Monthly Archives: November 2010

Used to be that no baseball season felt complete until Roger Angell’s piece appeared in the New Yorker. Mr. Angell just turned 90 but he’s still writing. However, I don’t know if we’ll get the usual piece, as Angell was blogging for the New Yorker during the post-season. My favorite bit came his final post–because he dug up a quote from one of his old pieces that I’ve been looking for, unsuccessfully, for years now:

Players have little awareness of fan angst, but I’ve not forgotten an amazing late-summer conversation I had with the iconic, forty-year-old Willie McCovey at Candlestick Park, in 1978, at a time when his contending Giants had just dropped five out of six games and were beginning a customary September slide toward oblivion.

“The fans sitting up there are helpless,” he said. “They can’t pick up a bat and come down and do something. Their only involvement is in how well you do. If you strike out or mess up out there, they feel they’ve done something wrong. You’re all they’ve got. The professional athlete knows there’s always another game or another year coming up. If he loses he swallows that bitter pill and comes back. It’s much harder for the fans.”

Baseball is over for the year. Now comes the talk, lots of talk, accompanied by speculation and rumors and all that Hot Stove goodness.

Hal Steinbrenner took to the airwaves yesterday (giving interviews to ESPN and WFAN, respectively). Chad Jennings has the wrap up:

“I can safely say we’re going to stay within the same level, but I’m obviously not going to get into details,” [Steinbrenner] said during The Michael Kay Show. “We know we’re expected to field a championship caliber team and we’re going to do what it takes to do that. If we have to get creative in a trade, or we have to go after a big free agent, we’re going to do that. We do have some money coming off.”

A few minutes later, Steinbrenner was asked a similar question by Mike Francesa.

“I’m not going to get into specifics, but yes we’ve got a good idea of where we’re going to try to end up,” he said. “We have some money coming off the payroll. Obviously re-signing Derek and Mo is going to be a priority to try to do that, but we’re still going to have money leftover. These meetings are pretty initial at this point, but it’s all about prioritizing what we need to do and looking at the free agent market and eventually looking at possible trades to try to improve.”

Because what’s scarier than having your body taken over against your will by an alien being? Or, as it’s more commonly known: pregnancy.

Of course, in most cases, when a woman is pregnant it’s not because her husband has arranged for some neighborly witches to have her raped by Satan in exchange for a boost to his acting career. The premise is ludicrous, but Rosemary’s Baby unfolds slowly and, by focusing on the mundane details of Rosemary’s life as well as the subtle horror, quite believably.

Lovely yuppie couple Rosemary and Guy Woodehouse, played by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, move into an old New York City apartment building (played by the Dakota) with a disconcerting history of violence and witchcraft, which they of course ignore. Their next door neighbors, who they can occasionally hear through the walls in certain rooms, are the pushy and snooping though seemingly well-meaning Castavets (Sidney Blackmer and the fabulously irritating Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar)– though to be fair, their pushiness only makes itself felt after their young female house guest kills herself, and they realize Rosemary is… fertile.

Mia Farrow gives a great performance, from glowing, beautiful, pliant young wife to a ghostly, half-mad, desperate soon-to-be mother. The character’s passivity can be frustrating – she lets herself be pushed into doing all kinds of things she doesn’t want to do by her husband, her neighbors, and the doctor they corral her into seeing – but it’s also understandable; Rosemary doesn’t want to make a fuss, doesn’t want to be rude, doesn’t want people to be upset with her, isn’t even sure she’s right. It’s in those scenes that Rosemary’s Baby becomes something of a feminist parable, not something I expected from Roman Polanski (maybe the ultimate “love the art, hate the artist” example, for me). The real horror of Rosemary’s situation comes not from being raped by the devil and impregnated with his spawn but from feeling cut off and powerless, used as a vessel for childbirth and not much else, ignored, told not to read or do or think anything for herself. By the time she gets up enough panicked courage to take action, for the sake of her unborn baby if not herself, it’s too late.

