Another Week: Number 84

Hall of Fame Game: Chicago Bears 21, Houston Texans 17

The humiliation of last season has faded a bit, and I find myself still on the Chicago Bears’ bandwagon — behind the tuba on the floor in the fetal position, maybe, but still aboard.

I visited the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio as a Boy Scout in 1973, on my way to the National Jamboree at Moraine State Park, Pennsylvania. It seemed small and somewhat lackluster even then.

This year’s annual game on the adjacent field was something less than even a real preseason game. No starters played, and the game was curtailed early in the third quarter because of approaching thunderstorms.

Still, I saw a few notable things.

For one, in addition to Tyson Bagent, the undrafted quarterback I championed last year, the Bears now have another backup quarterback named Brett Rypien, who also looked pretty sharp. Both of these are in addition to Caleb Williams, who is expected to emerge as the greatest NFL quarterback of all time on the afternoon of September 8th against the Tennessee Titans, probably at some point in the first half.

The Bears also have a 6-foot, 6-inch wide receiver named Collin Johnson, who is good at making impossible catches, so I have that to look forward to.

Meanwhile, NFL kickoffs have been drastically changed for the sake of player safety. Now the kick is shorter, and the opponents are much closer together. Once the catch is made, there’s a short chaotic scuffle until the tackle occurs on the twenty-something. There’s no Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” no awesome arc of the ball across the field, no chance for anyone to reach full speed, and hopefully far fewer crippling injuries.

The Killers at Lollapalooza

I’m 64 now, and although I would probably enjoy standing around in front of a stage to watch a band or two, I no longer have the enthusiasm for obtaining tickets, driving to Chicago, parking, hiking to Grant Park, and so on.

So it has been a blessing the last few years to have Lollapalooza streamed live on Hulu. I have never heard of most of the bands, but I will watch a couple of them at random and they usually have something to offer.

I know and like The Killers alright, but I only have “Human” and “A Dustland Fairytale” in my iTunes library. I watched their full Lollapalooza set on Friday night and it was exactly what I expected. Brandon Flowers exerted his near-giddy enthusiasm, and the band played all of their highly familiar and similar hits, employing the same handful of tricks again and again. For some reason, The Killers always remind me of Electric Light Orchestra — but ELO’s songs were much more varied.

Flowers does not have the frontman repertoire of a Mick Jagger, but he’s 38 years younger, so he’s got some time to develop his moves.

The whole performance was only about an hour and twenty minutes with encores, during which Flowers donned a purple jacket with black lapels which — with his haircut, smile, and showman’s gestures — made him look a bit like The Joker.

Hard Knocks: Offseason with the New York Giants

Hard Knocks, the NFL/HBO documentary series, continues to evolve and expand. This year, a set of offseason episodes has been added to the preseason and in-season editions. It goes behind-the-scenes with the New York Giants front office as they try to divvy up $255.4 million, the league’s salary cap for the 2024 season, between 53 players on the eventual roster.

One thing that strikes me occasionally is the disparity between the glorious mythology of the NFL and its mundane operations. One the one hand, you’re shown NFL legends weaving through battle in slow motion to heroic music. On the other, you have management sitting in humdrum offices with crappy coffee tables.

GM Joe Schoen leads the Giants front office team, and much of this season is spent in his humdrom office as he and his team scan onscreen personnel charts blurred to prevent TV espionage. Schoen seems like an agreeable but not particularly brilliant administrator as he deliberates the value of quarterback Daniel Jones, star running back Saquon Barkley, and various free agents and draft picks.

We see the expertise of assistant general manager Brandon Brown, the quiet enthusiasm of scout Hannah Burnett, and the seasoned dread of CEO John Mara as the 2024 chips fall in sequence. Especially interesting are head coach Brian Daboll’s snap cognitive tests of prospective quarterbacks.

At five episodes of roughly 40 minutes each, the series is a quick watch, and even though I don’t pay much attention to draft picks and free agents, having a fly-on-the-wall view of these offseason maneuvers was interesting.

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

After reading Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as a much younger man, I finally started working my way through William Faulkner last year, began his fifth novel this past May, and finally finished it this week.

Published in 1930, As I Lay Dying is a brutally grim book. It tells the story of a poor, rural Mississippi family, the Bundrens, as wife and mother Addie Bundren dies and the family embarks on an 80-mile journey to transport her corpse, via donkey cart, back to her hometown for burial. They are beset by rain and washed-out bridges and, in time, since there is no embalming or refrigeration, buzzards. The misery and revulsion are so excruciating that they even become funny at times.

Faulkner employs several unconventional techniques in telling the tale. For one, using a style now familiar from documentary films, its narration is switched back and forth between 15 different characters, with each contribution presented as a new chapter. These discourses are sometimes given in the local dialect, and at other times as abstract poetry bubbling up from deeper levels of consciousness.

To help me understand what I was reading, I ordered the Norton Critical Edition of As I Lay Dying, which includes a great selection of supplementary material covering everything from the physical architecture of a typical Depression-era tenant farmhouse to the book’s parallels with Russian literature, the role of the government in the family’s lives, and its significance from Freudian and mythological perspectives.

These supplements were largely what took me three months to work through. Some evenings I might read a couple of paragraphs over a few times, trying to squeeze the juice of their meaning into my my small cranium, and then back away until tomorrow.

The way the book’s ghastly subject matter happened to coincide with my own fresh grief simultaneously repelled me and drew me deeper. Finally finished, I think it was helpful to face this universal pain through other eyes.

I will read Faulkner’s next novel — Sanctuary — at some point, but not right now.