Japanese Baseball

JULY/AUGUST 2010

Eugene Elderely libidos Bitter coffee

Love Shack Cleveland H.L. Mencken
Japanese Baseball

Michael H. Carriere is an assistant Kevin Dehan drew the picture. Jack Dolgen is a writer, musician, and
professor at the Milwaukee School of kevin.dehan@gmail.com avid eater.
Engineering, where he teaches courses jack@jackdolgen.com
on American history, public policy,
political science, and urban design.
carriere@msoe.edu

Victoria Grace Elliott is some girl,
usually found on the University of
Texas campus. Also she gets paid to
draw comics for the Daily Texan.
There's some other stuff, but that's
about it.
victoriagelliott@gmail.com
Ricky Federico is a graduate of
Northeastern University. He currently
lives in a funky ol' shack, where the
tin roof is rusted.
rickyfederico@yahoo.com
Sherry LeBlanc feeds hungry people
and plays in a band called Shred
Shop. She lives in Austin, Texas and
knows that you secretly love Dave
Matthews Band. You can't hide from
the truth.
sherry.leblanc@gmail.com

H.L. Mencken was a Baltimore based Adam Schragin is a native Texan

writer, editor, and contentious spirit.
He died in 1956.
Cover photograph courtesy of Flickr user the_worm_turns
and writer who contributes to the
Austinist, the Austin A.V. Club, and
serves as the editor of
MadeLoud.com.
aschragin@gmail.com

Japanese Baseball is a general interest zine founded in 2010.

Founded by Michael Wachs

michael@japanesebaseball.us
http://www.japanesebaseball.us/
twitter.com/japbaseball
Look for us on Facebook, too.

MADE IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, AMERICA

 July/August 2010

The minute green pests are so

wonderfully productive that they seem
to increase and multiply before his eyes;
and, paradox as it may appear, the more
he pulls up the more there are left .

R.F. Murray
"ON GARDENING" from
The Gentleman's Magazine
(1888)
Japanese Baseball

japanesebaseball . us /805289255

Eugene
by Sherry LeBlanc
Illustration by Kevin Dehan

The windshield magnified the sun as I
baked in the passenger seat of our mobile food
pantry on the day I met Eugene. Angel, the
driver, pushed the air brake and I glanced at the
reflection of my forearm in the truck’s rearview
mirror. It was the color of rotisserie chicken. The
heat was already tearing at my patience and the
day had just begun.
As I climbed from my seat onto the pavement,
I was greeted by a group of volunteers standing
in a semi-circle around me. My friend Charles,
who helped gather everyone, pushed a young
man into the middle of the circle. “Sherry, this is
Eugene. He’s a volunteer firefighter!” I’ve known
Charles for years and it’s a rarity for the eighty-
five year old to muster up such enthusiasm. I
took a good look at Eugene who smiled at me,
revealing mossy teeth. Thick film hung in slow
motion between his lips. His skin resembled
freshly rolled dough dipped in warm water. The
bottom of his stomach peeked from the hem of
his shirt and was covered in curly, dark hair. His
navy-blue baseball cap was pouring sweat from
the edges. He was freckled and moist. I ignored
Charles’ introduction and began working with
the group.
Eugene stayed glued to my side as we set up
tables, unloaded the food and organized grocery
sacks. Everywhere he followed, I attempted to
provide a new distraction. “Eugene, would you
mind putting five onions, six apples and six ears
of corn in a bag?” “Eugene, could you help Ms.
 July/August 2010

Anita carry her food?” “Eugene, Charles needs

your help with the spaghetti”. He stayed silent and
worked diligently. When I moved to a new task,
he followed. It was hectic and hot as we worked
to move the families out of the dangerous sun.
As I began unfolding a table, he bent down
behind me and said in a husky half-whisper, “Do
you know what it’s like to be 27 and not know
the touch of a woman?” I handed him the table
and smiled, avoiding eye contact. He repeated
himself with more intensity.
“Do you know what it’s like to be 27 and never
know the touch of a woman?” I began unfolding
the next table as he bent down and whispered,
“It’s not a good thing”. I paused while my mind
raced, searching for the right answer.
This was the first day I met Eugene and the
first of many quotable quotes including:
“Is your husband a firefighter?”
“I always keep a gun and a bomb by my bed,
don’t you?”
“You look like the type who wouldn’t take
money for sex.” JB
Japanese Baseball

photo by flickr user hmk

japanesebaseball . us /805294139

The Whole Shack Shimmies

by Jack Dolgen & Ricky Federico

“Love Shack” by the Georgian pop band The B-52s is a landmark achievement as a song, video,
and cultural touchstone. You are encouraged to watch the video before and after Jack Dolgen and
Ricky Federico analyze it piece by piece over the course of 38 minutes. Listen online. JB