That’s another credit to the movie: it takes Rosemary nearly the entire running time to figure out what’s happening, whereas the audience is clued in from the start – to the fact that something sinister’s afoot, at least, if not precisely what. And the somewhat surprising ending is widely known, at this point (“What have you done to his eyes?!“). But while it’s frustrating to watch Rosemary become entangled in this sinister conspiracy over the course of hours, Polanski uses that frustration to invest the audience further, to deepen the viewer’s discomfort and tension. There are few movie characters I’d like to eviscerate more than the Castavets and their friends, especially that Laura-Louise. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review,

When the conclusion comes, it works not because it is a surprise but because it is horrifyingly inevitable. Rosemary makes her dreadful discovery, and we are wrenched because we knew what was going to happen –and couldn’t help her.

For all its horror, Rosemary’s baby is often wryly funny, and the movie keeps its sense of humor til the very end (when Rosemary drops her kitchen knife in horror near her baby’s bassinet, Mrs. Castevet picks it up and quickly rubs at the mark it left in her nice wood floors). Still, that end comprises the complete triumph of evil – the banality of evil, in fact.

Use protection, kids. Beware of too-good-to-be-true New York City real estate deals. And never, ever marry an actor.

The great Solomon Burke passed away recently. Sorry I didn’t mention it. The Beat of the Day will be dedicated to Burke for the rest of the week:

[Photo Credit: Ted Barron]

Sad news from the world of basketball: Maurice Lucas is dead.

Charles Pierce remembers Lucas in the Boston Globe:

Thirty-nine years ago this fall, I moved into the 11th floor of a 12-story dormitory at the corner of 16th Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was a freshman at Marquette University. (The dorm, McCormick Hall, is round and shaped like a beer can, which is remarkably appropriate in more than the metaphorical sense, and the building has been rumored for almost 40 years to be sinking into middle Earth.) Not long after I moved in, I found myself intrigued by the music coming out from under the door of the room next to mine — music which I now know to have been “Eurydice,” the closing track from Weather Report’s astounding debut album. (Mmmmmm. Wayne Shorter!) As I was listening, an extremely large man came out of the room and introduced himself. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?’ he said.

And that was how I met Maurice Lucas.

For the next couple of years, we talked about music, at least as much as Luke talked to anyone, him being what you call your campus celebrity and all during the glory days of Warrior basketball and the high-sun period of Al McGuire Era. Whatever I know about any jazz recorded after the big band records to which my father listened — Mmmmmmm. Basie! — I learned from Luke, with whom I don’t believe I ever exchanged four words about basketball.

Later that same year, when I was practicing with the fencing team in the basement of the old gymnasium while the basketball team practiced upstairs, Luke came out of the shower wearing only a towel. “Hey,” he said, “show me how to do that.” I handed him a foil and we squared off, I in my full regalia with a mask and Luke in a towel. I touched him once, lightly, in the ribs. He slapped my blade out of my hand and about 20 feet back down the hallway, hitched up his towel, and went off chuckling.

Lucas was one of the memorable characters on the Blazers’ championship team in the ’70s. I remember him later in his career–he was a professional tough guy and a fine player.

If you’ve never read David Halberstam’s “The Breaks of the Game,” you should. There’s some good stuff on Lucas in there. Did I mention that he was tough?

Before the NBA, Lucas played with the infamous Marvin “Bad News” Barnes for the St. Louis Spirits in the ABA. Spirits announcer Bob Costas told Terry Pluto in Loose Balls:

It was interesting to watch Lucas develop. Early in his rookie year, he was coming off the bench. One night the Spirits were playing Kentucky in Freedom Hall and Lucas was trading elbows with Artis Gilmore. At 7-foot-2 and 240 pounds, Gilmore just towered over Maurice. Lucas’s only chance was to beat Gilmore to a spot on the floor and then try to hold off Artis. Despite his enormous size and strength, Gilmore was never known as a ferocious player and he seldom was in a fight. But all of a sudden, Artis just got sick of Lucas’s bodying him and you could see that the big guy was really hot. Gilmore took a swipe at Lucas and missed. Lucas put up his fists, but he was backpedaling like any sane man would when confronted by Gilmore. It was almost slow motion–Gilmore would take a step, then Lucas would take a step back. It was obvious that Lucas didn’t want to fight and was trying to figure out where he could go. Finally, he was trapped in the corner; he had run out of court. He didn’t know what else to do, so he planted his feet and threw this tremendous punch at Gilmore, and it caught Artis square on the jaw. It was a frightening sight. Artis hit the deck. Lucas was going crazy. Now he really wanted a piece of Artis. Guys were holding Lucas back and Artis was still down. For whatever reason, from that point on Lucas developed into a helluva player.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Lucas.

