Monthly Archives: March 2013

Don’t Know Why I’m Even Botherin’…

[Image By Nacho Ormaechea]

The Boston Phoenix, the once-great alternative newspaper is gone. Over at Grantland, Charlie Pierce remembers the old days:

I mean. Jesus Mary, where do you start with the newspaper at which you grew so much, and learned so much, and came to respect the craft of journalism with a fervor that edged pretty damn close to the religious? What memories have pride of place now? The fact that T.A. Frail, now at Smithsonian, suggested you might just like Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy and it wound up changing your life? The day that Doug Simmons, now at Bloomberg News, snuck up behind you and stuck a pair of earphones on your head, cranked Black Flag’s “Six Pack” up to 11, and taught you that rock and roll had not calcified when you graduated from college? What’s the song that plays when you realize that you’re young when you thought you were growing old? What’s the prayer of thanksgiving for a hundred days of fellowship, drunk on words, all of us, as though there were nothing more beyond the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph locked into place? Please say that the muse is something beyond the balance sheet, something beyond technology. Tell me that she’s alive the way she once was when you’d feel her on your shoulder as one word slammed into the other, and the story got itself told, and you came to end and realized, with wonderment and awe, that the story existed out beyond you, and that it had chosen you, and you were its vehicle, and the grinning muse had the last laugh after all.

God, it was a carnival. I saw the publisher twice get into punch-ups, once with a staffer and the next time with a janitor. And, in both cases, it was at a Christmas party. We never got paid much, but we did get paid, and we were able to write about what we wanted to write the way we wanted to write it. We were a legitimate institution of Boston eccentricity, and we were proud of the fact that we were recognized for being that very thing. In 1982, when the 76ers beat the Celtics, and the Garden erupted into a chant of “Beat L.A.!,” the great Bob Ryan interviewed Darryl Dawkins and found Michael Gee, then covering the game for us. You have to have this quote, Ryan told him, because we can’t use it. Ryan had asked Dawkins what he felt like when he heard that chant from a Boston crowd.

“Man,” Dawkins said, “when I heard that, my dick got stiff.”

If I recall correctly, that was Gee’s lead.

On the set with Jeff Bridges…

over at Everyday I Show.

Here’s Charles Ebbets at work. The picture he took in 1932 is famous:

I get dizzy just looking at it.

More tastiness from Nicole Franzen: Papparedelle Scarpariello.

Powerful story by Michael Graff over at SB Nation.

[Photo Via: GU]

Picture by Horacio Salinas.

Man, it’s a gunna be a good day. Why not, right?

Jane Wilson, Rain, Heavy at Times, 2004

Let’s Travel Somewhere with Jakub Polomski.

No One Else it Seems, Ever Shared My Dreams…

[Photograph by Julia Hetta]

More Dexter, because you can’t get enough of a good thing. This one was originally published on August 10, 1998 back when Pete was a syndicated columnist. It is featured in Paper Trails, now out in paperback, and appears here with the author’s permission.

“How to Sleep with a Greek (You Do it Very Carefully)”

By Pete Dexter

By nature, I am not a public person.

Writing a column like this one, however, there are times when it becomes necessary to discuss matters of a personal nature. You walk into the office once in a while and can’t come up with a single reason to pick on the district attorney, you’ve still got to write something.

There are limits, though, to how personal I will get – it’s a matter of good taste, really – and I do not violate them. I never talk about how much money I make, I never discuss my medical history except in the broadest terms, and I never discuss my first wife’s legs. These things are too distasteful to talk about with strangers.

On the other hand, I do feel that as readers, you are entitled to know what Mrs. Dexter is like in bed.

Which is what I am going to tell you about today.

The first thing you ought to know about Mrs. Dexter, I guess, is that she is of Greek extraction. These are the people, you may remember, who climbed into an artificial horse, waited until the Trojans pulled it inside their gates, and then, after the lights went out in town, crawled out and re-opened the gates for the entire Greek army, which conquered Troy.

Obviously, a people capable of this sort of thing – I mean, who would even think of something like that? – are light sleepers themselves, not easily surprised in their tents.

It is also fair to say, I think, that thousands of years after that one night squashed inside the horse, sitting on each other’s head, they are still fanatically defensive of their sleeping space. There is an old Greek saying, in fact, which pretty well spells this out: “Do not touch a sleeping Greek with thy toe, lest you forfeit thy leg and thy luck.”

Which means if you have any thought at all of getting lucky, do it before they go to sleep.

Now, my own heritage is not nearly as steeped in violence. I come from a peace-loving, straightforward, practical people who sleep very well. In fact, we are not unlike the people of Troy, now that I think about it, except, as I alluded to before, we have a certain innate sense of good taste, and would never bring the horse inside the city gates. At least not the one I saw in the movie.

We are also an affectionate people, who, on awakening in the night, like to reach for our loved ones and hold them close to our bosoms.

