Monthly Archives: March 2014

“My Roof” By Edward Hopper (1928)

[Via the dope Tumblr site, Bo Fransson]

Dig this cool post from Messy Nessy Chic on the last Japanese mermaids (and heads up, there’s some nudity involved):

For nearly two thousand years, Japanese women living in coastal fishing villages made a remarkable livelihood hunting the ocean for oysters and abalone, a sea snail that produces pearls. They are known as Ama, and if you’ve dipped into Messy Nessy’s archives, you will have already met the few ladies still left in Japan that still make their living (well into their 90s) by filling their lungs with air and diving for long periods of time deep into the Pacific ocean, with nothing more than a mask and flippers.

In the mid 20th century, Iwase Yoshiyuki returned to the fishing village where he grew up and photographed these women when the unusual profession was still very much alive. After graduating from law school, Yoshiyuki had been given an early Kodak camera and found himself drawn to the ancient tradition of the ama divers in his hometown. His photographs are thought to be the only comprehensive documentation of the near-extinct tradition in existence.

The thaw has been gradual but it is supposed to be warmer today and warmer still tomorrow. Each night it stays light a little longer.

Ah, the light. C’mon Spring.

[Picture by Bags]

Okay, I’m reloaded. 

Some wild games in the NCAA tournament last night. And of course, the Yanks played too.

Mostly, they are concerned about the health of their new center fielder.

[Picture by Dave Bullock via West Coast Avengers]

We’re doing some technical stuff behind the scenes today so blogging will be light. Be back shortly with more Internet Fun.

Is it spring yet?

Just as a quick follow-up on Grover Lewis. Check out this memoir piece he wrote in 2005.

In 1943 my parents—Grover Lewis and Opal Bailey Lewis—shot each other to death with a pawnshop pistol. Big Grover had stalked us for a year, fighting divorce tooth and nail, and when he finally cornered Opal alone and pulled the trigger, she seized the gun and killed him too. They’d started out as Depression kids who had eloped from the Trinity Heights area of Oak Cliff, where they’d both been friends with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Like Clyde, my father was an unschooled country jake who fell—or jumped—into low ways in the big city. Opal, like Bonnie, was a bright student who left school early to help support her family—a moral girl with high ideals. Like Bonnie’s, Opal’s main crime seems to have been picking the wrong guy. In the end, she managed to save my father from everybody but himself.

The fatal events took place in my hometown of San Antonio when I was eight, and I became the ward of a brutish Fort Worth in-law who amused himself by trying to break my body and spirit. By today’s standards, he would have been deemed abusive enough to serve jail time. After five years, when I realized that my options were either suicide or homicide, I ran away and refused to return if I died in the process. Many of my mother’s kin considered me unsalvageable because I was a “pure Lewis.” They’s give me that look: “Just like his daddy.…”

Spook—my great uncle, C.E.Bailey—saved my life. When he took me in, I was badly damaged—withdrawn, lacking confidence, blind as a bat, smart as fire, dumb as hell. Still, with a friendly home base only a block’s walk from my high school classes and the local library also close at hand, I began to mend. My case was extreme but hardly singular in a workingman’s district where a lot of families got blown to smithereens.

A sagging condo pile with a “No Drugs” sign out front occupied the lot where our old family boarding house had steed. Spook and I had lived upstairs in a bare room with a bare bulb above the iron bedstead. When I started working after school, I bought us reading lamps, feeling grown-up about pitching in.

Spook’s insight—his special grace—was to treat me as a younger brother instead of a ward. In is fifties by then, a union machinist and a lifelong bachelor, he kept his mind sharp by studying the Bible and parsing out “the lies in the papers.” Half a Wobbly in his secret heard, he taught me a multitude of useful things, one of the germinal ideas being that decency and common sense were most likely to be found in common people. He offered general advice, specific if asked, and never raised his voice or hand to me. In the long haul, I think I was less trouble to him than his batty sisters, both of whom constantly schemed to lure him into their religious cults.

If Spook was our family Samaritan, Matthew Bailey—my mother’s father—was our scourge. A Snopesy little jackleg-of-all-trades—he had been Bonnie and Clyde’s favorite bootlegger—he worked for thirty-odd years as a maintenance engineer at the Wholesale Merchants Building in downtown Dallas, where he routinely slept with maids as a condition of their employment. With a flame of rage perpetually flickering in his head, he once put a black man off a city bus at knife point for sitting in front of him. I loved the old devil regardless and helped him out sometimes on weekend plumbing jobs, mostly just handing him his bottle. Matthew approached everything with a maximum violence required for the job, he never swatted me around, because as a rule, he only beat on the people who lived under his own roof.