David Lebovitz gives us roasted pumkin.

Thanks, Hoss.

Dig this Elvis photo gallery by Alfred Wertheimer over at the New Yorker’s Photo Booth.

Rob Neyer thinks that the Giants are worthy champions:

It’s fair to be surprised that the Giants won in five games. Historically, most World Series have lasted longer than five games. It’s fair to be slightly surprised that the Giants won the World Series at all, because most of the numbers suggested that the Rangers were the slightly better team.

Anyone who is shocked by the 2010 World Series hasn’t been paying attention, over the years. The Giants were a very good team that played better than another very good team over the course of five games. If they play another five games next week, everything might be different.

They’re not going to play another five games. This one’s over. The great majority of Giants fans have never seen their team win a World Series. No Giants fan has seen their team win a World Series since moving to California more than a half-century ago.

Now they’ve got one. And as anyone who followed the Royals in ’85 or the Twins in ’87 or the Reds in ’90 or the Cardinals in ’06 will tell you, the only thing that matters is getting one. All the rest is details.

There is a new collection of love letters from famed Chicago columnist Mike Royko to his wife.

Steve Lopez reviews the book for the L.A. Times:

The job of writing newspaper columns doesn’t come with instructions, just deadlines that fly at you in your sleep. I used to read Royko and Jimmy Breslin and try to break down how they did what they did, but I couldn’t crack the code. How could they make a word stand up on the page, or a thought linger? How could they say so much with lines so spare?

They knew the places they wrote about, and that was part of it. But only years later would I learn their real secret: They knew who they were, and they knew why they wrote.

Royko was a man’s man, as they say, a guy who loved baseball and bars, believed in his city, backhanded its fools and celebrated its anonymous heroes, always with wit and tough-minded certainty.

…It’s an interesting thing, the way a famous city columnist — whose very public job was to make readers feel like they knew him — kept his family life private. Maybe Royko understood the better story was out there in the neighborhoods and in the hopes and fears of others. When you fall back on family for material, you sacrifice them to your selfish needs and cut off your own escape from the public glare.

Or maybe there’s a darker explanation as to why Royko did not write about the woman who had so consumed him as a young man. David Royko suggests his dad got caught up in the superstardom that came with decades of writing five columns a week in a city he owned, and his marriage to Carol Duckman was not “a rosy extension” of his heartfelt letters to her.

It could be that Royko discovered he adored nothing more than the pressure of filling empty space, on deadline, to the cheers of a city that adored him. Those were love letters, too, all those thousands of columns, the brilliant ones and the forgotten ones too.

The job is a thrill, but a wise man once advised me not to overdo it.

The Giants are Whirled Champs for the first time since 1954.

Congrats on what’s been a great run.

This is a money game for Cliff Lee, in more ways than one.

I say he comes up Aces and the Serious goes back to San Fran.

We have a tie, folks! Today’s first honoree is…

Yam Yaryan.

Yam, who was christened Clarence Everett Yaryan, was born in Iowa in 1892, and played only parts of two seasons for the Chicago White Sox. In that time he hit .260/.326/.376 for a less-than-mighty OPS+ of 81, and acquired an excellent and, based on the photo, fitting nickname. Next up:

Flame Delhi.

Flame was born the same day as Yam, November 5, 1892, in Town-Name-of-the-Week Harqua Hala, Arizona. Despite the imposing nickname (his real name was Lee) he only ever got into one major league game: April 16, 1912. He pitched three innings and allowed six runs, three earned, on seven hits and three walks. And that, apparently, was that.

Feel free to offer suggestions for future Player Names of the Week, either in the comments or via email.

I watched horror movies as a kid–respectable ones like “Carrie,” and “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “The Omen,” as well as “Halloween,” and “Friday the 13th.” I also saw a bunch of low-budget horror classics like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “I Spit on Your Grave.” But it was a phase that didn’t last. Horror movies were never my thing, and the older I got the less interested I was in being scared.

I was also just as likely to be scared by an action movie like “The Road Warrior” or “Aliens” or a thriller like “Fatal Attraction” than I was by a horror movie. Horror movies were just iller, with all the blood and guts gore.

I got to thinking about scary movies over the weekend cause of Halloween and you know which one stands out? “Taxi Driver.”

It’s not a horror movie, strictly speaking, but it is a nightmare vision of New York and one that was easy to identify with–the isolation and danger, the fear and violence.

Scorsese once told an interviewer:

It was crucial to Travis Bickle’s character that he had experience life and death around him every second when he was in south-east Asia. That way it becomes more heightened when he comes back; the image of the street at night reflected in the dirty gutter becomes more threatening. I think that’s something a guy going through a war, any war, would experience when he comes back to what is supposedly ‘civilization’. He’d be more paranoid.

Pauline Kael gave it a rave in the New Yorker:

In its own way, this movie, too has an erotic aura. There is practically no sex in it, but no sex can be as disturbing as sex. And that’s what it’s about: the absence of sex–bottled-up, impacted energy and emotion, with a blood-splattering release. The fact that we experience Travis’s need for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the quality of consummation, makes “Taxi Driver” one of the few truly modern horror films.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw it, this scene featuring Martin Scorsese himself, really freaked me out…just, so…tense:

Nah, I haven’t been to Four and Twenty Blackbirds in Brooklyn yet.

But I aim to change that in the near future.

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times:

The story of Frank Sinatra’s rise and self-invention and the story of his fall and remarkable comeback had the lineaments of the most essential American myths, and their telling, Pete Hamill once argued, required a novelist, “some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler,” who might “come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do.”

Now, with “Frank: The Voice,” Sinatra has that chronicler in James Kaplan, a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has produced a book that has all the emotional detail and narrative momentum of a novel.

Mr. Kaplan’s spirited efforts to channel his subject’s point of view can result in some speculative scenes, which make the reader race to the book’s endnotes in an attempt to identify possible source material. For instance Mr. Kaplan tries to recreate Sinatra’s tumultuous romance with Ava Gardner and tries, not always that convincingly, to map his complicated feelings about the mob. But at the same time Mr. Kaplan writes with genuine sympathy for the singer and a deep appreciation of his musicianship, and unlike gossipy earlier biographers like Kitty Kelley and Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, he devotes the better part of his book to an explication of Sinatra’s art: the real reason readers care about him in the first place.

Some couple of few things to click on:

The first round of organizational meetings for the Yankees will be held today in Tampa. George King reports that Kevin Long will return as the hitting coach.

Ben Kabak on a certain former New York team…

Rebecca G takes a looks at the 10 best moments of the 2010 Yankee season.

Steve Lombardi serves up a dirty trick.

And over at The Captain’s Blog, William talks Core Four and “The Diplomacy of Saying Goodbye”:

The decline of legends like Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera (well, maybe not Mo) is inevitable, and at some point, the Yankees will have to move on. However, they don’t need to do it in such a cutthroat way. In the case of Bernie, there was no reason for not giving him a guaranteed deal. Even if the money was a concern, would the Yankees really have been worse off with Williams taking the roster spot of guys like Andy Phillips, Josh Phelps and Kevin Thompson? Luckily, Bernie’s relationship with the Yankees remains strong, but it would have been a shame had the result of the team’s decision been estrangement from one of its homegrown stars.

Do we really follow sports only to watch a winner? If so, why not jump from bandwagon to bandwagon? Although many casual fans do take that approach, the diehard’s attachment to a team stems more from its history than its prospects for future success. Because of their financial advantage, the Yankees can have their cake and eat it too. As a result, the team shouldn’t feel the need to abide by Branch Rickey’s famous advice about trading “a player a year too early rather than a year too late” when handling its Hall of Fame core. The Yankees can still win while catering to their stars. The end doesn’t always justify the means, and in this case, the cost of winning in the future doesn’t have to involve turning away from history.

[Picture by Richard Sandler]

Here’s some flicks from around town…

taken by Bags, our man in the street.

Happy Monday.