Monthly Archives: October 2013

You can watch “League of Denial,” the PBS Frontline documentary about concussions and the NFL here.

David Bryne writes about New York City:

I moved to New York in the mid 1970s because it was a center of cultural ferment – especially in the visual arts (my dream trajectory, until I made a detour), though there was a musical draw, too, even before the downtown scene exploded. New York was legendary. It was where things happened, on the east coast, anyway. One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn’t move to New York to make a fortune. Survival, at that time, and at my age then, was enough. Hardship was the price one paid for being in the thick of it.

As one gets a little older, those hardships aren’t so romantic – they’re just hard. The trade-off begins to look like a real pain in the ass if one has been here for years and years and is barely eking out a living. The idea of making an ongoing creative life – whether as a writer, an artist, a filmmaker or a musician – is difficult unless one gets a foothold on the ladder, as I was lucky enough to do. I say “lucky” because I have no illusions that talent is enough; there are plenty of talented folks out there who never get the break they deserve.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don’t buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down. I don’t romanticize the bad old days. I find the drop in crime over the last couple of decades refreshing. Manhattan and Brooklyn, those vibrant playgrounds, are way less scary than they were when I moved here. I have no illusions that there was a connection between that city on its knees and a flourishing of creativity; I don’t believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That’s bullshit. But I also don’t believe that the drop in crime means the city has to be more exclusively for those who have money. Increases in the quality of life should be for all, not just a few.

[Picture by Bags]

From her second cookbook, I thought I’d share bit of Marcella with you:

The Good Italian Cook

by Marcella Hazan

I know young people now who play the piano as … one can’t … can’t play it better. But then, when I hear them play it that way, I have my little questions for them. I ask them, when will you start to make music?

—From an interview given by Arthur Rubinstein on his ninetieth birthday

Music and cooking are so much alike. There are people who, simply by working hard at it, become technically quite accomplished at either art. But it isn’t until one connects technique to feeling, turning it into the outward thrust of that feeling, that one becomes a musician, or a cook.

The good Italian cook is an improviser, whose performance is each time a fresh response to the suggestions of an inner beat.

Those who set out to become accomplished Italian cooks have at least one advantage over others—there are no acrobatic movements to execute, no intricate arabesques to master. Italian cooking produces some of the most delectable food in the world, with astonishingly simple means. Except for rolling out pasta by hand, an Italian cook does not need to command special skills. There are none of the elaborate preliminaries one may find in other cuisines. La buona cucina is not an exercise in dexterity. It is an act of taste.

Taste, like rhythm, may be described, but it does not exist until it is experienced. Carefully annotated recipes are useful because they lead to the re-creation of an experience, they demonstrate what can be accomplished. But one must bear in mind that a recipe is only the congealed record of a once fluid and spontaneous act. It is this spontaneity that the good cook must recover. To attempt to reproduce any dish, time after time, through plodding duplication of a recipe’s every step, is futile and tedious, like memorizing a ditty in some foreign tongue.

As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, no one ever steps into the same river twice. One does not need to be a philosopher, only a cook, to know that no dish ever turns out again exactly the same. Cooking, like life itself, flows out of the experienced past, but belongs to the unique moment in which it takes place. From one occasion to the next, you will not find vegetables at the identical stage of ripeness or freshness. No two cloves of garlic, no two bunches of celery, no two peppers in a basket have exactly the same flavor, no cuts of meat duplicate precisely the texture and tenderness of those of another day. Each time you bring your ingredients together, your own hand falls with a difference cadence. The objective in good Italian cooking is not to achieve uniformity, or even absolute predictability of result. It is to express the values of the materials at hand, and the unrepeatable intuitions of the moment of execution.

All this does not mean there are no rules. Of course, there are rules. There is structure to Italian cooking just as there is structure to the music of a dance. The brief suggestions that follow here and the recipes of the book will succeed, I hope, in making you aware of how Italian cooking is achieved. Even more, I hope that eventually the recipes will release you from their grasp, and allow you to cook through the unfettered exercise of your own taste. Once you have understood technique you must stop paying attention to it. You must stop counting teaspoons and begin to cook.

Say the Pirates lose today, what’s worse the pain Pirates fans will feel or the pain Braves fans feel right now? Or the pain that A’s fans would feel should they lose tomorrow night. The Pirates are the Cinderella team of the 2013 playoffs. But the Braves and A’s keep making the playoffs only to get knocked out before they reach the Whirled Serious.

Last night I IM’d with an A’s fan and he said the Game 4 loss would haunt him for the rest of the winter. Unless, I said, they win Game 5.

He said, “The A’s never win Game 5.”

And what could I say to that? Other than I hope they prove him wrong.

[Photo Credit: Rob Carr/Getty Images]

Couple of Game 4’s today in the ALDS. I say the Tigers force a Game 5 and the Red Sox finish off the Rays.

Hope I’m wrong, of course, on both counts.

Never mind those nerves:

Let’s Go Base-Ball!

[Image Credit: Churchman73; Mike Sudal/WSJ]

Illustration by Jaime Hernandez.

Poor little Genie…

[Picture via: Ghost in the Machine]

Apple Cider Doughnuts. Seriously. 

There are 23 large iron lamps affixed to the ceiling. The tints of neon light they throw down into the indoor batting cage, a concrete room tucked deep into the guts of Yankee Stadium, vary according to when they were last smashed out by errant balls and replaced. Under these lights, largely out of sight, Bam Bam (or “Sir Bam Bam” – but we’ll get to that later) is at the pinnacle of the game that promised much, disappointed more, and then came through for him after all. Across the street, the much brighter lights under which he and all that he was supposed to be receded and then disappeared have been leveled, along with the rest of the old Yankee Stadium.

