Monthly Archives: September 2012

Missus Cab Driver…

[Photo Via: Retro New York]

This is the best thing I’ve seen all week. Thank you, Hardball Talk.

Roasted pumpkin with rosemary and garlic, part of a  simple September feast indeed.

“Mademoiselle Mary de Borderieux,” By Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

True Indeed.

[Photo Via: Touchn2btouched]

It won’t mess up your hair.

As Jon mentioned in the previous thread:

Yanks record by month:
13-9
14-14
20-7
13-13
15-13
4-5

Apart from the 20-7 run, this is a mediocre team. Yes, they’ve been hurt by injuries but right now they are a group of underachievers.

[Image Via: Photo Blur]

Collage by Julien Ratouin-Lefevre.

Who knows if this is rock bottom or not but if Saturday night was a punch to the stomach this one here’s a kick to the balls.

The Yankees put the first two men on base, scored one, then left the bases loaded against Jon Lester in the first inning. They went 1-637 with runners in scoring position tonight and got what they deserved against an inept Red Sox team when they couldn’t score more than three runs and the Sox won it on a base hit in the 9th inning.

I’d recap the game but most of you saw it and reliving it would just angry up the blood. Going to be hard enough to fall asleep as it is.

Sox 4, Yanks 3; O’s 9, Rays 2.

We’re tied again.

The Yankees have not won two games in a row since August 14-15th. Believe it.

We’ve talked a lot about the Yankees reaching rock bottom lately. Worst case scenario, they miss the playoffs. Worser case: the Red Sox knock them out. Boston has nothing to play for other than to inflict pain on the Yankees.

Three game series starts tonight in Boston and their ace, Jon Lester, is on the hill. The Yanks counter with Hiroki Kuroda who is due for a good start.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Alex Rodriguez DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Russell Martin C
Steve Pearce 1B
Curtis Granderson CF
Andruw Jones LF
Jayson Nix 3B

Never mind the paranoia: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Still Diggin’…

Here’s an end-of-summer treat from Nicole Franzen.

Here’s another wonderful short in the Made By Hand series.

Made by Hand / No 4 The Cigar Shop from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

Here is a good piece on Sarah Burns whose documentary on the Central Park Five is making the rounds at the film festivals.

Photograph Via Inspirefirst.

Take the A Train.

To Sir, With Love.

It is cool and sunny in New York today just like it was yesterday. This is just the kind of brilliant autumn day we had on September 11, 2001.

Let’s take a moment to remember everything about that day.

Salute.

[Images Via: This Isn’t Happiness and Manzari]

Word is Mark Teixeira will be out 10-14 days.

Bronx Banter Excerpt

Please enjoy this essay by Carlo Rotella, featured in his new collection, Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, And Other True Stories.

“Bedtime Story”

By Carlo Rotella

I was in a city far from home, working on a magazine story. I spent the day and evening going around asking questions, watching people do what they do, filling up a couple of pocket notebooks. Among other places, I visited the dog pound, a place of grimness even though—or because—the people who worked there seemed gentle and well-intentioned. All those pit bulls, muscled up with nowhere to go, flexing as we walked past on the other side of the bars. They were desperate and accommodating, and they knew that something was wrong. They could smell all the dogs that came before them. Where had they gone?

Around midnight I retired to the dingy motel where I’d been put by the magazine that sent me out to do the story. In an effort to cut down on expenses, its travel offi ce had found me a place where if you wanted to line up some crack or a prostitute all you had to do was hang out for a while in the parking lot. It had been a long day and evening, with drinking at the end of it. The pit bulls were on my mind. I don’t have much use for dogs but I kept coming back to the sight of the animals lined up in their cages, going all rigid and alert and eager to please when visitors came by. They had thought something was going to happen, even if they didn’t know what it might be, but it didn’t happen. Life would go on like that for a while until, I guessed, some were adopted and some were taken out and killed, and then other dogs would take their place, and soon it would be the new dogs’ turn to win the lottery or die.

One thing to do in a dingy motel is to watch dingy TV. There was lots of it—tedious sports shows and talk shows, unfunny comedies, dumbass celebrity updates, bad movies of the ’80s, a charnel house of shitty writing and stale ideas. I ran aground for a while on an offbrand show or movie about the crew of a rocket ship who go around fighting space vampires. The heroes dashed from here to there shouting fakey jargon and toting futuristic weapons that looked like the weapons we have now with nonfunctional molded-plastic appendages glued to them. The vampires glowered, hissed, and suppurated. It kind of ruins the space-opera magic to wonder what the actors’ parents think when they see them on the screen, but that’s what I usually wonder about. The talented darling who starred in school plays and expectant local fantasies back in Elk Grove Village or Mamaroneck or wherever is now wearing fangs and slathered in gory makeup and being blown unconvincingly in half by a plasmoid megablaster. I picture the parents thinking, “Well, at least he is on TV.”

The lameness of it all caught me just right—in that end-of-day, far-from-home, buzzed-from-work mood—and laid me low. Deep gloom descended. I went through the channels a few more times, only growing more despondent, until I happened upon round one of the middleweight title fight between Marvin Hagler and John Mugabi—held 22 years before, almost to the day. Hagler had his hands full, but he knew what to do about it. He was settling in to cope with Mugabi’s strength and power by taking him deep into the fight, wearing him out over the long haul and fi nishing him late. Mugabi, a blowout artist, had gone ten rounds just once and six only twice in his twenty-five fights, all wins. The turning point would come in the sixth round, when Hagler, having blunted the force of Mugabi’s early-round assault, would take over the fight by giving his man a spine-jellying pounding, then settle in to finish him inside the distance, KO’ing him in the eleventh.

All of a sudden I felt a lot better. I turned down the sound and put out the light. On the screen, Goody Petronelli, Hagler’s trainer, radiated calm and ease as he talked to his fighter between rounds. Everything was going to be fine; Petronelli’s every gesture said as much.His main task was to create a recurring pocket of serenity to which Hagler could retreat between hard-fought rounds for rest and reflection. Demonstrating a for-example combination he wanted Hagler to throw, Petronelli moved his own hands as if arranging flowers. Let’s just fix a couple of little mechanical things, he was saying, and it’s your fight. Doesn’t matter how strong the other guy is. Doesn’t matter what he’s done before this or who he’s done it to. We know how to beat him. We know how to beat everybody. Hagler wasn’t exactly looking at his trainer and he didn’t exactly nod, but he heard him. I took off my glasses and put them on the cigarette-stained bedside table, put my head down on the pillow, and was dreamlessly asleep before either fighter struck a blow in the next round.

Reprinted with permission from Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories, by Carlo Rotella, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Carlo Rotella is the author of Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and Boston Globe, and he is a commentator for WGBH FM in Boston.

[Featured Image: Motel Room by Greg Watts]