And then dig this nice oral history on Grover by Texas Monthly:

Peter Bogdanovich (director of The Last Picture Show): I don’t remember how Grover got on the set, obviously through Larry [McMurtry]. He introduced him. And at some point we decided he’d be good to play Sonny’s father. I had written something, and we told Grover what the lines were, and he did it. I don’t remember that I was told that he was going to write a piece about the film until it was a fait accompli. Because I never saw him take notes. No tape recorder. No interview. I was surprised when I saw the piece. At the time, I remember being very unhappy with it and thinking that it was ungenerous, unkind, and inaccurate, if well written. And I remember being rather angry about it at the time. I don’t believe I ever saw Grover again.

Rae Lewis: The thing about Grover—I saw this time and time again—was he had a reporter’s instinct for relaxing his subjects. By the time he’d interview them, he had researched them. When he talked to Robert Mitchum [for Rolling Stone ], he knew about Mitchum’s short stories. He would start talking and point out that he was taping the conversation. He wanted them to understand that they would be quoted. But he just had a way of talking so they’d relax, and next thing you knew they were going to town.

Robert Draper (correspondent at GQ; former writer at Texas Monthly; met Lewis while researching Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History): Around the time I interviewed him for the book, he hadn’t really done any work at all for two or three years. His confidence was shot. Maybe, to put a finer point on it, his ability to reconcile his standards with the realities of the publishing business had gone the way of the buffalo. Not to give myself too much credit, but in his eyes my book had restored his rightful place in magazine journalism, and it was only after that that he started to churn out magazine stories again. Although by churn out I mean three stories a year rather than one a year.

Kenneth Turan (film critic for the Los Angeles Times; worked with Lewis at New West): Posterity is so quirky. Grover was as good as anyone who wrote nonfiction journalism in his era. You can hold his stuff up against anybody’s. Who knows why some people get to be better known than others? But in terms of quality, Grover took second place to no one.

Goddamn. 

Dolly Parton reminds me of Yogi Berra because they both have personas that often overwhelm their great talent. Yogi is a lovable clown not one of the 2 or 3 greatest catchers to ever play; Dolly is the brash straight shooter with the big boobs, wigs, and plastic surgery, not a beautiful songwriter and fine singer.

Anyhow, I got to thinking about Dolly the other day after I read a profile on her written by the late Chet Flippo for Rolling Stone in 1977. It’s not available online but a few years later he interviewed her for the magazine and that can be found here.

In addition to her many talents Dolly was–and is–a tremendous character (unlike Yogi whose public character was largely manufactured).

What’s the most outrageous thing you’ve ever done?

DP: The most outrageous thing? [Laughs] Boy, that could be a number of things . . . A lot of this stuff I can’t hardly tell you about. Sometimes one of the great thrills is just to go ahead and do something nobody would expect me to do.

I have a real stubborn, mischievous streak. And I have a girlfriend, Judy, who thinks she is just as stubborn and as mischievous, but she backs down a little easier than I do.

So this happened while I was doin’ Nine to Five. Judy and I were coming home one night; we’d been out to Lucy’s El Adobe restaurant, and we’d had a couple of Margaritas. Judy and two friends of hers were in one car, and me and Gregg [Perry, her keyboardist-producer] were in his car. Well, Judy started doin’ silly little things – they started givin’ me the finger or something. Then it got to where we were trying to top each other. Judy thought she was gonna flash me; she started unbuttoning her blouse. Anyhow, I just pulled up my shirt and I flashed them with one of them. Well, they just about wrecked; they just about died because they thought it was so funny. So anyhow, they did something else, and the next time around, I mooned them [laughs]!

Judy was tryin’ to top this, and I thought, “What else can we do?” I thought, “Now I know Judy. She’s gonna think she can pull one on me; she’s gonna really get one on me.” So I thought, “I must take off all my clothes.” And I thought, “Well, now how can I?” Because this next stop we were gonna make was a stop sign going toward the Bel Air Hotel. So I said, “Gregg, I’m gonna ask you to do something that I don’t think anybody should ever ask another person to do. I’m gonna take all my clothes off – I have to – but you can’t look. You’ve got to look straight down the road!”

He thought I was kidding. I said, “Now I ain’t kidding!” I was getting upset ’cause I had to get this done real fast. I just had to do this, because I knew that Judy was gonna get out in her panty hose or something.