From up close, the blunt crack of a Major Leaguer striking a ball with a bat – even on a tee – will startle almost anyone every single time. Not Bam Bam. He doesn’t even flinch anymore. He watches, and then places yet another ball onto the batting tee for his latest charge to smack into the netting that encases them both.

It has been 24 years since he first arrived at Yankee Stadium; 20 since the Yankees pawned their phenom off to Japan. This is his first time back, the culmination of one of the most interesting journeys in baseball, a bridge from the place baseball was to where it seems headed. His family is in town from Curacao on one of the last days of a season long since lost, with another loss a full seven hours away. But Bam Bam, who wore World Series championship rings on both his middle fingers before changing into a pair of San Francisco Giants shorts and a T-shirt, is mending the mechanical defect in the swing of a 27-year-old backup catcher five at-bats – one hit – into his first big-league call-up.

That’s the beginning of Leander Schaerlaeckens’ fine portrait of Hensley “Bam Bam” Meulens. Head on over the SB Nation Longform and dig the rest of it.

The Dodgers are the first team to advance to the championship series. Over at ESPN, Howard Bryant has a long piece on the rebuilding of a once-proud franchise:

For Johnson, being in the ownership circle is new in baseball, but not new personally. Johnson sold both his equity stakes in Starbucks Coffee and in the Lakers at least in part to finance joining Guggenheim’s bid. Internally, Johnson did not want to be patronized, the athlete, especially the African-American athlete, who lends his name to a venture and then has little say in its operation. In one of his first meetings with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Johnson convinced the chain to remake its food menu at the Harlem restaurants because while the African-American clientele would purchase coffee like any other consumer, “Black people,” Johnson told Schultz, “don’t eat scones.” It was a small but shrewd example of the different lens Johnson brought to the table.

“I want to show these athletes and entertainers that we can be owners,” Johnson said. “Now, going in with Stan and Mark and Todd has been a great experience, but I want them to respect me, too. And the way you get that respect is to write a check. And not to say they wouldn’t if I didn’t, but the real respect comes from when you’ve got skin in the game. And that’s what it’s been for all my partnerships. Howard Schultz [said] if I didn’t write the check, he wasn’t going to do that deal with Starbucks. Go down the line. [Late Lakers owner] Dr. [Jerry] Buss told me, ‘Hey, I love you like a son, but you have to write a check.’

“When you have to write a $50 million check, you have to say, ‘OK, is the investment going to pay off? Is it the right move? Is it the right decision?’ ” Johnson said. “To me, your name is not enough. And I’ll say it because first of all I think that fans react different. The players act different. The players when they’re alone are saying, ‘What? Magic wrote a check?’ So they understand that, and it’s also different for me because I want to make sure I make it right, make sure it goes the way of our strategy. I want to be part of the strategy. I want to be a part of everything. I’ve never not written a check. I want to be invested in the deal. I want everyone to look at me as a real owner and not just some guy who put his name on it.”

Ray.

Before I climbed the steps to the subway this morning I saw a cluster of small birds bathing in a puddle by the curb. I stopped and looked at them. My first instinct was to grab my phone, take a picture, put it on Instagram, email it to myself to use on the blog, to share the moment. But I didn’t reach for the phone. I just stood and watched, the birds flapping their wings and then one by one taking off. More taking their place.  I took it in for myself and that was enough.

Now I’m telling you about it because it was a pleasant way to start the day. But I was also relieved not to photograph it, send it, share it, faster, faster.

[Photo Credit: Todd Gipstein]

Rainy Monday in New York but today gives four playoff games. A’s and the Tigers up first. Then Pirates, Cards. Tonight gives the Rays trying to extend their season and later, the Dodgers try to move on to the NLCS.

Have at it, folks.

Let’s Go Base-ball.

[Photo Credit:  Jared Wickerham/Getty Images North America]

Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Bread? Heck yes.

Photograph by Nick D. Woods via MPD.

Strike a Pose.

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

Welcome back! While you’re checking out the post season action, you can still enjoy a challenge or two of your own with the latest round of Where & When. As you know, the object is to determine where and when the picture was taken, drawn, etc. Without further ado, I give you this:

Sometimes they’re hard, sometimes they’re easy. But at least they are engaging. This one should be an easy one for the internet savvy or hardcore New Yawka from back in the day. I know that one of these features was very familiar to me growing up in the Hudson Valley, which is certainly not where this is.

Have a go at it; but since this is relatively easy, let’s try something a little different: Post your answer on the thread and any finite info you might have about this location relative to the date the picture was taken versus another period of time when the scene was or is significantly different in some way. Or, you can talk about an interesting personal experience you had there. The most interesting answer (by acclamation) will get the root beer this time, with all others with a correct answer and interesting stories or info getting cream sodas. Let’s see how this works out, and above all have fun. See you in the afternoon!

If you don’t follow It’s a Long Season, no better time to start than now.

[Photo Credit:  Justin K. Aller/Getty Images North America]

Depressing performance by David Price yesterday, beautiful game in Oakland last night.

Today gives games in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, also football, food, chores and assorted Sunday business.

“Only You Babe” (Single Edit)–Curtis Mayfield

[Photo Via: Blood and Champagne]

“Otha Fish” The Pharcyde

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]