sound excavates mainstream pop sources much more frequently than it turns toward elders like The Replacements. On Being Funny, Healy isn’t so far off from the Paul Westerberg of “Unsatisfied” when, describing the desolation of the newly dumped, he sings, “I sit in my kitchen with nothing to eat, with so many friends I don’t want to meet.” He understands the pathos-generating potential of self-sabotage. And the way his mind flits from noise to genuine insight throughout the love songs he can’t offer in a simple way recalls the constant self-questioning of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, the dirtbag’s favorite deep thinker.

There is a through line that connects The 1975’s indie side to its love of shiny beats: James Murphy, whom Healy admires so much he’s said he should be paying the LCD frontman royalties. Healy’s James Murphy fixation is the bridge connecting The 1975’s dance-oriented rock to earlier, more shambolic dirtbags like Wilco. When they were released in the mid-to-late ’00s, Murphy’s songs hit like the hungover morning after indie rock’s final bash, employing a post-hip-hop and EDM sonic palette to the existential angst of the aimless, self-destructive, fruitlessly questing hipster. Along with other New York hedonists like the Strokes, Murphy kept the dirtbag POV alive in the early 21st-century, when rock, like the American economy, became more frictionless and technocratic. It was a time when the bad boy’s oppositional stance almost seemed outdated: Clean-cut heartthrobs like Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard inhabited masculinity almost as an afterthought, projecting entitlement in the gentlest way possible. These stars were like the nerdy Silicon Valley techies who hadn’t yet awakened their machismo by taking up crossfit or climbing the world’s highest peaks. They didn’t need to be dirtbags. They were nerds, crafty and innovative and quietly sure of themselves.

Before that moment, of course, came the apotheosis of dirtbagism in rock, when the stance unexpectedly entered the mainstream. In between the slackers and the technocrats came Kurt Cobain, wearing jeans with holes the size of his heartaches and, in the most famous rock lyric of the 1990s, yelling “A denial!” over and over again. With his hair in his eyes, he directed his ire at a money-driven culture, including the swollen corporate rock scene, where it seemed that the independent spirit of the dirtbag no longer carried much currency. Nirvana and their Pacific Northwest peers presented all three classic variations on the dirtbag by being born in suburban and small-down heavy metal parking lots, raised by punk uncles and mountaineers — Bob Whittaker, scion of one of the sport’s most famous families, was Mudhoney’s early manager — and mining marginal existences for both fun and angst. As with any subculture absorbed into the mainstream, though, grunge couldn’t maintain its haphazard spirit of resistance. Some stars, like Cobain, fell under the weight of the contradictions. Most, like the members of Pearl Jam, grew up and became responsible progressives playing benefits for Ralph Nader and Bernie. It would take only a couple of decades for the Northwest to go from the capital of dirtbagism to an unaffordable tech mecca. “A denial” has taken on dark new meanings: The Proud Boys ape grunge styles, and incels express anxieties about sexual disempowerment that strangely echo Cobain.

The rock world The 1975 occupies is a new one, transformed by younger generations questioning the genre’s history of handing the spotlight to skinny, sexy white boys when so many capable women and people of color could do better. It’s interesting to note that today, Healy’s main rivals in dirtbag attitude are rappers, running the gamut from queer innovators like Tyler, the Creator to popular inheritors like Machine Gun Kelly. Not surprising, though: The dirtbag has always represented opposition to power from within, an opting out that becomes a new path instead of a challenge from beyond patriarchy’s borders. From the 1960 to the 1990s rock ruled the zeitgeist; now hip-hop determines the culture’s shifts. So in place of The Rolling Stones, we have Drake, a quintessential Type 2 dirtbag whose softness and aura of genial alienation only reinforces his unwavering belief in himself, and The Weeknd, a dramatic marginal man who adopts monstrous attributes as a way of exposing the bad habits of his manhood. These stars owe a debt to the individualists who were once considered marginal geniuses, but are now acknowledged as paradigm-shifters: Andre 3000, who showed rap that a freak could be as powerful as a hard man; and D’Angelo, R&B’s own Carmy Berzatto, who insisted on making art by his own rules when the entertainment machine would have had him take any other route.

Following the paths laid down by these Southern romantics, a range of soft refusenik boys are now playing with dirtbag mythologies in subversive ways. They occupy different points on the weirdness spectrum, from dreamy Omar Apollo to playfully wasted Cuco to charming Bartees Strange. One of the most intriguing artists working this new variation on the dirtbag is Steve Lacy, who’s come into his own as a purveyor of internal worlds that blossom into new perspectives. His fractured soundscapes create spaces where he can be fluid about everything — his sexuality, his ambitions, commitments of any kinds. Talk about duality! The aptly-named Gemini Rights unfolds like a river running two ways as Lacy’s bent voice articulates a constant stream of contradictory hopes, frustrations and desires. He’s not telling stories that can be easily absorbed; that’s his form of dirtbag self-possession. Shy and aloof, tender and oversensitive, dreaming and distracted, Lacy brings us back to the soulful dirtbag with a new sense of possibility: The self he projects through his songs is more aware of his foibles and less attached to maintaining his self-righteous loneliness. He wants to connect, even if he takes the long way. “I bite my tongue, it’s a bad habit,” he drawls on the unlikely hit of the year bearing that name, before asking the subject of his affections if he can do the same to theirs. Second-guessing himself, hanging on to that spirit of elusiveness, he’s written the dirtbag anthem Matty Healy has to match.

Steve Jennings / Getty Images

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The 1975 in 2019.

Dirtbag Destinations

The dirtbag will likely be with us forever, as long as men still inherit forms of power some aren’t quite comfortable claiming: He’s a cipher and a safety valve, letting enough steam out of conventional gender roles to allow them to adapt and survive. But he can make a fatal turn from independent spirit to bigot and menace. It’s not a big leap from the dirtbag’s style of outsiderness to the incel’s conviction that others must pay for his marginalization; all it takes is a little more anger, the loss of that flicker of self-awareness. Worse yet is the appropriation of dirtbagism’s creative outsiderness within ideologies grounded in hate.. The same impulse that led hippie bikers and California country rockers to imagine themselves as cowboys, or that made punks emulate 1950s biker gangs, leads fascists like the Proud Boys to wear the same haircuts, leathers and tattoos: The longing for a mythical masculinity divorced from the corrupting influence of the mainstream, whether that mainstream is corporate America or Reaganism or an Oval Office that has room for a Black man and a biracial woman. When its adherents refuse self-critique, dirtbagism can veer not away from toxic masculinity but straight into its heart.

In his affecting memoir of coming of age and reckoning with toxic masculinity, Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Isaac Fitzgerald writes of his consternation when he realizes the haircut that he’s come to love is in fact that neo-Nazi high-and-tight look. “I get that if you took a photo of me and put Alt-Right Poster Boy underneath it no one would really blink,” he writes. Not exactly pleased that the tattooed-biker do that gave him confidence was now sending highly problematic dog whistles, he endures the awkward phases of growing his hair out. Then he finds a queer-run hair salon and figured out how to stand apart in a different way.

Like Being Funny in a Different Language, Fitzgerald’s memoir evokes the confusion men who consider themselves beyond the strictures of traditional roles — gender, class, political, even sometimes racial — experience when they find themselves behaving in questionable ways. Dirtbagism, it turns out, is only a partial solution. When it comes to creating alternatives to the patriarchal status quo, men actually have to surrender some privilege, not merely question the effect an elevated status has on their own souls. This can be a painful realization, a disappointment. But it also opens up new possibilities, pointing toward a life that might be less damaging to others, and less lonely.

After sharing his own account of having to make painful changes in order to escape the masculine trap, Fitzgerald writes, “To any young men out there who aren’t too far gone I say, you’re not done being yourself. You can keep growing. Growing, it turns out, is what this life is all about. Don’t fear change, fear being only who you are right now forever.” On Being Funny, Matty Healy seems to be aiming for such wisdom. “I thought I’d done anger / I thought I’d done shame / But I’ve always been the same,” he sings in “Human Too.” This dirtbag might actually be changing, even if he’s not gonna change his socks.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The post Love Songs of a Dirtbag appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Megan Potente and Laurance Lem Lee

Special to The Examiner

The initial findings of a much anticipated San Francisco Unified School District curriculum audit were released Tuesday, adding to pressure from parents and educators to change how kids are taught to read. The audit findings point to major deficiencies in the district’s K-5 English language arts curriculum as it is written and observed inside classrooms. Those who have been pushing for change are not surprised by the findings, and are now hopeful that the district will finally acknowledge the deep problems and commit to change.

At public comment during the Monday meeting, parent Havah Kelley said, “Nothing about what I heard today surprises me. … I’ve been trying to help my son for about five years.”

Literacy is the foundation of an equitable education and far too many SFUSD students leave elementary school without achieving their basic right to read. The most recent SFUSD performance data indicate 55% of students do not meet standards in English Language Arts and there are huge gaps in performance between subgroups. Only 20% of Black students, 15% of English learners and 16% of students with disabilities met standards in English Language Arts.

When asked if he was concerned about the state of literacy, SFUSD grandparent Rex Ridgeway responded, “Concerned is an understatement. A better word is ‘distressed.’ Just look at the Reading Test Scores at Bret Harte: 8%, Charles Drew: 19%, El Dorado ES: 11%, Carver ES: 16% and MalcolmX: 23%. It is so obvious that the district has failed those schools and their students.”

The California Reading Report Card ranks districts by 3rd grade reading performance of socioeconomically disadvantaged Latinx students, an “apples to apples” comparison that gives a good picture of how well districts teach reading. SFUSD falls in the bottom 10% of the 287 ranked districts. There are districts with lower funding and higher levels of poverty that have better reading outcomes than SFUSD.

The truth is we know how to teach kids to read, but SFUSD ignores the science and has done so for many years. A vast body of research from many related disciplines, conducted in the US and around the world over five decades, has resulted in an emerging consensus about how learning to read happens and what is going on in the brains of those who struggle. This body of research is commonly referred to as the science of reading and documents what has worked for the largest number of children.

Asked about updates to early reading instruction curricula, Nicole Priestly, SFUSD’s chief academic officer, indicated at that Monday meeting that nothing will change soon, since “some of the curriculums have high marks in some of the areas but not in others. And so that will beg the question of how we might want to make that come together in some form of action. But that’s a question that remains to be seen and we won’t be able to answer that until we actually engage with the materials and perhaps go through the pilot.”

Districts serious about improving literacy implement systems and teaching practices grounded in the research. Recent California success stories, including Lodi Unified and Nystrom Elementary, show how following the evidence scientific improves reading outcomes. In a recent EdSource roundtable on early literacy, Attorney Mark Rosenbaum made the point, “We don’t need a task force. We don’t need more studies. We just need a commitment.”

Indeed, what we need from SFUSD is a commitment to the changes recommended in the curriculum audit. The district maintains a firm grip on a controversial approach widely recognized for failing to meet the needs of many children. SFUSD names its approach the “Comprehensive Approach to Literacy”, which is more commonly referred to in other districts as balanced literacy.

This approach is based on a discredited “whole language” theory debunked decades ago. Balanced literacy teaches kids to guess words using an assortment of cues, like pictures and context, instead of sounding words out. It treats foundational skills haphazardly, without the practice many kids must have in order to learn. Balanced literacy also fails to build the vocabulary and background knowledge necessary for reading comprehension and access to grade-level content.

The most popular balanced literacy curricula used in K-2 SFUSD classrooms, Lucy Calkins Units of Study and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, are also the most poorly rated on the market. In addition, one expensive intervention program, Reading Recovery, intended to close reading gaps for the lowest performing first grade students, which recently found to actually have a negative impact on reading performance over the long term. This comes as no surprise to those who understand the science of reading and the design of Reading Recovery. Yet instead of moving away from the program, SFUSD is actively hiring new Reading Recovery teachers for the 2022-23 school year.

When we talk to concerned parents about this issue, they usually are dumbfounded. Why doesn’t the district change its ways? Why are they using methods and materials known to fail so many kids? Many parents ask us how they can teach their children to read, because they are not getting what they need at school. And business is booming for private tutoring, which can cost between $100 and $200 per hour session, with three to five sessions per week recommended. Literacy should not be a luxury afforded to those with financial resources or parents who can take on the job of teaching their kids to read.

Many SFUSD teachers, who have faced no shortage of challenges in recent years, are fed up with the district’s early literacy plan. Douglas Rich, a long-time SFUSD literacy specialist, believes the district is dangerously change averse.

“The SFUSD administration is too focused on an outdated and harmful philosophy of teaching and learning,” he said. “They like to talk a lot about their philosophy, but none of that has translated into useful guidance for teachers. I read somewhere that you don’t have to operate out of great malice to do great harm. The absence of understanding is sufficient.”

