OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It's part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
FOR THE LONGEST TIME, the local and national sports media portrayed Ken Griffey Jr. as the Nice Guy Who Finished First, at least in individual baseball achievements.
(Unfortunately for him, baseball's a team sport, a lot more of one than basketball. Mariners fans have long known what Cubs fans have recently learned--that a singular home-run titan doesn't make a championship team.)
Then, during the recent contract re-negotiations, Griffey was portrayed in the local press as having always really been the Mean Guy Who Wanted His Way. (As if any true superstar player didn't have an overriding ambition to do his best and to push those around him to do the same.)
Now, by accepting a new contract worth millions less than he would've gotten from the Mariners (or the Yankees or Braves) just to finish his career with his hometown (small-market) team, he's being portrayed as the Nice Guy once again. He probably always a guy who enjoyed being nice when he could but who was also subject to stress and frustration like anyone in his hi-pressure position. He didn't change; just the image.
My only regret,besides that of not being able to watch him break a few batting records here in town, is that Griffey's personal "best company to work for in America" has had such sleazy owners.
No sooner was the borderline-racist Marge Schott out of the Cincinnatti Reds' front office than insurance tycoon and financier Carl Lindner came in. Lindner's best known nationally for his hostile takeover of Taft Broadcasting (a TV-station chain that had also owned the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio and Aaron Spelling's production company).
Lindner later sold pieces of Taft to finance his takeover of Chiquita Brands. You may recall last year Lindner quashed a Cincinnatti Enquirer investigative series into financial irregularities at the food company (previously known for its former violent role in Latin American politics). Lindner not only got the paper to stop running the results of its investigation, but it successfully redirected the national media spin on the story to the tactics of the reporters, not the funny-money dealings the reporters were investigating.
How could such a Nice Guy like Junior want so badly to work for such a meanie like Lindner?
And will this change my view of how nice Junior is or isn't? (It won't. Really.)
TOMORROW: Another great human space gets threatened with removal.
IN OTHER NEWS: Roger Vadim, who passed on last Thursday, directed 26 films and an assortment of French TV projects. Several of his films have endured as classic entertainments of eroticism and verve (And God Created Woman, Barbarella). Others remain as unsung treasures awaiting rediscovery (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ms. Don Juan) or period pieces of what one director once thought audiences would find sexy (Night Games, Pretty Maids All In a Row, the remake of And God Created Woman). But the headlines and the TV obits barely found time to mention his work; preferring to describe Vadim only as the ex of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve. Years ago, the U.S. publishers of his (now out-of-print) memoirs took the same angle, retitling the book Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda. One of cinema's greatest celebrants of female beauty had attained a traditionally-female fate, becoming known only as a shadow behind the achievements of his spouses.
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