Then something clicked when Robbie Gould kicked the game-winning field goal. So I'm still an unrepentant Bears fan. However, for some reason I maintained my enthusiasm throughout the evening, and even became ecstatic when I watched the Dallas Cowboys' first regular-season game against the New York Giants. I've never, contrary to what you might think, hated the Cowboys. In fact, I like almost all steam-rolling professional teams, with the only glaring exceptions being the Detroit Red Wings (who I've come to tolerate because the city is an utter shithole beyond redemption, like Gary) and the Boston Red Sox. This started with the indomitable dual three-peats of the Chicago Bulls in the '90s, led by the immaculate Michael Jordan. Even later, with the repeated runs of the New York Yankees, I admired the team's prowess. I still hate the Red Sox, though, so I'm not completely willing to embrace certain successful franchises.
One would think I'd hate the Dallas Cowboys, even more now that they have a new stadium that looks like the Titanic. That's the thing, though: I don't. I don't love the Cowboys, but I appreciate and subtly embrace the hoopla and deafening enthusiasm of the fans and its team. I felt sorry a little bit for Jordin Sparks, whose rendition of the National Anthem could scarcely be heard amid the ambient white noise of the stadium, but she thrust her booming and piercing voice through the static as well as she, or anyone, could. From camera shots overhead, the new Cowboys stadium looks absolutely, well, crazy. It's huge. It dominates the landscape, and from the inside some of the upper tiers resemble the ill-fated Tower of Babel. But that's the thing that makes the NFL great: the enthusiasm of the fans and their embrace of the bombastic. Seriously, that stadium is a monster, and this says nothing of the over-the-top HD jumboscreen that hangs over the field.
This all sounds like the height of American extravagance, and it is. But it's only around for a little more than four months, which is more than enough time to marvel at it, and not nearly enough to gape at it and fall down, dizzy and disoriented. This is the NFL, not the endless and, honestly, tedious MLB. I'd take 16 mind-blowing football games versus 162 wearisome, and ultimately meaningless when taken in small chunks, ones that comprise the baseball season. The fanfare, the enthusiasm of the fans, and the explosive but still safe--safe, I'll say it again, because the behavior of football fans is not nearly as boorish as that of MLB enthusiasts--atmosphere of an NFL game is enough to reduce me to a drooling mess not unlike, to quote Patton Oswalt, that of "a retarded kid with a sparkler."
In the same way, I'm now enthralled with the sounds of Greece. LNE is a tremendous guide through this realm of foreign music that I know nothing about. I've learned not to fear the strange, though--I mean this in the xenophobic sense, and not just "weird." A few nights ago, she played some song by Manos Loizos, and I fell into a fugue state. Mind you--I know almost no Greek. I know some curse words LNE taught me, and I occasionally laugh when I stub my toe and blurt out, "Malaka!" The entire pictographic language looks like just that--pictographs--to me. Last week she showed me what she was reading, and I thought that maybe it was a horrible Jonathan Safran-Foer book (again--redundant). Lo and behold, though, it was in Greek. Now, it's not that I'm unwilling to learn; it's that I can pinpoint and recognize my limitations. I'll never be able to play the violin, or perform a tuck from a 50-foot-tall diving board, or read Greek. You know the old aphorism, "It's Greek to me!"? After perusing her book of what looked to me like an assortment of crazed doodles, this has never been more of a literal cliche for me.
Nevertheless, I don't speak Portuguese, and that hasn't stopped me from listening to, and loving, Os Mutantes. In the same way, now I think I'm standing on the edge of a rabbit hole that will lead me to music from Greece. Again, I have no idea what's being sung, and I'll definitely have to find translations, but the vertiginous scales and the remarkable aptitude/exactitude of the musicians boggles my mind. It is truly impressive.
I'm listening now to this link LNE sent me that plays a song featured on The Wire, Stelios Kazantzidis's "Efuge, Efuge." It's so good that I easily forget my Latin caveat (another redundancy, I know), paraphrased from Virgil's "Aeneid": "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."
I implore you: embrace the bombast, even if it might overwhelm you at first. This means acceptance, with respect to the Cowboys, and full approbation of trilling (in a good way) Grecian scales.
You just have to, as the Tom Waits song says, which is also The Wire's theme song, "keep the devil way down in the hole." But this doesn't mean you should shrink from going in, too.
Plus, baklava is awesome, and should really bridge the divide and become a staple Sunday football snack. Blasphemy, you say? Too difficult? A little too much?
Maybe, but you must embrace the bombast!
R
