Monthly Archives: April 2013

Painting by Richard Diebenkorn.

Over at Flavorwire, check out this gallery of photographic meditations on Edward Hopper by Richard Tuschman.

Still building…

[Photograph Via: Eye Heart New York]

It was warm again yesterday but by the time I got off the subway in the Bronx in the evening it was cool. Felt like spring “for reals,” as the kids say.

Something was stirring in the air and just before I arrived home the sky was dark and the wind kicked-up and it was exciting–a spring storm.

This morning gives sun but the ground is still wet, especially the dirt where the flowers are starting to bloom.

Sweet.

No double-header tomorrow. Phil Hughes will go; Nova, skipped.

[Photo Via: R2-D2]

Ivan Nova, take two. After winning the first couple of games in Cleveland it’d be a drag if the Yanks left with a split, so here’s hoping they win tonight or tomorrow.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Brennan Boesch RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C

Never mind getting a swell-head:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

Put the needle to the groove.

Tonight and tomorrow at the Film Forum…motherfucker.

David Lebovitz does Guacamole.

There is a good story by John Le Carre in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required). It’s about the making of his novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The piece centers on the tense relationship between the film’s director, Martin Ritt, a left-wing Jew who’d been blacklisted, and its star, Richard Burton, the larger-than-life Welshman.

Here’s my favorite part:

In one of the few conversations of substance that I had with Burton during our short spree together, he almost boasted of how much he despised the showman in himself; how he wished he had “done a Paul Scofield,” by which he meant eschew the big-screen heroics and the big-screen money and acept only acting parts of real artistic substance. And Ritt would have agree with him wholeheartedly.

But that didn’t let Burton off the hook. To the eye of the puritanical, committed, connubial leftist and activist, Burton came too close to everything Ritt instinctively condemned. In a 1986 interview, he has a line that says it all: “I don’t have a lot of respect for talent. Talent is genetic. It’s a gift. It’s what you do with the gift that counts.” It was bad enough to put profit before art, or sex before family, or flaunt your wealth and your woman, or ostentatiously soak yourself in liquor, or strut that world like a god while the masses cry out for justice. But to waste your talent was a sin against gods and men. And the greater the talent–and Burton’s talents were legion and extraordinary–the greater, in Ritt’s view, the sin.

Love Ritt’s take on talent. But Le Carre doesn’t think Burton was a wasted talent. He concludes the article:

Richard Burton was a literate, serious artist, a self-educated polymath with appetites and flaws that in one way or another we all share. If he was the prisoner of his own weaknesses, the dah of rectifying Welsh puritanism in him was not a hundred miles from Ritt’s. He was irreverent, mischievous, generous-hearted but necessarily manipulative. For the very celebrated, being manipulative goes with the territory. I never knew him in his quieter hours, but I wish I had. He was a superb Alex Leamas, and in a different year his performance might have earned him an Oscar, the prize that eluded him all his life. The film was grim and black-and-white. That wasn’t what we we wearing in 1965.

If either the director of his actor had been less, perhaps the film also would have been less. I suppose that, at the time, I felt more protective of the podgy, stalwart, and embittered Ritt than of the flamboyant and unpredictable Burton. A director carries the whole burden of the film on his back, and that includes the idiosyncrasies of his star. Sometimes I had the feeling that Burton was going out of his way to belittle Ritt, but in the end I guess they were pretty evenly matched. And Ritt surely had the last word. He was a brilliant and impassioned director whose righteous anger could never be stilled.

Here’s a disturbing 2010 Vanity Fair story by Mark Bowden–“The Case of the Vanishing Blonde”:

From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.

[Photo Credit: Amanda Friedman]

Check out this long piece on the D.O.C. by Alex Pappademas in Playboy.

Who the hell is the D.O.C.? It’s been nearly 25 years since the rapper released his astoundingly great debut album, No One Can Do It Better. It was produced by Dr. Dre when Dre was churning out hot product at an ironic-in-retrospect pace: In a single year Dre made the D.O.C.’s album, as well as N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and N.W.A co-founder Eazy-E’s solo debut, Eazy-Duz-It. The D.O.C. was a cocky, charismatic young rapper with a knotty, complex flow—his delivery had more bob-and-weave than your average West Coast rapper’s, and he reminded people of East Coast guys like Rakim. The kid with the golden voice, he called himself. Within three months he’d sold half a million records—until injuries to his vocal cords sustained in a car accident rendered him barely able to speak and totally unable to rap.