So I started takin’ off my clothes. And I tell you, I had ’em peeled off. I had my clothes layin’ on the side and I was just threatening Gregg at all times. All I could think of, mainly, was that stop sign, because I knew Judy was gonna get out in her panty hose or something. I knew she was gonna think she had really done something. When we stopped, I saw the door scramblin’ open, and they were letting Judy out. She took off her pants, so she was gonna come out in her panty hose as if that was some big deal. So I waited, then I just casually got out. I opened up the door and I started walkin’ around the car in the moonlight. Here I was, just Snow White – you know how fair my skin is. There I was, and I tell you, I thought the girls were absolutely goin’ to die. I just did it real casual, and then I just flew back in the car.

And then it was like I was immediately exposed! It was like nothing had mattered until then. Then all of a sudden I realized I was naked. I was so embarrassed, but feelin’ so proud that I had done it – that’s the kinda stuff I’ll do. Is that good enough?

Good enough for me.

[Photo Credit: Keystone/Getty Images]

“Woman at Table in Strong Light” By Richard Diebenkorn (1959)

Today marks the 6th anniversary of our pal Larry Roibal’s daily sketch blog. I love his site.

Dig this collage of every drawing he’s ever posted. 

Lou Piniella’s wife used to wake up in the middle of the night to find her husband standing on the bed practicing his swing. Or he’d be over by the mirror scrutinizing his form. I always wondered if he smoked a cigarette as he took his imaginary cuts.

I couldn’t help but think of Sweet Lou when I read this story by Peter Kerasotis in the Times yesterday:

There are people who keep a baseball bat next to their beds to fend off potential intruders. Carlos Beltran does so to fend off bad thoughts that have invaded his mind. The thoughts that will follow him home from the ballpark, lying dormant while he is with his family.

“When I’m home, I can put a smile on my face and act like nothing’s wrong,” he said. “But then at night, when I’m in bed, everything comes to my head: ‘Man, I was horrible today. How come I’m in this slump? Why am I hitting .220 this month? What’s wrong?’

“No matter how many years you’re in baseball, how much success you have, when you hit a bump, you worry.”

When that happens, when those worrisome thoughts settle into his synapses, Beltran will reach over the side of his bed and find his baseball bat.

“I’ll just feel my grip, work my grip, thinking, thinking,” said Beltran, who has also been known to hold a new bat close to his ear, listening to its tone. “Sometimes, a thought will come to me, an answer.”

I love baseball.

[Photo Credit: Rich Addicks]

Faded.

[Picture by Natasja Maria Fourie via MPD]

“Portrait of Victorine Meurent” By Edouard Manet (1862)

Head crack, head crack: you smoked up that stack, in a minute you were back.

From Garden & Gun: Krispy Kreme Brulee. Good Lord.

Ahh, welcome back to another round of Where & When, the challenge that just won’t go away; sort of like that phantom vibration in your pocket when it feels like your cell phone is ringing, but it’s actually on the charger, so you realize you’re just nuts.  I dunno about you, but I’m feeling rather optimal about our starting pitching and I hope Jeter has something better to offer than what he’s shown so far, but that’s not what you came here to read.  You want to know what kind of old, fancy and probably gone forever buildings I’ve managed to dig up and show you.  Well, you might be right about that, so let’s cut the chit-chat and get straight to the point:

If you’re older than me and you’ve had to get around the country or the world, you may have come through here more than once.    The place where this interior was located was given a new name a year after this picture was taken; in fact this is likely pictures of the finished product as it opened the same year.  There are quite a few interesting stories to go along with it, so you’ll get a bonus scoop of ice cream if you can tell one, but first you have to know where this is and when the photo was taken.  Do that and you’ll get your favorite root beer (since I’ll venture that we’ve gotten past the worst of winter at this point), and the runners-up will share our favorite cream soda.

So, have at it ladies and gentlemen, feel free to leave your answers below and we’ll discuss later in the afternoon or evening, depending on my suddenly busy schedule (the studying paid off).  I hope to do this again this week, but if not I’ll see you in the comments on the other posts.  And no peeking at the photo credit!

[Photo Credit: Shorpy/Juniper Gallery]

These two photographs by Kathy Willens from the AP have me excited for baseball. I found them over at It’s a Long Season one of my favorite spots. Check it out any ol’ time. You’re sure to find some goodness.

Two very different records about Piggies.

[Illustration via: House of Ismay]

So cool. 

Serious Eats gives Irish Brown Bread.