SELECT FACTS FROM THE "LOVE SHACK" WIKIPEDIA PAGE:

In 2006, it was also named as one of VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s, plac-
ing at #40. The Simpsons episode E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt) features the B-52's
performing a version of this song entitled "Glove Slap". The Christian parody band,
ApologetiX, released a version of this song called "Meshach" about the charac-
ter in the Bible. B-52's singer Kate Pierson lived in the Love Shack in the 1970s.

japanesebaseball . us /805296557
A Woman of Value
by Adam Schragin
The time is 7:00pm at Golden Manor, a
home for elderly Jews in San Antonio Texas.
It has been hours since an uncomplicated
dinner of unrecognizable starches and proteins
rearranged into soupy creams and creamy soups
– everything, even the vegetables - the pallor of
Thanksgiving stuffing.
Sid Rosenthal is horny. You’d be forgiven
for mistaking the waning years of one’s life
as dedicated solely to minor pursuits like
backgammon and grandchildren, but foremost
on his mind is the distant rumbling of blood
snaking through his penis. Sid didn’t imagine
his life would take a turn for the nearly erotic
after his children schemed, schemed to have him
committed, simply for starting a kitchen fire after
trying to microwave the toaster. And yet, here
he was, in the peak of his sexual life, which just
so happened to be the twilight of just about
everything else. It had been ten years since his
wife Ethel had passed away from bone cancer,
and though their last years together were tender,
their romantic life had been icy for at least a
decade previous. When she passed, Sid poo-
pooed the idea that he’d have another shot at
love, and certainly one at lust.
Sid first noticed Rachel during a tedious
mid-afternoon bingo session made worse by
the volunteering efforts of the well-meaning
but overly earnest Confirmation Class from the
nearby reform synagogue. A sprightly young
person was helping Sid with the game, watered-
down rules and all, and he spent the first half
wondering about this young person’s strange
shade of nail polish, blue like a bruise. When he
looked up, he saw Rachel looking either at him
or through him, done up in a rosemary-colored
bathrobe with just a thin line of saliva hanging off
of her bottom lip. Mauve irises were surrounded
by a thread of veins, and her hair began mid-
scalp and fell off in soft patches. A beautiful red
mouth, moist with the dangling spit. The young
person gave up trying to tether Sid’s attention to
Bingo, and continued to play without him. The
way Rachel stared – like she had a question she
July/August 2010
thought he could answer.
Later that night Rachel stumbled into his
room, apparently lost en route to the toilet. A
poor excuse, or a probable one, but nevertheless
a surprise visit that resulted in a ceremonious
exchange of gummy kisses and, to his delight, a
hand job, effective despite her Parkinson’s-related
trembling. Afterwards, they both coughed and
made vague pillow talk about sweet experience
and sweet cakes and decaffeinated coffee. When
he awoke at 5 a.m., she had stumbled somewhere
else. That was two weeks ago, and the affair had
become more regular than any bowel movement
he could remember having. Their rendezvous
was either in the dark, late hours before nightfall
or mid-day after Activity Hour. Though the staff
was frequently invasive during other private
moments, Sid knew they recognized what was
going on and they gave the lovers a wide berth
– apparently the staff had no desire to snatch
away some final happiness from a man much
frustrated in his life.
This late Tuesday evening, Sid had scarcely
rewound his tape copy of The Barry Sisters –
Their Greatest Yiddish Hits before Rachel padded
gently into his room. At age fifty she was twice
married, a real estate agent with a loud laugh
and just the suggestion of lines around her
mouth. But at eighty, her perception came and
went. She had lost the laugh, but was still sure-
footed. Sid slid over in his bed and beckoned her
over. She smelled like rosemary and age. It was
intoxicating.
“I can smell,” he whispered at her, the words
shuffling out all wrong.
“Uh huh,” Rachel assented. He pulled at her
underneath the covers, half falling out of stretch
pants and into her lap. Sid was careful with her
brittle cheeks, gentle with kisses on her blue
veins and with his hands on the knots on her
back. He disrobed, and could see the liver spots
on his chest and could trace the distilled breath
of Icy Hot to his neckbone. He applied a coat of
Vaseline to his long-suffering penis, now edging
toward patient erection. He applied another to
Japanese Baseball

