Photograph by Satoki Nagata.
Saturday
November 23, 2024
Since 2002
Monthly Archives: April 2013
New York Minute
Reading is Fundamental, y’all.
The Magic Number
Robbie Cano hit a three-run homer which was enough to give the Yanks a lead and on a night where every player wore the number 42. Mariano Rivera recorded the save and the final score was 4-2.
Works for me.
Rivera worked a perfect ninth and watching him perform like this is the thing of beauty that we’ve come to cherish, never more than now, this being Mo’s final season and all.
This is a time to appreciate.
[Photo Credit: Nick Laham/Getty Images]
Wait–They’re Playing Who, Again?
The Diamondbacks? In April? Oh, very well.
Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkils 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C
Never mind the weirdness:
Let’s Go Yank-ees!
[Photo Credit: Bags]
Morning Art
Photograph by Barbara Cole.
New York Minute
Bleecker Bob’s is gone but Rock and Soul is still around. I stopped by on Saturday afternoon to visit my friend Mike who works there. He wasn’t around but I went to the back and looked through records anyway.
A middle-aged woman stood above the record player and played a 45 of “Top Billin'” for a boy who couldn’t have been older than 8 or 9. When it was over, she flipped the record over and played the instrumental. I told the kid that the record is a classic and he said he liked it a lot. He was dancing in place.
Fit to Print?
Guest Post
By Peter Richmond
I’m told that a photograph from The Boston Marathon bombings was quickly circulated to news sources depicting someone with a leg blown off. I was told of the photograph of the missing leg by a friend named Lamar Graham who, as editor-in-chief of nj.com, the state’s largest news disseminator, told me that he’d refused to run it, which confirms what I’ve known for a couple of decades now: that Lamar is a great journalist.
Disaster coverage, wherein the disaster has taken and maimed human life, is, for the responsible journalist, the most horned dilemma of all. Do I do my best at what I have been hired to do — be the neon lens onto the scene, wherein the more vivid the detail, the more compelling the tale? — or do I act as the best human being I can be, wherein that lens must have filters? (That was a loaded question. Next time Lamar gives a seminar on how to run a website, I’m going to be there.)
Because here’s the thing: bad news – whether its nature is disaster or gore or geek – is not to be defined as an event to be weighed by our ability to be transfixed by it. It happened independent of our need to be fascinated by it. It has a context. And, of course, disaster and death have the hugest context of all.
This is nothing more than an open plea to any journalist in Boston over the next few days, with her or his “boots on the ground,” entrusted to bring us facts: weigh your words and images very carefully. Please.
I know whereof I speak. In July of 1982, as a reporter for the San Diego Union, in New Orleans on a sports story, I covered the crash of a plane en route to San Diego, just after takeoff, killed everyone on board. Eager and carnivoristic reporter that I was, and schooled in the “Get the story first and best!” school, with half the gaping, wounded fuselage still on fire in a field I slipped through some police tape into the field, and hooked up with a couple of coroner’s deputies planting little plastic flags in the ground where they saw evidence, and, at their side, I catalogued the severed limbs I’d seen. It was easy; as anyone who has been close to stuff like that knows: You just go into shock, as if a plastic visor is descending over your sensibilities, and become The Reporter.
I was proud of my enterprise. I filed my gruesome story, only to discover the next day that the editor had taken out all the anatomical detail. “It was too gory, hunh?” I said, over the phone, from 2,000 miles away. “No,” he said. “You don’t get it. Relatives of the victims are going to read that, and it’s going to make their loss even harder to bear. ‘Did what he described belong my brother?’ Never forget that you’re not writing to be noticed. You’re writing for people to inform them about what has happened.” Then he invoked Hippocrates’ Oath, which pertains awfully particularly at times like these: “First, Do No Harm.”
Twenty-one-and-a-half years earlier, on Dec. 16, 1960, two airliners collided over Staten Island. The TWA Super Constellation plummeted straight to the ground. No survivors. The United DC-8 limped its way toward Prospect Park in Brooklyn, with half a right wing, but came up short, crashing in Park Slope, killing all on board except a 12-year-boy who was tossed into a snowbank, to survive another 24 hours, but only after having been devoured by media, who also took detailed note of the wrapped Christmas presents scattered around the site to never be opened. My dad was on that plane, and man, did I, a seven-year-old reader of newspapers, not want to read details.
Once Upon a Time in the Bronx
Over at Lo-Hud I found a link to a two-hour BBC radio documentary on the Yankees.
Worth checking out.
Banter Gold Standard: Hopper’s World
Another one from the vaults by our man Peter Richmond. This one from GQ, reprinted with the author’s permission.
