The Super Bowl Won't Be the Same Without Tom Brady

Here are a few things The Front thinks The Front thinks:

• Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ass-freezing weather, the economy is basically Kansas 1933, and it seems like it's always dark. I get in a taxi and the radio's tuned to NPR, the Ethiopian driver can't talk about anything except how great it is to be in America and see Obama sworn in. Wherever I go - Minneapolis, Denver, El Paso - every cab driver is an Obama guy.
• I was thinking about Latouche the other day, trying to remember how this character got in my head. And re-reading Delirious New York this weekend reminded me...it was all a reaction to Rem Koolhaas. I used to think Koolhaas was just a stupid poser. He'd write weird stuff about "eating small geometric food and voting over the phone" (no, really). But I noticed...he was starting to score points off of people and institutions that really deserved to be scored on (MOMA Inc., indeed). And I wondered, what if he's right...about everything? And, what would a totally uncritical follower of Rem Koolhaas look like? Anyway, that's what that was all about. (If Latouche were a D&D character we'd need a new alignment: Chaotic Incompetent.)
  
• Here is a fun piece on the CCTV project Koolhaas completed in 2006. The west tower is for his ego, ba-dum-dum.
  
• First Sea Lord puts his finger on the central problem with Modernism (apart from everything being a cube). It is destructive. It does not play well with others. Other styles may coexist reasonably well with one another - but Modernism blends with nothing. So if you are a Modernist, you are all-in baby, because there is no compromise. That's why this is the most overrated piece of shit ever foisted on a gullible public. Look! You can have pate with chocolate sauce! You can even pretend to like it, and that people who don't like it are boors. It still sucks.
  
• Oh yeah, I got into the Pepys again. I know, if it's not Wodehouse it's Pepys. There ought to be a 12-step program for this. But not the Diary this time, not giving up three months of my life for that, nossiree... I'm about a third of the way into Richard Ollard's very worthy biography (written in 1974, updated in 1983 right after they finished the Diary index). I'm just pausing at the point here where...let's see...Pepys gets drunk with the royal chaplain and gets introduced to Charles II right before the Restoration. This is the sort of thing that happened to Pepys pretty regularly.
  
• He was The Man. He was the architect of the Royal Navy. Survived the plague of 1665 and the London Fire of 1666. Hobnobbed with royalty. Went to jail...three times. Not some lame-ass debtors prison, either, they sent him up to The Tower, where he could sit in a room a watch guys with black hoods and axes walk by. Never convicted him of nothing. Ollard comments that Pepys' motto could have been: "Much suspected by me / nothing proved can be"
  
• He lived to be 70. When he was 69 he "received the thanks" of Cambridge University. His blog is here.
  
• There's a role-playing game in there somewhere.
  
• The pleasant surprise is how much we know about Pepys outside the Diary period. Late in his life someone at The Admiralty commented unflatteringly on Pepys's motto, which appeared as a frontispiece to his Memoires: "Fight the good fight; and always call to mind that it is not you who are mortal, but this body of ours. For your true being is not discerned by perceiving your physical appearance. But 'what a man's mind is, that is what he is', not that individual human shape that we identify through our senses." He delighted in pointed out to correspondents that the author was not he, but Cicero.
• Think about that for a minute, because this is where civilization stands or falls, right on this spot. At that moment, there were people in the power structure of England who got it - they thought less of the clowns at The Admiralty because they were weak on Cicero. Can we get some of that for America? A little bit of shame over ignorance people? A little respect for the classics? Let's all read some Cicero! You first.
• I saw Steamboat Bill Jr. last night (free from Comcast On-Demand, via TCM). Keaton's last independent film, and a masterpiece. The cyclone scene gets all the ink (that's a real house, no camera tricks), but the scene where his dad takes him to the hat shop is a minor masterpiece. I don't care who you like in comedy, Pryor, Cosby, Jack Benny - this guy is right there with them. He gets my Hall of Fame vote.
• One thought about football. This Super Bowl pits a recognized veteran Super Bowl winner with declining skills...against Kurt Warner. I'm serious - Roethlisberger came out of the gate a premier NFL quarterback (passer ratings of 98.1 and 98.6 in '04 and '05). Then he cracked his head in a motorcycle accident (75.4 in '06). He rehabbed, got some time to recover, and reached new highs (104.1 in '07). Then he cracks his head in a bunch of football games, and it's back to concussion-ball (80.1 in '08). He was a fine player, and he's just 26, but he's already in the Aikman-Young zone. I don't believe he'll be playing when he's 30, and I hope he's not having someone feed him with a spoon at that point. Much as I admire them, the Steelers have a history here, and they owe it to this guy to draw the curtain early.
• Tom Brady, come back, all is forgiven!