Love, American Style

After re-connecting with my youth via Once In A Lifetime last evening, I remembered why I suggested that hockey-style shootouts in which players really have to beat the goalie would be superior to using penalty kicks to decide World Cup games: They actually decided NASL games that way. And the players loved it. Most of the rule changes and stylish innovations of the NASL look a little silly now, but there was nothing more exciting in the film than watching the Cosmos' Carlos Alberto deke the goalie and softly lob the ball over his head into the net to decide the 1978 Soccer Bowl in a shootout. Wow!

I also learned that goal-scoring machine Giorgio Chinaglia, one of my childhood heroes, is a major-league prick.

Overall, Once In A Lifetime was an above-average sports documentary (with a dynamite soundtrack that featured dozens of period funk hits) that strikes a chord with me because so much of my youth was spent watching, reading about, and emulating the Cosmos. (I'm also intimately familiar with wildly popular phenomena that mysteriously lose tons of money and crash before you know it.) They may have spent a little too much time on Pelé (although, who wouldn't?), and may have lingered on scoreboard shots more than on-the-field action a little too often, but the fast-paced editing really contributed to the whirlwind feel of late-70s soccer fever.

There's a book too? Hmm... how do I get one?


FMFM: Pavement's Pacific Trim EP, another wax transfer. I see that this is being reissued on the forthcoming double-disc version of Wowee Zowee. Only two of the four songs, the historical fiction of "Give It A Day" and the tossed-away "I Love Perth," are actually good, although a third, "Gangsters and Pranksters", is pretty memorable in its way. ("Saganaw" may hold the distinction of being the worst Pavement tune ever released.) A recording that sounds like it was done in an afternoon, Pacific Trim is a fleeting pleasure. Plus it has the best rock'n'roll song ever written comparing your girlfriend's Puritanical dad to Cotton Mather himself. (Hey, is that an extremely vulgar title, or do I have a sick mind?)