“Hopper’s World”
By Peter Richmond
It’s not that a ’70 BMW 2800 CS Coupe isn’t the most magnificent machine ever designed by man. It is. Or that I wouldn’t orchestrate a major drug deal to own one—or even drive one, just once, along an autumnal Vermont mountain road, en route to a fire-placed inn, with a case of ’85 Canon Saint-Emilion in the trunk, next to a Crouch & Fitzgerald valise stuffed with Thomas Wolfe first editions. I would. These are a few of my favorite things.
But they do not constitute the good life. I find the good life a little farther off the beaten path, in a world full of unsmiling figures, brooding tenements and shadowy streets-although the sunsets are pretty nice. Edward Hopper could always paint light. Hopper’s light is a corporeal thing, heavy and tangible, illuminating a quiet, unhurried place unbeset by the swarm of the modem species—a place where time has stopped,
My idea of the good life wouldn’t be to own a Hopper; it would be to live in one. Maybe in Gas, with its darkening road to unknown destinations, and its overwhelming sense of stillness in the forest of pines through whose needles wisps a wind making music that cannot be heard in my world. Or High Noon, in which a woman wearing only a bathrobe stands in the front door of a clapboard house. In the fashion of all Hopper’s solitary figures, her mouth is closed; her face is passive and yields no clues. It’s a mask of mystery. Unlike her modern-day counterpart, she feels no need to spill her secrets, to yammer endlessly on daytime television about the bad luck that has befallen her. She is at rest.
This stillness must be what people are trying to find when they spend enormous amounts of money vacationing at remote Caribbean resorts or buy whole islands in the South Pacific. I’ve found it a little closer: In 1978, before a minor league hockey game, in an art museum in Rochester, New York. In 1992 in an art museum in Cincinnati. In 1973, in a library in Massachusetts, I even held some Hopper etchings. The curator of the collection made me wear gloves, but I felt the calm just the same.
Does my consideration of a Hopper painting feel as good as the night I persuaded my tenth grade girlfriend to flee her prep school on an interstate bus to meet me in my older brother’s college dorm in Boston, where we fell asleep on the bare wooden floor in front of the fireplace and she slept on her side with her back to me and I awoke to sputtering firelight to find the palm of my right hand resting in the valley of her soft waist between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her ridden-up blue sweater, and it felt as if all of the currents at the heart of the universe were flowing beneath her skin? Does looking at a Hopper feel that good?
Well, no. But the two have something in common. In the contemplation of both (and that’s more or less what my tryst entailed—contemplation), there is something being stirred and stoked that physical pleasures can’t fuel: the imagination, with its promise of the infinite. Of anything you might want. Just beyond the frame of a Hopper, there’s always something more.
Take the country road in Gas: It’s a road to nowhere in particular, but wherever it’s going, things are probably better there. Or the faceless city in Manhattan Bridge Loop: You’d think it nothing but a cold pile of brick. But I know better. I know that inside the buildings, there is more to be found; there’s the soul of a city. And when I spend time in front of the canvas, I find it.
Or take High Noon. The woman’s bathrobe has fallen open, but shadows demurely cloak her. She is turning her face to the sun. Upstairs, behind waving curtains, her bedroom is dark. There might be someone in it. There might have been someone in it not long ago. There might be someone in it soon. Me, maybe.
You may remain unconvinced. You may find it a preposterous notion that the good life could be made up of windows into a state of mind. You may insist that the good life must comprise the sensory pleasures and the sensual ones. But when your Mondavi Cabernet is drained down to the sediment, your Jag needs new valves and your woman has dismissed you like an empty can of cat food lobbed into the trash, I’ll still have this place where, even if the sun reveals a world that’s haunting and bleak, it’s a sun that never sets.
Missing
Here’s more true crime in Vanity Fair from Mark Bowden:
Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived tidy. After so many years on the road, he would leave his rolling suitcase open on the floor of his hotel room and use it as a drawer. Dirty clothes went on the closet floor. Shirts he wanted to keep unwrinkled hung above. Toiletries were in the pockets of a cloth folding case that hooked onto a towel rack in the bathroom. At the end of the day he would slide off his worn brown leather boots and line them up by the suitcase, drop his faded jeans to the floor, and put on lightweight cotton pajama bottoms.
Most evenings he never left the room. He would crank up the air conditioner—he liked a cool room at night—and sit on the bed, leaning back on two pillows propped against the headboard. Considerately, to avoid soiling the bedspread, he would lay out a clean white hand towel, on which he placed his ashtray, cigarette pack, lighter, BlackBerry, the TV remote, and a candy bar. He smoked and broke off candy bits while watching TV. This is where Greg was on the evening of Wednesday, September 15, 2010, in Room 348 of the MCM Eleganté Hotel, in Beaumont, Texas—lounging, smoking, snacking on a Reese’s Crispy Crunchy bar, sipping root beer, and watching Iron Man 2.
He missed the ending.
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver