Ramsayings

Helen and I had tickets to Roy Oswalt’s debut as a Phillie. Wish it had gone better, but it was still a brilliant move for the Phillies. Few people believed that J.A. Happ could duplicate his successful rookie campaign, myself included. The Oswalt deal gives the Phillies an intimidating rotation, especially in a short series.

But can they make the playoffs? The Phils have been snakebitten yet again, losing Shane Victorino, Raul Ibanez and Ryan Howard to injury, leaving Jayson Werth as the only Phillies regular who hasn’t been hit with the injury bug. It couldn’t come at a worse time. The Phils have moved within 3 games of the Braves and seem to be putting the pieces together before the latest round of injuries hit. (Make that 1 game back. The Giants miraculously beat the Braves last night.) If they can get healthy for September, I’d say they have more than a decent shot at winning the NL East yet again.

If not, they still made the right move. Getting Oswalt for the 2011 season and beyond is still the right move. Dom Brown will have more experience. We may manage to keep Jayson Werth, though probably not. It’s still the smart thing to have done at the deadline. Now that we’re only one game behind the Braves, our rotation may be too much down the stretch.

Love Johnny Goodtimes’ letter of apology to Ruben Amaro, Jr. I guess I should sign on to that as well, huh?

Very happy to finally see Inception, my first movie in the theater since Charlie was born. Far cry from the last movie I saw in the theater, which was Adventureland, if memory serves.

Great, big movie. It’s the sort of stuff that makes you want to shake anyone who tells you art should conform to the new financial realities brought to us by piracy. I love small movies, but if everything were shot on handhelds I think film art would just die altogether. What would be left to do? If the world were only filled with amateur Cassavetes, we’d be a pretty dour bunch, wouldn’t we? I mean, is there even a point to getting into the thought puzzle at the core (?) of the film? I feel like I’m still absorbing the movie.

Did anyone see The Prestige, Nolan’s stopover flick between Batman Returns and The Dark Knight? Guess not, because if they had I think more people would think of him as the M. Knight Shymalan you don’t laugh at…yet.

Speaking of Shymalan, the crowd burst into laughter once his name was mentioned in the trailer for Devil. Dude’s not hitting his way out of this slump, unless he intended to be the new Ed Wood.

I went to my fare share of shows at the Khyber while it lasted. Wasn’t it great? The stretch they had was nothing short of amazing now when I look back on some of the shows I saw there. Sure, there were your obscure psych rock artists like Ghost, city mainstays Bardo Pond and the occasional top flight booking that was an absolute coup.

I saw the Decemberists there in 2004, when they were plenty famous enough to play a bigger venue, yet not so big that everyone and their brother was a fan. I caught Trad, Gras och Stenar there, too. My first glimpse of the National came there, too. They booked almost anything worth seeing, until Johnny Brenda’s came along and Stacie George stopped booking there and the city’s music scene moved north to Fishtown.

It was a beautiful mess of a place, sandwiched between too many bad Old City spots to count.  Most of them came and went and now the Khyber has (sort of) gone, too. When I read that they intend to transform the dingy bar into a fancy Japanese eatery, I nearly died laughing. It was the sweatiest, smokiest club I’ve ever had the pleasure of patronizing. Don’t get me wrong: Steve Simons has had success as a restauranteur elsewhere in town, even if those spots are pretty unremarkable, but this is nothing short of using concealer to cover one of Old City’s most treasured blemishes.

I’m glad they had the good sense to run the venue into the ground for a good four years or so before doing this. Otherwise I might have really cared.