Megan Potente, M.Ed. is a 20-year elementary school teacher, who worked for many years in SFUSD, is a parent of an SFUSD graduate and serves as co-state director of Decoding Dyslexia CA. Laurance Lem Lee is a second-generation Chinese American, SFUSD graduate, general contractor and good government advocate. You can follow him on Twitter @eyessfboe

The post Opinion: Early studying instruction in San Francisco public colleges: A love affair with what has failed appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Calling all gamers! Halo drops this week. It’s gonna be big!

And for those of you who need a little love in your hearts, Bridgerton returns to put that smile back on your face.

Find out what else you should watch this week below.

Sunday, March 20

8/7c When Calls the Heart (Hallmark)

Elizabeth’s published book makes the rounds in Hope Valley, and it’s a real page-turner!

May is curious if the Mountie in the book is based on Nathan. Oooh. We can’t wait to learn more!

And does Nathan have a flouted heart? He sure doesn’t think so.

8/7c Power Book IV Force (Starz)

Rolling dahlia out comes with some complications for Tommy and Claudia.

The new business partners find themselves butting heads on what’s right for the product, with Tommy leaning one way and Claudia another.

Will they be able to come to an agreement? It’s another wild hour of the hit series you won’t want to miss!

8/7c Killing Eve (BBC America)

Eve struggles to identify her lead in The Twelve.

Villanelle gets her mojo back – she decides to be good by embracing what she’s good at – killing.

Carolyn discovers an old acquaintance in Cuba and decides to go rogue.

8/7c The Equalizer (CBS)

This one is bound to have fans talking one way or another, and it teases a nail-biting hour!

Dante’s kids reach out to McCall after Dante is kidnapped by some panicky deputies who illegally detained and beat him before they realized he was a fellow cop.

Will McCall have to face the Blue Wall to save Dante?

8/7c Riverdale (The CW)

Riverdale is back for 2022 in its new Sunday timeslot! How will Sundays shakeup the series going forward?

Picking up after the five-episode “Rivervale” event, Jughead, Archie, and Betty deal with mysterious side-effects from the bombing. Could it be tied to the alternate universe or might be due to Cheryl’s curse? Cheryl seems to think she played a hand in their unfortunate turn of events.

But the big question at hand: Will the curse affect the town of Riverdale overall? You’ll just have to watch to find out!

9/8c The Presence of Love (HMM)

Over the years, Adjunct Professor of Romantic Literature, Jocelyn “Joss” Lambert has let practicality and fear of the unknown rule her life, saving risk and adventure for the heroines in her books.

Just before her 33rd birthday, Joss receives a surprise gift from her late mom – a 10-day trip to England to discover her roots – a trip she and her mom had always planned to take together. Faced with a career-altering “publish or perish” deadline, an anxiety-prone Joss goes on the journey, hoping it will inspire her.

As Joss ignores her own deadline to help a young girl named Tegan, her father, Daniel and his mother, Merryn begin to warm up to her and see their family bonds strengthened and Joss finds a link to her own family’s past that brings her clarity.

As her journey of self-discovery comes to an end, Joss must decide how to live her truest life — a life that might just include a romantic kind of love she never expected.

9/8c NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS)

An unidentified aircraft that flies into U.S. airspace and crashes into a Navy plane.

The NCIS team is called in to investigate.

Also, Deeks and Kensi begin to prepare for their foster inspection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLGPw8e0jF0

9/8c Outlander (Starz)

Roger comes to Henri-Christian’s aid after he’s bullied by a few Fisherfolk lads who believe the baby is a demon.

Fergus is distraught over the child’s treatment and worries about his future.

Meanwhile, a friendship blooms between Young Ian and Malva.

9/8c The Walking Dead (AMC)

The final season continues to gather steam, and many of the characters wind up crossing paths.

Prepare for one of the most shocking episodes of the series to date.

How will it all play out?

9/8c FROM (Epix)

Things are getting real.

After Sara gets her orders, she struggles with what to do next, while the Matthews start asking the hard questions about where they currently reside.

Elsewhere, Julie questions her choices and Boyd seeks out guidance wherever he can find it.

They say the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. A new episode of #FROMonEPIX premieres this Sunday on @EPIXHD. pic.twitter.com/fHftFGCk5H

— FROM on EPIX (@FromOnEPIX) March 18, 2022

10/9c S.W.A.T (CBS)

The calm, cool, and nice Tan is out the window during a case that brings him face-to-face with someone from his past.

And based on this promo, we’re definitely looking forward to it. It’s Tan’s time to shine, and he’s giving off season one Street vibes with the impulsiveness and badassery. It may suck for Hondo who has to chastise him. But frankly, we’re looking forward to Tan kicking some ass!

Bring on a Tan-heavy installment!

Monday, March 21

Days of Our Lives (NBC/Peacock TV)

Things are about to get crazy!

When we left off, Kayla was being pressured to fire Marlena, but somehow Kayla is the one who ends up getting fired!

Meanwhile, Maggie comes up with an even more ridiculous solution to the Sarah problem: have Tony move into the Kiriakis mansion with her! Let’s hope Anna puts a stop to that silliness.

8/7c 9-1-1 (FOX)

We’re back in business, baby!

9-1-1 returns after an extra-long break with an all-new hour that ramps the action up to a hundred.

We’ve got runaway trucks with bombs underneath, and a host of emotional moments as Eddie struggles away from the 118 and Hen realizes she isn’t ready to see Chimney replaced at the station.

There will be LOTS to discuss after this installment! Trust us.

9/8c 9-1-1: Lone Star (FOX)

Following up an exciting 9-1-1premiere, fans of the franchise will get another little gift when Athena Grant makes a cameo in Lone Star when Carlos and Grace seek help on a SWAT-ing call that leads to a death.

Yes, two of 9-1-1: Lone Star’s biggest fan-favorites will be working together and sharing some screentime. We’re so excited!

Meanwhile, Amy Acker guest stars again when Catherine gets a bomb scare a the governor’s office and the team responds.

9/8c Snowpiercer (TNT)

Melanie is back! And so are Wilford’s dastardly ways.

With New Eden so close, what could possibly go wrong? Can anything go right?

Big questions still left to be answered: Who does Dr. Headwood have in her lab? Who is still fighting on Wilford’s side? Can we have one episode where no one dies?

