Monthly Archives: November 2013

The Magnificient Seven–The Clash

[Photo Via: ]

“Composizione con grande piano rosso, giallo, grigio e blu” by Piet Mondrian (1921)

Movie Poster of the Day:

Bookmark it.

A day in the life of Pete Hamill:

If it’s a beautiful day, I love taking walks. The walks are always aimless. From where I live, I like walking to the Battery, where so many people, including my own parents, came through that harbor and passed into Ellis Island and became Americans. You can just sit on a bench and look at the harbor, or look at the people. Like being a flâneur. You can just wander around and let the city dictate the script.

And here is Hamill’s review of The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt:

To enter the world of this wonderful memoir is to leave the dull certainties of home and go wandering. The author’s destination is always the great wide world Out There, and through his sharp, compact prose, Roger Rosenblatt takes the reader with him. He is, after all, what some 19th-century Parisians called a flâneur, a stroller sauntering through anonymous crowds in the noisy, greedy, unscripted panoramas of the city.

In that role, Rosenblatt has no exact destination. In unstated homage to such wandering scribes as Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, he doesn’t consult Google Earth or a guidebook. He doesn’t need a tour bus or a taxicab. He walks the streets like a poetic stray, embracing chance and accident, inhaling the gritty air of his true Old Country, a Manhattan village called Gramercy Park. He is not, however, parochial. Sometimes he slips over the border to make the strange feel familiar. Along the way, he bumps against human beings he almost surely will never see again.

Those nameless men and women are moving in the streets, retreating into shops, escaping snow or wind in the churches, the schools or the malls that have replaced the arcades once so precious to Parisian flâneurs. At times, a single person is the object of his scrutiny. Above all, his subject is people one at a time. He studies them, he says, like a detective. Clothes, hairdos, shoes, postures. And eyes, which say so much without words about what used to be called the soul. Rosenblatt tells us he has been doing this since his age was written in single digits. Detective fictions filled his head with ways to see the world, really see it, and then try to figure out what he was doing in that world. He suggests that though he studied at Harvard, and even taught there, his most important education came from popular fiction. Above all, detective fiction, starting with Sherlock Holmes.

[Photo Credit: Dave Sanders]

Happy Chopsticks. This looks like a place to check out. Nu?

Our pal Matt B sent me this still from John Ford’s She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Struck him as Vermeer and Rembrandt out west.

Cool.

She’s A Rainbow

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

Morning Hopper.

I Used To Love H.E.R.

From Anonymous by Robert Flynn Johnson.

I went once as a kid. I would like to go again. (And I’ve never been to Ellis Island–for shame!)

[Photo Credit: Sally Elena Milota]

Good morning, and welcome back to Where & When; tracking down locations over the eons. Well, at least in the 200 years or so… I have wanted to introduce the new feature I vaguely described, but I’ve had a rush of work come at me lately, so it has to wait for the opportune moment.  In the meantime, let’s track down the origins of the following pic:

I really like this one; the size and design seem very imposing in its girth as opposed to it’s height (which is still too high for me to swan dive into an Olympic-sized pool of chocolate milk below), but it also reflects the rugged undiscovered nature of early New York.  That was not likely the case when this photo was taken, but compared to what we have now, it was certainly both an achievement and a period marker.  I don’t have to give much in clues for this one; you’ll likely see it in other places, but it’s history is interesting enough, so feel free to discuss what you’ve found during your research.  Tell us what building this is and when it was built, and bonus points for knowing whether this building still stands or was replaced by another. Explain how you came to your conclusions and you’ll be able to honorably imbibe one of the following:  Steelhead for the first player with the right answers, and Sprecher for everyone else.  Enjoy! And no peeking at the photo credit… >;)

[Photo Credit: Museum of the City of New York/Getty Images]

Instant Replay comes to baseball. Here’s how it will work.

Max and Kershaw, Miggy and McCutchen: the Award winners.

[Photo Credit: Morry Gash/AP]

I know he can’t hit a lick but I really enjoyed watching Brendan Ryan in the field late last season and hoped that he might return in 2014. According to Joel Sherman the Yanks are close to signing him. I can’t tell you if it is a good move or a dumb move but I can tell you that I will enjoy watching him play short again next year.

[Photo Credit: Patrick Smith/Getty Images]

It’s all about pie this week at the always-impressive Food 52.

Everything you need to make the perfect pie. 

Cook’s Illustrated’s Foolproof Pie Crust. 

Four & Twenty Blackbird’s All-Butter Pie Crust.

Cranberry Sage Pie.

Lemon Chess Pie. 

Oatmeal and Chocolate Pie.

Five links to read before baking a pie. 

Six ways to fancy up your pie. 

Get the Four & Twenty Blackbird new cookbook. 

Coming soon to my old neighborhood. Looks like I’ll have a reason to make a pitstop on the way home to the BX.

[Photo Credit: Dan Nguyen]

Man, this picture is just so dope.

Good Times Roll

Paintings by Cameron Howell.

“Bill’s nicknames are ‘Cuffs’ & ‘The Inspector.'”
2013
acrylic and card stock on panel
20″x 16″

“Benny’s leisure activities include dancing.”
2013
acrylic and card stock on panel
20″ x 16″

There is a good profile of George Clooney in the latest issue of Esquire. Tom Junod is an expert at this kind of celebrity writing and Clooney is a gracious, professional subject. A lot of insights in this piece but this one stands apart:

You must love him.

For one thing, he’s lovable, professionally so. For another, he leaves nothing to chance. If he can’t win you over with his fame, his charm, and his good looks, he will win you over with preparation. It’s not that he’s needy, like an actor; it’s that he’s competitive, like an athlete. He’s always been good at making people love him; he’s not about to give up his edge now.

Of course, he is not often challenged, and risks the fate of a fighter whose dominance is tainted by a lack of worthy opponents. A few years ago, however, he lost one of his dogs to a rattlesnake. He is a dog guy—a little sign about men and dogs adorns a living-room wall otherwise dominated by signed photographs of dignitaries—and he set about to get another, preferably hypoallergenic. He saw a black cocker-spaniel mix on the Web site of a rescue organization and called the number. The woman who answered said she’d be happy to bring the dog to his house, but then she explained that the dog had been abandoned and picked up malnourished off the street. “He has to love you,” she told George Clooney, “or else I have to take him back.”

At first, he found himself getting nervous—“freaking out.” What if the dog didn’t love him? Then he responded. “I had some turkey bacon in the refrigerator,” he says. “I rubbed it on me. I’m not kidding. When she came over, the dog went crazy. He was all over me. The woman said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s never like this. He loves you.’ ”

He has told this story before. He has even told it to Esquire before. That he tells it again—that it’s the first story he tells—serves to announce what is essential about himself: that he’s a man who will do what it takes to win you over, even applying bacon as an unguent.

I’m seduced and repulsed by charming people. I’m sure Clooney would charm the pants off me like he does with most people. But the turkey bacon story is revealing because it doesn’t just suggest that he’ll do whatever it takes to win you over but that he’s willing to cheat to get there. Beneath the surface there is something desperate about it (“You really like me!”. He wanted that dog and the trainer to like him so much that it was more important than giving the dog the home it needed. What we don’t know is how the dog got along with him after the stunt. Maybe he did give him a good home. Did Clooney bring the dog with him on location? Did a house sitter look after the dog most of time?

We don’t know. The seduction is the thing here not necessarily the reality.

[Photo Credit: Nigel Parry]

Groove.

[Photo Via: MPD]