the warm lips of her labia, then temporarily lost

track of his surroundings. Unable to enter her
from above, he just slipped and slid into her, their
chests now sticky with sweat. “Eishes-Chiyell,”
the Barry Sisters cooed. “A Woman of Value.”
“Ah, Rachel,” said Sid. “Ah, my darling.”
“Ah, Mort,” said Rachel. He moved inside of
her at the slowest of increments.
“One Look at You,” the Sisters sang. “Ain Kik
Auf Dir.” Sid gasped, exited and moved to her side.
She pulled at him with her hand. Then suddenly
she stopped, her fingers still in rings around his
member, her eyes shut and her body giving way
to slumber. He lies that way, in the dark, her hand
around him, drifting away himself.
The cliché about old love is that it makes one
feel young again. Instead, Sid found himself at the
cusp of something strange and new with Rachel’s
arthritic hand wrapped around him, a sensation
never before replicated in his marital bed. In
Rachel’s sleeping hand, he moans and a line of
glue-like cum courses out of him. “Ah Rachel,
‘Yuh Mein Tiere Tocter.’ ‘Yes, My Darling.’” JB

japanesebaseball . us /805299562
Goodbye Cleveland!
by Michael Carriere
As both a basketball fan and an urban
historian, I found myself fascinated by the now
ex-Cavalier Lebron James’ public humiliation of
his former team and city. It is clear that James
did not handle his exit from Cleveland with
anything resembling the grace and poise he
displays on the basketball court. Dan Gilbert,
the owner of the Cavaliers, also put his worst
foot forward, as seen in the bizarre, hateful press
release he issued immediately after witnessing
James’ ESPN special/spectacle (one must admire
Gilbert’s situational understanding of “loyalty”:
did Gilbert feel any sense of loyalty to the 250
individuals that his company, Quicken Loans, let
go in June 2008?). And then there are the ever-
suffering Cleveland sports fans, let down once
again by those they raised to near-royal status.
The unthinkable has happened: the king has left
his subjects in the lurch.
Many commentators were struck by the
immediate reaction to the news among Cavs fans.
At least one such individual burned his Lebron
James’s “23” jersey in the street, while others
took to throwing rocks at the James’ billboard
outside of the Quicken Loans Arena. Yes, it’s sad
that James is moving on to sun-soaked Miami,
but did this occurrence really warrant such
extreme responses? After all, as my father used
to tell me after a particularly rough night at the
foul line, it’s only a game.
Yet in the context of a Rust Belt city like
Cleveland, James’s decision to jump ship to
Miami must be understood within the broader
history of the city. The way that Cavs fans began
to talk about James’s betrayal sounded a whole
lot like the language once used to address the
disloyalty of firms who left the city during the
peak of deindustrialization. In many ways,
James’ choice to leave Cleveland is but another
stop on the longer narrative of abandonment
in Cleveland, another reminder that anything
deemed productive and of great value will
inevitably leave the city. But the James episode
is also a cautionary tale of the shortcomings of
post-industrial development. In the rush to use
July/August 2010
sports figures and sporting arenas as engines of
economic growth, city developers and their allies
often repeated the mistakes of the past. Such a
development strategy turned James into nothing
more than a commodity, and commodities, as
deindustrialization once taught us, care little
about place—and even less about loyalty.
Things didn’t always look this bad for
Cleveland. By the turn of the last century the
city housed the third largest amount of corporate
headquarters in the nation, behind only New
York and Chicago. At the same time, industrial
firms such as U.S. Steel, the Leece-Neville
Company (manufacturer of electrical products),
the Carling Brewing Company, the Coit Road
Fisher Body Division of General Motors, and
National Screw provided jobs for countless
residents of Cleveland. And people flocked to
the city: by 1950, Cleveland’s population stood
at 914,808.
Yet the forces unleashed by economic
globalization hit Cleveland hard. By the late
1960s/early 1970s plant closings had become
commonplace, with firms like the Carlin Brewing
Company shuttering their doors forever. By the
1980s, the situation had gone from bad to worse.
U.S. Steel closed its last Cleveland plant in 1984,
while the Coit Road General Motors facility had
closed shop in 1983—a decision that led to the
loss of over seventeen hundred jobs. By the late
1980s, Cleveland was but a shell of its former self,
as (predominantly white) people fled the city in
large numbers. By 1990, the city’s population
stood at just 505,616. Those that remained in the
city expressed disbelief in the fact that so many
people—and, more importantly, companies—
could simply pack up and leave the city. The
narrative of abandonment had come to define
Cleveland.
It was this story that the world of sports was
meant to directly address. Throughout the 1990s,
city after city recast sports teams as engines of
economic growth. Central to this strategy was
the belief that public/private partnerships to
build new, downtown arenas would revive dying
Japanese Baseball
cities. Cities such as Baltimore (Camden Yards,
1992), Denver (Coors Field, 1995), and Detroit
(Comerica Park, 2000) all believed that new
stadiums would attract both people and capital
back to the downtown area. Not surprisingly,
Cleveland got into the act as well, opening up
Gund Arena (now Quicken Loans Arena) in
1994, as part of the city’s broader Gateway
Project redevelopment plan. Such state-of-
the–art facilities, in addition to appealing to city-
wary suburbanites, were also meant to attract top
athletic talent, talent like Lebron James.
Such a development strategy proved
remarkably lucrative for athletes like James, but
it didn’t seem to do a whole lot for the rest of
photo by flickr user jimharper
the citizens of Cleveland. In 2004, as James was
finishing up his first season as a Cavalier, it was
announced that Cleveland had the highest rate of
poverty in the nation. After James’ second season,
statistics were released that found that Cleveland
had lost 24 percent of its manufacturing jobs in
the first five years of the twenty-first century. Like
jobs, people also continued to flee Cleveland:
new census estimates show that Cleveland had
the largest numerical decline in residents during
2009, dropping 2,658, or close to one percent of
the population (by comparison, Detroit, often
held up as the poster child for abandonment, lost
1,713 residents during the same period). And in
May 2010, as Cleveland residents pleaded with
 July/August 2010