8/7c All American (The CW)

With the pressure of school, Spencer and Olivia find themselves looking forward to a fun day together, but quickly find themselves in the middle of everyone’s lives at home.

aura learns of some new information about the ongoing investigation that has Coop, Patience, and Preach worried. Billy and Grace are at odds as to who is best for the job, and neither is ready to back down.

Layla assumes the worst when her dad tells her he is stepping away from his hectic life at the label.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=088M7AXghv0

9/8c All American: Homecoming (The CW)

When a blackout occurs at Bringston, some juicy secrets revealed, but will they stay amongst the group once the power gets turned back on?

Damon grows suspicious of what Simone and JR are hiding from him, and Simone struggles with telling Damon that she gave away a baby for adoption too.

Coach Marcus and Amara’s relationship comes to a head, making them question how to proceed.

9/8c The Gilded Age (HBO)

Gladys Russell’s debutante ball could be the event of the season – but can her mother pull it off without Mrs. Astor?

One of the servants has a surprising secret that could mean disaster.

Will Marian’s plans go off without a hitch? Not if Aurora Fane and Aunt Ada have anything to say about it!

It’s the season finale of the most lavish spectacle on television!

10/9c The Good Doctor (ABC)

Shaun has a little shadow!

Now that Salen’s gone (for now, anyway!), the medical series is back to focusing on compelling cases and relationships with patients, and Shaun is first up.

The notoriously detached Shaun allows himself to become a surrogate parent to a scared little girl in the hospital, and at first, it’s cute. But when she crashes, will he be able to give her the best possible care given his feelings for her?

10/9c The Endgame (NBC)

Snow White’s little bank robbers send Val and the Feds on a tailspin when their next big event is attempting to get into the Federal Reserve Vault.

It prompts Val and the others to race again time to stop them, hoping to prevent economic collapse.

But let’s be real, hasn’t the economy already collapsed, or is the fictional world of The Endgame far better than our own?

Tuesday, March 22

8/7c FBI (CBS)

If they harm a hair on Tiff’s head, we revolt at dawn!

The team dives into a cross-country serial killer case that will have so many twists and turns, it’ll have our heads spinning.

But the scary part is that TIff may be in danger when someone attacks her at the scene.

9/8c FBI: International (CBS)

There’s nothing like the stress of trying to keep a political figure safe in a foreign country that will have everyone tense as heck!

The flyover team has the task of protecting the U.S. Attorney General safe after a security breach in Hungary.

And Raines has to juggle personal matters too when a sibling visits Budapest.

9/8c This Is Us (NBC)

Is this the beginning of the end for Kate and Toby?

Their marriage has been fraying for a while. Since Toby’s prolonged absence is causing so much stress, it’s logical for Kate to try visiting him in San Francisco to ease the tension.

But things may go from bad to worse, as the visit could open Kate’s eyes as to how far off-track their relationship is and how much more she wants out of life.

9/8c Naomi (The CW)

There is a lot going on when Naomi returns from its mini-break!

Greg and Jen celebrate their anniversary, and while they reminisce about the past, they also look toward the future and what’s next for their family.

Elsewhere, Dee and Zumbado don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to Naomi, and Anthony and Nathan spend more time at the comic book store, much to Lourdes’ dismay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqnBXQ-2wg4

9/8c Abbott Elementary (ABC)

The best comedy of the year returns with all-new episodes, and we’ve never been happier that school is back in session!

Open House at a school is quite the experience, and our beloved, neurotic Janine is working herself up over meeting a struggling student’s parent for the first time.

Of course, she is.

#AbbottElementary returns on TUESDAY?! Yeah, we’ll never stop dancing. pic.twitter.com/6CsfZUniiA

— Abbott Elementary (@AbbottElemABC) March 18, 2022

10/9c FBI: Most Wanted (CBS)

How do you grieve the sudden loss of your fearless leader and friend?

The team is still reeling from Jess’ death, but it doesn’t stop them from jumping into another disturbing case.

They track down a member of an Incel group who is determined to come after and kill all the people who never gave him a chance.

Wednesday, March 23

10/9c Astrid and Lilly Save the World (SYFY)

It’s double trouble when a doppelganger monster arrives on the day of the school play.

With The Guardian enacting his plan soon, will Astrid and Lilly be able to save the day?

Will Astrid and Lilly’s newfound arguments and disagreements prevent them from saving the world?

10/9c A Million Little Things (ABC)

Uncle Gary knows that the best way to get over heartbreak is to find someone new. He gives the best advice, and those Gary/Danny scenes are always a highlight of the series, which means that this installment should be fun!

Elsewhere, proving that the Savilles are the “bestie” portion of their post-divorce life, Eddie turns to Katherine for advice when he’s afraid to get intimate with someone new now that he’s in the chair.

And Maggie gets into some good trouble when she opts to talk with a young woman on-air who may want an abortion.

10/9c Good Trouble (Freeform)

Mariana is having a tough go of things after Callie’s departure, and everyone seems to rally around her and offer support while she also faces complications with her undercover job, Evan, and newbie Joaquin.

Malika dives right into her new job with Lucia Morales, but it’s not as it’s cracked up to be.

After so much men drama, Davia wants to dos something to get herself out of a rut.

Thursday, March 24

Star Trek: Picard (Paramount+)

You’re killing it, 2024. Raffi and Seven may have detected The Watcher, but what about Rios? How will he reconnect with the team now that he’s been arrested by ICE?

Back on La Sirena, let’s see how the Borg queen plays the cards she’s been dealt. Will Jurati figure out the last piece of the puzzle? Hey Q, where’ve you gone? It’s TIME about you let us in on your plan!

Halo (Paramount+)

Master Chief makes his way to the small screen in a big way. We’ve watched the first two episodes and this TV adaptation has something for fans of the games and new people watching the franchise for the first time. Return to TV Fanatic for full reviews!

8/7c Station 19 (ABC)

We will learn about Sullivan and Ross’ past through flashbacks, while in the present, Sullivan still fights an uphill battle trying to get Beckett to attend AA meetings.

Station 23 learns that they will be shut down, which puts Andy in an unpopular position.

And that pesky custody saga continues!

9/8c Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)

The hospital is bustling with excitement when a man arrives with a python wrapped around his torso. Seconds worth of screentime in the promo already suggests this is going to be FUN!

Hamilton offers Mer a permanent position in Minnesota, which is something that a lovelorn Nick genuinely hopes she’ll consider.

But will she? Will Mer really leave Seattle for good?!