And so when one of us marries a Greek, and then wakes in the night – perhaps frightened, perhaps remembering the first wife’s legs – and reaches out in the dark for our loved one, what happens is that we are handed our lunch.

Here she is in the morning, staring horrified at a cut lip: “My God, what happened?”

The fact that this lip was cut by her own elbow or shoulder or – this is the one to watch out for – her head, is a source of a secret ethnic pride, although she will swear she has no memory of the assault.

But coming as I do from a peace-loving, straightforward, practical people, I do not try to change her. Instead, I adapt. When I awake and feel the need for something to hold close to my bosom, I reach for my second-string pillow. Soft and cool, it does not jump up unexpectedly into my chin at small noises, and no matter how close you get to it, you never hear that faint whistle of air passing through a nostril.

And the truth is, it fits better.

All in all, a hell of a pillow.

But life is more complicated than that. Greek women, it turns out, always know when their men are in bed with their arms around another, and at 3 in the morning, she is suddenly staring at me in the dark.

“What are you doing with that pillow?” she says.

“What pillow?” I ask. As a people, we are not great liars.

“You’re hugging a pillow,” she says softly. “Why don’t you just hug me?”

Very competitive, the Greeks.

“I didn’t want to wake you up,” I said. I toss the pillow back onto the floor, and she slides across the bed, and takes its place. Warm, soft, lithe; smelling like strawberry shampoo.

I whisper, “Good night, I love you ”

She whispers, “I love you too ”

I whisper, “Mrs. Dexter?”

“Yes?”

“I was talking to the pillow.”

There is a long, satisfying pause, but the Greeks are very tricky.

“So was I,” she says.

The Goddess Alexandra gives Butternut Squash and Crispy Sage Pizza.

Duh-rool.

Saveur goes behind the scenes at the Doughnut Plant.

[Photo Credit: Yelp]

This here is intriguing. Mark Jacobson’s 1999 article for New York magazine on Stanley Kubrick and Joe D:

One can only suppose how Stanley Kubrick might have filmed the life story of Joe DiMaggio. How might the disparate life visions of these two Bronx icons who last week died barely hours apart have meshed on the silver screen? For one thing, Kubrick, who liked biographies of the outsize (he made Spartacus, wanted to make Napoleon), would almost certainly have used idiosyncratic, Max Ophlus-like moving-camera shots to depict those two nifty backhand stabs utilized by Ken Keltner to stop Joltin’ Joe’s famous streak in 1941. As for the Yankee Clipper’s well-documented weekly ritual of sending a bouquet of roses to Marilyn Monroe’s grave site for twenty years, one can only guess at how Kubrick’s mordant comic spirit might have handled that. After all, Kubrick, horny boy of the Bronx, was never noted for love scenes, requited or not, even if Shelly Winters did keep the ashes of her beloved husband on her beside table in Lolita.

Joe D, a film by Stanley Kubrick — it might not be Dr. Strangelove, but ya gotta love it. Could have happened, too, since as a boy-wonder Bronx still photographer in the midst of cranking out a 70 average at Taft High School and haunting movie palaces like the Loews Paradise and the RKO Fordham, Kubrick rarely missed an opportunity to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, where he saw the peerless Clipper patrol the center-field greenery in all his Apollonian glory. The stuff of dreams, no doubt. While never fulfilling his primary ambition of playing second base for the Bronx Bombers, once Kubrick began working as an assignment photographer for Look magazine, he often returned to the Big Ballpark. Indeed, in the May 9, 1952, issue of Look, there is a photo of Joe DiMaggio taken by Stanley Kubrick.

1950s painting by Richard Diebenkorn.

“The Day My Grandfather Groucho and I Saved ‘You Bet Your Life'” by Andy Marx.

When Nick Swisher took his high on-base-percentage and shit-eating grin to Cleveland he left the Yankees with a personality complex. That is, they are now without a goofball, whose enthusiasm, which in Swisher’s case I believe is sincere, people either find appealing or irritating. I tolerated Swisher’s schtick though didn’t think he was funny or interesting. I liked him as a player, though, and so while I thought he was an ass I didn’t think he was a phony and you’ve got to let people be who they are.

Juan Rivera and Kevin Youkilis, well, that is nobody’s idea of charm or good cheer, though Youkilis does have a droll sense of humor. What the Yanks are left with is their one-time mascot who was banished to the minor leagues last season: Francisco Cervelli. You may have heard, he’s the Yankees starting catcher. Now, it doesn’t matter how this adds up in making the Yanks a better team, because it gives them a cheerful pain in the ass,  a guy sure to make us smile on occasion because he enjoys his job and a guy certain to piss off the opposition.

And there’s some value in that.

Here is a great movie. No Maps on My Taps. Make an effort to check it out when you can.

Pipe Dream.

[Photo Via: Sita McVay]

Room with a View.  Shhh.

Picture from Blue Pueblo via the consistently vibrant site, This Isn’t Happiness.