After that, the D.O.C. was a living ghost. He made two would-be comeback albums, but his real career existed behind the scenes. It became an open secret that he’d ghostwritten rhymes for Dre on The Chronic and 1999’s 2001 and polished lines for Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. The D.O.C. was a fixer, a problem solver, a hip-hop Winston Wolf. Once a breakout star, he now existed in hip-hop as a legend in the background of other people’s rhymes. Dre shouted him out (“Like my nigga D.O.C., no one can do it better”) at the end of “Nuthin’ but a G Thang,” the first single from The Chronic. More than 10 years later, so did Brooklyn-born Jay-Z on “Public Service Announcement”—“HOV, not D.O.C./But similar to the letters, no one can do it better.”

Permission granted.  

 [Photo Credit: Anthony Gruppuso / USA TODAY Sports]

“Eclipsed” by Sangram Majumdar  (2009)…found via This Isn’t Happiness.

Nothing better than magic hour in the city, especially when it’s warm out. I was reminded of how much I enjoy those precious moments when I saw this picture by our man Bags.

On the way to lunch this afternoon I spotted a shiny new Frito Lay delivery truck, adorned with navy blue pinstripes and a giant interlocking NY on the back door. I tried to maneuver to get a picture for tonight, but a baked potato cart was blocking the good stuff. Ah well, I thought, the Yanks probably won’t hit enough to warrant a score truck picture anyway.

If you didn’t see the game and are reading this for the first time on Wednesday morning, the good news is you had two hits last night and one of them was a homer that went about 420 feet. The Yankees reached .500 with a 14-1 victory over the Indians with an offensive explosion that overshadowed a second fine performance from Andy Pettitte.

The hit parade featured every Yankee starter but Hafner. They pounded out five homers (Cano, Ichiro, Youkilis, Boesch and Overbay) and six doubles. Around those bases the Yankees shall roam.

Speaking of parades, this weekend was the opening ceremony for the Inwood Little League. It’s over-the-top in all the right ways and the kids felt 100 feet tall walking up Broadway.

Google maps tells me the parade route was 1.25 miles. If I asked my kids to walk a quarter mile to get an ice cream soda and meet Spiderman, they’d fall down on their knees in tears accusing me of child abuse. They did this walk without complaint with pants drooping down around their ankles, hats falling over their eyes and carrying a banner designed specifically to make them trip over like the Keystone Cops.

If there are further notable items from our family’s first foray into organized baseball, I’ll let you know.

It’s Old Man Andy tonight in Cleveland.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Kevin Youkilis 3B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Francisco Cervelli C

Never mind the winning streak:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Ari Seth Cohen celebrates older women with fabulous style. 

I saw a pregnant woman on the subway this morning. I was standing and tried to make eye-contact with her. If she looked at me I’d ask if she wanted to sit and then I’d see if someone would give up their seat for her.  There was something girlish about her though her hair was completely gray, cut right around her shoulders and she dressed like a woman not a girl. In one hand she held a cup of coffee, in the other, she gripped a bagel with jelly. I wondered if she’d be embarrassed if I asked someone to get up for her.

She ate the bagel like she was mad at it. But she didn’t look annoyed just ravenous. It was amusing, even arousing, and I imagined making a video of her. It would be a family joke for years to come.

But I didn’t know her so I just admired her eating the fuck out of that bagel.

[Photo Credit: jkingsz]

In 1972, Ron Rapoport interviewed Jackie Robinson:

“I couldn’t care less if someone is out there wearing 42,” he said. “It is an honor, but I get more of a thrill knowing there are people in baseball who believe in advancement based on ability. I’m more concerned about what I think about myself than what other people think. I think if you look back at why people think of me the way they do it’s because white America doesn’t like a black guy who stands up for what he believes. I don’t feel baseball owes me a thing and I don’t owe baseball a thing. I am glad I haven’t had to go to baseball on my knees.”