10/9c Big Sky (ABC)

The aftermath of the confrontation with Ronald leaves everyone reeling. And two important people missing.

Meanwhile, things come to a head for Travis when his handler shows up and makes contact with Jenny.

Will his plan to ruin the Bhullar’s be ruined? Oh, and Wolf is STILL alive! Oh, joy!

Friday, March 25

Bridgerton (Netflix)

It’s time for a new love story, Bridgerton fans!

Netflix’s hit drama returns for a second season that puts Lord Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma at the wheel.

What does that mean for everyone else in the Ton?

You’ll need to tune in to find out.

Severance (Apple TV+)

A celebratory atmosphere pervades the Macrodate Department as Helly earns a reward, but Dylan can’t forget what he saw. Innie Mark finds a gift from his Outie, bringing him and the team one step closer to finding out the truth about their existence. Things get bloody this week on Severance.

Pachinko (Apple TV+)

Based on the New York Times Bestseller by Min Jin Lee, the epic tale comes to Apple TV+.

This sweeping saga chronicles the hopes and dreams of a Korean immigrant family across four generations as they leave their homeland in an indomitable quest to survive and thrive.

Starring Lee Min-Ho, Minha Kim, Jin Ha (Devs), Soji Arai, Kaho Minami, Jimmi Simpson, and recent Oscar Winner Youn Yuh-Joung (Minari).

8/7c The Blacklist (NBC)

The Task Force pursues the Chairman, who operates a dark web stock market trading shares of criminal organizations. Red takes extreme measures to locate a tracking device, causing Ressler to spiral. Cooper contacts his blackmailer.

8/7c RuPaul’s Drag Race (VH1)

The Lip-Sync Smackdown has claimed its victim. Mama Ru and the judges weren’t playing around. The queens need to make sure they don’t drop the ball during a challenge ever again.

For the remaining queens in the competition, it’s time for the Rusical. It will be a song and dance show set to the inspiration of Moulin Rouge. Which queen will steal the spotlight? Who will get kicked out of the chorus? And which queen will be the next to sashay away?

The countdown is on for the final few rounds of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 14.

Edit Delete

Carissa Pavlica is the managing editor and a staff writer and critic for TV Fanatic. She’s a member of the Critic’s Choice Association, enjoys mentoring writers, conversing with cats, and passionately discussing the nuances of television and film with anyone who will listen. Follow her on Twitter and email her here at TV Fanatic.

The post What to Watch: The Presence of Love, Halo, Bridgerton appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

It’s a word that has expressed what many have been longing for since around March 2020: normalcy.

And it’s being used much more often now.

While the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is more contagious than previous ones, the share of severe cases has been lower, thanks largely to vaccinations. New cases have been declining in a growing list of places. Some governors say Americans will need to learn how to live with the virus.

But what will that mean? And when will it be? Is this moment different from previous glimmers of hope?

Hear the latest from two public health researchers and physicians, Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Robert Wachter of the University of California, San Francisco. Gandhi and Wachter have done extensive work communicating the risks of Covid-19 to the public, particularly on Twitter, but their stances sometimes differ: Gandhi tends to embrace a quicker return to normal while Wachter is more cautious. They’ll take your questions live.

Does a possible new state of the world mean renewed levels of social interaction, relationships and even love? Daniel Jones and Miya Lee, Modern Love editors, and Anna Martin, host of the Modern Love podcast, will join us to explore optimism through our readers’ own Tiny Love Stories: short, true tales of love, with the theme of hope and renewal . Ariana DeBose, who was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” will read a selection of her and our editors’ favorite reader submissions.

We hope you’ll join us.

The post The Morning at Night time: a Digital Occasion on Covid, Love and Shifting Ahead appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Scoping the lineup (and the paddle-out) on a recent swell. Photo: SF Surf Shots.

This is my second winter living in San Francisco and surfing the infamous Ocean Beach. Frankly, the responses I get when I mention that to folks have been pretty surprising. People talk about Ocean Beach like it’s Nazaré without the Jet Ski assist, and while yes, the paddle out can take 45 minutes on a bigger or messier day, and no it’s not a place I’d take a friend out for their first surf, it’s not as bad as the public opinion might warrant. At least not all the time. There are definitely the days when it is just as scary as people say it is, and there are the days (like today) when it’s just as pristine and heavy and glorious as the pictures and videos show.

That being said, my favorite part about Ocean Beach is hardly the waves, but rather what they’re teaching me about myself and my surfing. I’m learning a lot, and have improved drastically since I started spending consistent time at The Beach. Here are some of the things I’ve learned, summarized into a few easy to digest points and paired with some of my own (not so great) shots of the infamous Beach taken in early January, and some (really incredible) shots from Ross Warning of SF Surf Shots during a couple of perfect days last week.

A recent “eight to 10-foot swell” massively overdelivered, with 15-foot waves and perfect offshore conditions. Photo: SF Surf Shots

Why I Love Ocean Beach

1. Ocean Beach is Always Breaking
Almost always. I’ve realized that some south swells in the middle of the summer will pass by OB completely, maybe bringing some dribblers to the north end by Kelly’s Cove but nothing more than that. But if we’re talking north swells, Ocean Beach is where you’ll consistently find the most size and the best waves if the wind stays favorable.

2. The Paddle
Wait a second are we still on the pluses? yup Even when it’s a fight to get out and I’m only catching a wave or two every 30 minutes, at the very least I’m building paddling endurance and getting great exercise. Ocean Beach is my local gym, and the price of entry is simply a broken board every once in a while.

Stick the drop, or else. Photo: SF Surf Shots.

3. The Power
The level of power that the wave has is pretty incredible and it’s pushed my shortboarding. When it’s low tide and the wave is really throwing, everything you catch is a late-drop free fall that either ends with you somehow hanging on or getting annihilated. The power will also teach you to deal with fear. Even on a medium-sized day when I go nonchalantly skipping out into the waves there’s sure to be a moment where that feeling of panic rises in my chest and I’ve got to just deal with it – like falling on a wave and being simultaneously pushed to the bottom and dragged by my tombstoning surfboard with no clue where the surface is. Stay calm, and you’ll be just fine. It’s the school of hard knocks.

Duck dive or bail? Easy answer on this one. Photo: Will Sileo

4. The Duck Dive Training
Speaking of hard knocks, I thought I knew how to duck dive when I first moved to San Francisco. I didn’t. At most other breaks, there’s at least some margin for error. Say you didn’t get deep enough, well the foam will probably catch you, but overall no big deal. Now say you didn’t duck dive deep enough at Ocean Beach? Get ready for a world of hurt as you’re treated to a high-spin cycle at the local laundromat. You’ll also learn when to bail your board, because it only takes one explosive set on the head with your board getting ripped out of your hands to realize you might as well have swallowed your pride and bailed.

When it’s good, it’s very good. Photo: SF Surf Shots.

5. The Incredible Waves
I’ve caught the wave of my life out there, multiple times, and I have no doubt that OB is where I’ll find the next “wave of my life.” As the saying goes, the best barrel (wave, really) of your existence is the one you didn’t think you were going to make. The wave right on the edge of your ability such that you’re barely capable of scratching into it but willing to go anyway. It takes a certain amount of “fuck it” to push yourself over the ledge. And with so much room for me to grow out there at OB, I can only imagine how many “waves of my life” the beach still holds for me.

Don’t be this guy, unless you’re looking for an incredible work out. Photo: YouTube Screenshot//NorCal Surfer.

Why I Hate Ocean Beach

1. The Paddle
The paddle might be a pro, but it’s definitely also a con. To be quite honest, the paddle out is overhyped. It doesn’t always suck. But when it does, it really sucks. On lower tides the inside bar can be a massive pain in the ass, and if there’s enough swell in the water, getting out can feel like throwing yourself against a brick wall. There is nothing worse than catching a wave (especially the first wave of the set), riding it a bit too far inside, and then being unable to get back out. Many a session has ended in frustration with tired arms that simply couldn’t carry me through the break and out the back.

Surfing OB is all about catching the perfect window where swell, tide, and wind align. Photo: Will Sileo

2. The wind
The wind is almost constantly changing. Apart from the handful of days per year when you got offshore winds from sunup to sundown, you never really know what you’re going to get until you’re in the water. You check the cams and it looks incredible, drive to the water and the wind has picked up but it still looks decent, and fifteen minutes later by the time you’ve made it out the back, it sucks and everyone is getting out. In one hour-long surf session earlier this year, I paddled out as it was sunny and lightly offshore, only to have the winds veer onshore before I could catch my first wave. Within fifteen minutes the onshore winds brought in fog so thick you couldn’t see the sand, which killed the wind and cleaned up the waves. And to cap it all off, fifteen minutes after that the sun came out and burned off the fog. I caught a few clean waves and didn’t stick around for the onshores to pick back up again.

When the current is ripping, with three miles of beach it can be a long walk home. Photo: Will Sileo.

3. The Current
The current is the true beast of Ocean Beach. You never know where you’re going to drift or how quickly. I used to think it was all the tides. When the tide comes in, an enormous amount of water flows into the San Francisco Bay through the Golden Gate Strait. So logically, with an incoming tide, the current should pull north towards the Golden Gate, strongest when it’s changing the fastest. Tide goes out, tons of water comes out of The Bay, and the current pulls south. But a couple days ago when the current should have been pulling its strongest south (tide going out pretty quickly) I found myself drifting very slightly north. And the day before that when the tide was bottomming out and I should have been barely drifting north, I found myself moving south at a good clip. If someone has figured out the formula, please tell me.

4. The Sand Bars
Thanks to the current, the sandbars are always changing too. See a good peak close by? By the time you’ve paddled over and waited for the next set, if you’ve somehow managed to beat the current and stay on that spot you’ll notice that the next set is actually breaking somewhere completely different. Paddle over there and you’ll receive the same treatment. Best bet is to stay where you are and hope for the best.

Good samaritans (and probably former carjacking victims themselves) trying to get the word out at Ocean Beach, SF. Photo: WS

5. Car crime
To cap it all off, you never really know when disaster is going to strike and how bad. Car crime is notoriously rampant in SF, and OB sees some of the worst of it. I’ve seen a bum walk car to car hand wrapped in a towel punching out windows just to get a better look inside and see if he wanted to steal anything. I’ve heard stories of surfers putting their key in a lockbox (seems safe, right?) only to come back and find a broken lockbox but no car. Every time I get back to my car, I breathe a sigh of relief.

In all honesty, my attempts to categorize and share these “hard and fast rules of OB” just goes to show how little I do know about the break after two years of surfing there. But I guess that’s just to be expected. Do the pros outweigh the cons? For me they do, so I’ll keep learning and surfing here for as long as I can. What’s your opinion of Ocean Beach? Feel free to sound off.

The post This Is Why I Love Browsing Ocean Seaside, San Francisco; and Why I Hate It appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

“This city blows,” one of the women huffs out. “Big time.”

“I mean, whatever, I’m not above living in a former crack house, you know?”

“Dude, I’ve been saying for months, let’s just move to East LA This city’s dead.”

A second later, a young Black man clad in red flannel and a beanie interrupts them, telling them, “You don’t get to hate San Francisco … You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.” They haven’t earned the right to hate this place — they just got here, he explains, summing up the message at the center of “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” This Muni dweller is Jimmie Fails, a local in a bustling and indifferent San Francisco that is quickly slipping from his grasp.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” centers on fails’ desperate efforts to hold on to the Victorian house his grandfather built in the heart of the city, and to find belonging in a community that is rapidly changing in the face of an unclear future.

The film is Joe Talbot’s directorial debut, for which he picked up the Best Director prize at Sundance 2019. It is a thoughtful, tender glimpse into gentrification, the affordable housing crisis and toxic masculinity. Whether you are from the city like myself, or have experienced the effects of these issues in your own hometown, this film is universal in its meditations on the human desire for belonging and what defines a home.

As a child, Jimmie lived in the house with his father, who inherited it from his own father, who supposedly built the house with his own two hands. After his father lost their home, it stood abandoned until a couple moved into it. Although he has not lived in the house for years, Jimmie, often with his best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) at his side, trespasses on the property to make repairs and help with its upkeep. Even after the older couple living there mocks his devotion and throws them off the property, Jimmie refuses to let go of the house. However, when a family dispute forces the couple to vacate the house, he enlists Mont to reclaim his old home, refilling it with his own furniture and memories.

The film is semi-autobiographical, loosely inspired by Fails’ own life and his friendship with Talbot, the film’s director. Both are lifelong San Franciscans, and clearly care about the story they’re telling, imbuing their characters with their own lived experiences, with their love, frustration and resentment of the city. The realism of this film is palpable. The two main actors were virtually unknown faces at the time of its release, allowing the audience to truly envision them as their characters.

Although “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is, in essence, a love story between a man and a house, the relationship between Jimmie and Mont is indelible to the film. The two are inseparable, their brotherly friendship loving and gentle. It’s not typical in film to see men cry so openly in front of each other, and yet these two do so without shame. Their touching brotherhood works with Emile Mosseri’s poetic, heart-aching score and Adam Newport-Berra’s cinematography to create an atmosphere that is warm and welcoming, like an old classic.

while it’s obvious that Fails’ real life story is special and worth telling, Talbot’s inclination toward sparse, sleek storytelling inhibits the film’s ability to tell that story in full depth. Jimmie or Mont will often hint at some idea to the viewer, giving them a vague glimpse into their perspectives or relationship. However, the film’s overly minimalist script will cut them off. This film lets us learn little about the characters beyond what is essential to moving the plot forward. Its long lapses of silence — which are stylistically moving, yet lack the dynamic quality of dialogue — cause it to drag.

The film tends to hide behind its ethereal cinematography and dreamy score, shying away from exposing the rough, gritty edges of its subject. In doing so, it engages quite passively with how Jimmie’s Blackness shapes his struggles for belonging and for ownership of his family home. I wish that it leaned harder into its depiction of gentrification, and did so on a wider scale (using the side characters, for example) rather than solely through personal storytelling centered around Jimmie and the house.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is a love letter to San Francisco, a city “plagued with idealism,” as explained by former mayor Willie Brown in a recent interview with The New York Times. It’s heart-achingly clear that Jimmie is a victim of this same idealism. He has held onto this one hope for so long. Even though deep down he knows that it’s an illusion, that it’s unlikely he will ever be able to reclaim his grandfather’s home, his struggle forces us to ask whether believing in something that isn’t real is better than believing in nothing at all.

Hannah Eliot SC ’24 is from San Francisco, California. She likes to surf and is learning (trying) to play the guitar.

Related

The post Movie recordsdata: You don’t get to hate ‘The Final Black Man in San Francisco’ except you like it appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Club Fugazi has grown into a jazz and poetry cabaret, with performers reading rousing lines from the beats before diving through a dangling hoop, each acrobat doing the twists and turns of the jump with his or her unique showmanship and aura zhushing leaves.

In another moment, the newly renovated North Beach venue has turned into a playground for someone with insect skills when a performer hops around the inner perimeter of the gleaming white proscenium – up the wall, then upside down, supported by fellow cast members.

“Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story” has taken the place of the longstanding “Beach Blanket Babylon”. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

In yet another scene, the former home of “Beach Blanket Babylon” became a place of performance art. Audio from a “Maltese Falcon” scene is played while the actors Devin Henderson and Natasha Patterson dance out the sexual tension with full-body affairs and convulsions that Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart limit in the film to glances and trembling voices – all while juggling up to five sparkling pearls the size of a crystal ball.

This is the next chapter in the Bay Area circus heralded by Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story, the new show from Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider, co-founders of Montreal’s famous The 7 Fingers.

San Francisco Mayoress, London Breed, greeted the audience on Tuesday October 12th, which was only exposed to hold the introduction of what she quipped that she had received permission from the Department of Health – and hailed the opening night as a turning point in the city’s fight against COVID-19.

“That will be a long time coming,” she said. “We have been in the house for almost two years.”

The Mayor of San Francisco London Breed speaks to the audience ahead of the premiere of Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story at Club Fugazi in San Francisco. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Dear San Francisco is a suitable flagship for the reopening of the arts. Presented as Valentine’s to the city, the show includes readings of actual love letters to the city, some anonymous, some from celebrities, others from the viewers each evening. Often these charming missives skilfully turn into action. A letter that says, “Thank you for being the place I felt safe to come out of,” doesn’t inspire a hand-to-trap (short for hand-to-trapezoids, a shape Carroll invented) with not -heterosexual pairings and groups.

But sometimes the potted homages to the city feel better for the tourist crowd, who may be trying to validate their pre-existing stereotypes of San Francisco, than for the fine art that the rest of the show aspires to. There are filler lines about how expensive the city is, how hard it is to find a parking space; it’s about psychedelic drugs, how many types of milk there are, and the fearful people trying to choose between them.

“Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story” premiered. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

In any case, the athleticism, precision and inventiveness of the actors quickly overshadow any brick.

Enmeng Song on the diabolo, which is derived from the Chinese yo-yo, can create the illusions of floating and locomotion; he can tear the axis of his device off the cord and then lasso it again in midair.

Junru Wang, who balances upside down on very tall stools, each as wide as the palm of a hand, appears to have radial symmetry, like a starfish; You’re looking directly at them, of course, but it’s like seeing them swimming in the ocean from a bird’s eye view.

The lavishly structured sound design by Jake Rodriguez only amplifies this effect; You can practically imagine how individual waves comb.

Melvin Diggs (below), Devin Henderson, and Natasha Patterson in Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

When you see circus in an intimate setting, you can see again how much power, discipline and grace there is in every effect – the way acrobats do with seemingly little more than a breathless breath, a look up and a wish then climb a trapeze; the way pectoral and even facial muscles twitch when one performer lifts two others onto their shoulders; how diaphragms pump in search of more oxygen.

You can feel the effects too. When artists land, with a boom or a pop, the reverberation sometimes ripples all the way to your seat.

Performers show their strength and agility in “Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story”. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Ultimately, “Dear San Francisco” is a love letter not only to the city, but also to the human body, reminding even the less supple among us that our arms and legs are tools and shapes that we may forget to use creatively .

As sleek and smart as Alexander V. Nichols’ production design is with its frequent use of projections, “Dear San Francisco” is refreshingly low-tech, with performers often contributing their own singing voices and instruments – accordion, banjo, drum. They express art and life in everything they touch: a pole, a teeterboard, a straw hat set, a unicycle, a telephone booth become small miracles.

n“Dear San Francisco: A Soaring Love Story”: Created and directed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider. Constantly. One hour 45 minutes. $ 35- $ 89. Club Fugazi, 678 Green St., SF 415-273-0600. www.clubfugazisf.com

• Lily Janiak
  Lily Janiak is the theater critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak

The post Evaluation: New circus present ‘Pricey San Francisco’ is love letter to metropolis and the human physique appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

“Take a look at this,” said my husband, pointing to a handbag and a Mac laptop that were left unattended on the next table right next to the street. “She just left her things when she walked into the café.”

“I would never do that in San Francisco,” said my daughter.

“Shall we steal it?” my husband was joking.

As a 23-year-old resident and patron of San Francisco, my husband and I went to Boston, a metropolis of nearly 700,000, taking our eldest to college.

The laptop incident at an outdoor cafe threw us into further discussion about how superior Boston is to San Francisco. This historic east coast city, with its cobblestone streets and 35 colleges and universities, looked fresh and radiant compared to our homeland, where we had grown tired of the perishable housing problem, dirty streets, and increasingly devastating forest fires that shrouded the city in smoke.

With no information beyond what we saw and no crime data, we concluded that Boston is safer than San Francisco, perhaps because our parental instincts about getting our daughter to a safe place tarnished our judgment. We agreed that we would never leave anything of value unattended in San Francisco, where our friend’s purse was stolen from a restaurant in Castro and another friend’s son was stolen from a thief using his laptop in an open window of a cafe in the Mission District stole, was stabbed.

Boston has an abundance of cobblestone streets and brick buildings.

Sean Pavone / Getty Images / iStockphoto

As we strolled through the green, sandstone-lined streets of Boston, their gardens and flower boxes full of flowers, we said, “It’s so much cleaner!” And “There are so many trees!”

We noticed that most of the storefronts in the neighborhood shopping districts like Newbury Street and Charles Street were busy, unlike San Francisco, where so many seemed empty.

A pedestrian bridge in Boston leads to the Charles River Esplanade.

S. Graff

As we crossed a freeway on a pedestrian bridge, my husband pointed out a freshly mown area of ​​grass next to a freeway.

The bridge took us onto an esplanade that traced the length of the Charles River and connected us to the Emerald Necklace, a 1,000 acre chain of parks connected by parkways and waterways and designed by the famous Frederick Law Olmsted landscape. It was all remarkably quiet.

The Charles River Esplanade, a public park in Boston on the Charles River, traces the length of the river and connects to the Emerald Necklace.

Eduardo Fonseca Arraes / Getty Images

To two parents who abandoned their daughter across the country, all of this “Boston is better” conversation felt comforting. We sent them to a place with better public transportation, more trees, more history, cheaper baked goods, better behaved dogs, cleaner streets and cafes where you can just leave your laptop unattended when you take a toilet break.

My mother always advised me not to make comparisons that arouse jealousy, competition, and unhappiness. But when I travel, I inevitably find how my home, San Francisco, and wherever I visit, is different.

Sometimes the contrasts are small. For example, in Encinitas, a suburb of San Diego, where I sat at home for a week this summer, the tacos were tastier than those in the Mission District. Decades ago in Paris, a picnic dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens at dusk was interrupted by a crowd of park workers whistling and alerting everyone that the park is closing and that you must dispose of all of your rubbish. Would something like this ever work at Dolores Park? I wondered.

But sometimes the differences are more momentous. On a trip to China a few years ago with my daughter, for example, I was amazed at the abundance of sparkling clean public toilets in Beijing, which are available in almost every block and supervised by supervisors. I was overwhelmed by the huge transport system with trains rolling one after the other into stations and even going to dark corners of the city.

In Mexico City, I took a nightly stroll downtown, where an army of city workers was scrubbing the sidewalks with buckets of disinfectant and brushes. I couldn’t help but think that Valencia Street, the shopping street near my home in San Francisco, could use a thorough cleaning.

The problem with such comparisons, of course, is that they are superficial. They are not backed up by numbers or research, and they have no knowledge gained from living in one place for years, experiencing its seasons, sending your kids to public schools, navigating the traffic and reading the local news every day. They take root in the problems of the city and may take their best qualities for granted.

In this file photo, pedestrians stroll down Newbury Street in Boston, Massachusetts.

Maremagnum / Getty Images

When you are on vacation, you often only see the shiny facade of the place you are visiting – the most beautiful streets, the neighborhoods recommended in the travel guides, the immaculate museums – the pride of the city. The experiences are enhanced by the joys of travel – the reduction of stress from being away from work, the sound of a cocktail at lunch, the thrill of seeing something new. Through the rose-tinted glasses of a vacation, these cities appear remarkably liveable, and if you’re like me, you might log on to Zillow, look at house prices, and dream of moving to this destination permanently.

“Look at that waterfront apartment that’s only half a million in Seaport? Do you know what that would cost in San Francisco? “

In Boston, where the average home sale price is $ 715,000 compared to $ 1.5 million in San Francisco, it was easy to imagine moving across the country with my family – especially since I’ve never seen Beantown in the winter and Shoveled snow to get out of my house on a freezing cold morning.

But the fantasy was often cut off when I stopped talking to locals and told them I was from San Francisco. They reminded me that I also lived in an amazing place with near-perfect weather, wonderful panoramas, lots of jobs, good food and a history of social revolutions.

In a shop on Newbury Street, the owner told us he was driving cross country in college to visit Haight-Ashbury.

“I love your city,” he said and I thought I do too.

Maybe the grass isn’t greener? Victorian style houses in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

hate / Getty Images

The person I would have liked to talk to in Boston was the woman who left her laptop unattended in the cafe. After about five minutes she returned to her table and yes, her things were still there. I wonder now if she was just an unsuspecting person putting her things everywhere, and Boston is really like any other city. Or maybe it really was proof that Boston is safer. That parent will stick with that version of the story.

The post I like San Francisco. However visiting different cities makes me envious. appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

How do you move a hippopotamus across the country? In a special heavyweight box, according to the zoo.

RELATED: Monterey Bay Aquarium like you’ve never seen it before – through the eyes of a clumsy penguin

In this specially built container is Tucker – better known as Bruce to visitors to the SF Zoo.

The hippopotamus received this nickname in honor of former Giants skipper Bruce Bochy, but is referred to as “Tucker” when it becomes part of his new Hippo-Pod.

Bruce moves to Cincinnati to team up with a potential buddy, Bibi.

“It certainly took an entire village to move, and we thank all of our employees, the DHL and SFO team for their help in making this move smooth,” said SF Zoo in a tweet.

How do you move a 4,500 male hippopotamus across the country? In a special heavyweight box! We said goodbye to Bruce yesterday morning when he moved to his new home at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens! pic.twitter.com/lXQIKUVLzc

– San Francisco Zoo (@sfzoo) September 7, 2021

Copyright © 2021 KGO-TV. All rights reserved.

The post San Francisco’s Bruce the hippo moved throughout nation to Cincinnati for real love appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.