James to stay, the city’s unemployment rate

hovered around ten percent.
All of this is not to blame one athlete for the
sorry state of a major metropolitan area. Instead,
the example of Lebron James shows us that it
may be time to rethink how we revive American
cities, as the strategy of growing economies
through sporting arenas has proven ineffective.
Don’t believe me? Look past Cleveland and
focus on Baltimore, where during the opening
week of the 2010 baseball season the Orioles
drew the smallest crowd in the history of their
stadium – 9,129 fans. The diminishing amount
of fans may have something to do with the fact
that people, as in Cleveland, continue to flee the
city. In March 2010 it was announced that the
city has lost about three percent of its residents
since 2000. To re-grow interest in his team,
Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos has
publicly declared that what the city needs is a new
arena—funded in part by taxpayer dollars—to
replace what he has called “antiquated” Camden
Yards, a stadium that is not yet twenty years old.
In light of such pronouncements, the time
has come to realize that the health of a city relies
on more than just a young man who can dunk
a basketball, or a team that has a shot to reach
the playoffs. Look beyond the loss of James in
Cleveland and one can see such groups as the
Civic Innovation Lab, a group that provides
both start-up funding and volunteer assistance
for individuals trying to start businesses in the
city. One recently funded endeavor transformed
an abandoned city mall into the “Gardens Under
Glass” project, a self-described urban eco-village
that features carts of vegetables and fruits grown
on site, under the mall’s arching glass domes. The
group has also funded companies developing
“green” energy sources and new curriculum
models for Cleveland’s struggling public school
system.
Given the city’s history, it makes sense for
Cleveland residents to place James’ decision
within the broader narrative of abandonment—
and to grieve for such a loss. Yet in their grief
one hopes that those in Cleveland, indeed those
across the country, come to realize that their cities
remain remarkably resilient—and to rethink what
it means to truly develop such regions. Athletes,
like firms, will leave. Instead, focus development
on those who are most invested in the health of
their cities: city residents themselves. JB
---
This article originally appeared online at History
News Network (hnn.us).
Japanese Baseball

japanesebaseball . us /805322971
by Victoria Elliott
July/August 2010
Japanese Baseball

japanesebaseball . us /805334103
originally from How to Sell Manuscripts (1920)
Novel things
appreciated.

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