Monthly Archives: September 2014

Get it movin’…

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

From three little halves. 

There have been many constants in Derek Jeter’s career—hits, runs, rings, endorsements, and beautiful girlfriends—none more endearing than the site of his family watching him from the stands. They are the modern family—his father Charles is African American, his mother Dorothy is Irish and German. Fifty years ago Jeter’s blackness would have been an issue; today, in the age of Obama, race has never been an issue for Jeter—it’s as if he’s beyond race. They are often joined by Jeter’s younger sister, Sharlee, her two-year old son, Jalen, now in tow. Sometimes there’s an aunt or a girlfriend.

They are still here at the end, rooting harder than ever—suffering with every near miss—as if he were a rookie or a kid playing an American Legion game on a cold rainy spring morning. When Jeter makes an out, their suffering seems worse because the inescapable truth is that his time is short. Including yesterday’s 5-2 win over the Blue Jays in which Jeter had 2 hits for the 4th straight game, he has—what, 20-25 at bats left at Yankee Stadium? Each at bat is precious and if Jeter has retained his usual stoic countenance you can see the desperation in his parents’ reactions.

A few weeks ago, when he was in the middle of a slump, Jeter hit a ball to deep left center field against the Rays. It was his third at bat of the game (0-2: groundout, flyout, both weak) and he hadn’t turned on a pitch in what seemed liked forever. He hit it hard enough for the crowd to react but not well enough to go over the outfielders head. The ball was caught at the warning track.

The TV replay showed Charles Jeter in his seat watching the flight of the ball. Next to him, Dorothy sat up straight and said “Oh” when the ball was struck. As the watched it she said, “Please go, please go, please go.” She paused a beat and said it one last time. She jerked back into her seat when the ball was caught, clasped her hands behind her head and leaned back. Charles Jeter smiled and looked down, almost sheepish as if it was greedy to expect more.

On Friday night, Jeter sent another fly ball to the warning track in left field. He’d already gotten 2 hits in the game and there was hope that he had one last flourish left in him during his final home stand. Jeter’s dad stood up when his son hit the ball. Dorothy gasped and put her hands on her cheek, eyes were wide with concern. Her sister was next to her leaning forward, hands pressed together in prayer. Dorothy covered her eyes when the ball was caught. She fell back into her seat. Oh, a mother’s agony.

Charles Jeter smiled and sat down. Their son has given them more thrills than they ever could have ever dreamed of and you can’t blame them for wanting more.

The $64,000 question around the Yankees is will Jeter cry before the season is over? Chances are he won’t, but if he does, I suspect it will be in his parents’ arms.

If the Yanks play and lose does it matter so long as Jeets gets his two hits? Well, they played and lost yesterday but Jeter got 2 hits so you tell me.

Five home games left for the Captain. That’s what–20-25 at bats?

Tanaka’s back:

Let’s Go Yankees!

Picture by Bags.

Derek Jeter with 2 hits the last couple of games. What if he makes a thing of this during his final homestand? That’d be sweet.

Brett Gardner CF
Derek Jeter SS
Brian McCann DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Chris Young LF
Chase Headley 3B
Stephen Drew 2B
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Francisco Cervelli

Never mind the chill:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: dw*c]

Couple more hits for Jeter last night as the Yanks beat the Jays, 5-3. It’d be cool if Jeets and the Yanks go on a little run here.

Friday Night fun ski.

Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Derek Jeter SS
Brian McCann C
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran DH
Brett Gardner LF
Stephen Drew 2B
Chase Headley 3B
Ichiro Suzuki RF

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags.

Maybe it’s the change in weather but I woke up with this morning with a scratchy throat. Then I remembered yelling–bouncing off the couch with a scream–when Derek Jeter turned around a meatball from R.A. Dickey and hit it over the left field fence for a home run. His first home run at Yankee Stadium this year.

Remember that feeling? Shouting when something good happens? I’m out of practice. Maybe that’s why my throat is raw this morning. Or it could just be the fall chill in the air.

Either way, it’s a familiar sensation. So was the look on Jeter’s face when the winning run scored in the bottom of the 9th. He shouted too, and raised his fist.

Even if this is all there is, for a moment it felt like a revival–and that’s enough.

[Photo Credit: Alex Goodlett/Getty Images]

The Yanks are back in the Bronx where they’ll play eight games in the next eight days. This is the final home stand of Derek Jeter’s career.

Ellsbury CF

Jeter SS

McCann DH

Teixeira 1B

Young RF

Gardner LF

Headley 3B

Drew 2B

Cervelli C

We’ll be root-root-rooting him on.

Never mind the curtain calls:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags.

“Mazda” by Miguel Laino (2012)

Yes, please.

Jeter got a hit and the Yankees won, another 1-run game. This time, 3-2.

It is condescending to celebrate Jeter getting a base hit? No. He’s got 11 more games left, 8 more at home. He’s exhausted. Hits are hard to come by. Every one is a reason to cheer. We used to take them for granted.

Now is the time to appreciate each last one.

p.s. Dellin Betances is pretty good. 

[Picture by Bags]

Well, maybe they are. But maybe the Yanks’ve got some fight left. You know, just for kicks.

Jacoby Ellsbury DH
Derek Jeter SS
Brian McCann C
Mark Teixeira 1B
Chris Young LF
Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Brendan Ryan 2B

Never mind the beanings:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags.

I’ve watched about seven or eight episodes of Girls and I just can’t get with it. But I dig it’s creator Lena Dunham, anyway. There was a nice profile of her by Meghan Daum in the Times magazine last weekend:

Of course, there’s a very good argument to be made that there are too many people, young women especially, writing about their personal experiences these days and not enough willing to report from the battle lines that exist outside their own heads. And Dunham’s alter ego on “Girls,” Hannah Horvath, a pathologically solipsistic aspiring personal essayist, is a prime example. In making her so, Dunham uses her work on the screen to wink at the conceits of her work on the page.

But even if she doesn’t tackle the Big Issues for a few more years, the fact is that she’s still just 28. When Ephron was 28, she was a reporter for The New York Post, “specializing in froth,” as she once noted. When Didion was 28, she was editing at Vogue; she had quietly published her first novel and was nowhere near the sensation she would become. When Parker was 28, she had finished a stint as a drama critic for Vanity Fair, and she and her compatriots were still working out seating arrangements for the Algonquin Round Table. None of them at that point had totally found their way to the issues that would come to define them. And despite the monumental platform Dunham has been given, that’s probably true of her too. She’s everywhere, but she’s still not there yet. That might have a lot to do with why people find her at once so exciting and so exasperating.

To Dunham, the most useful reaction to this endless onslaught of reactions is to just keep working. These days she is editing the fourth season of “Girls” and is in the early stages of writing a novel “about a professional woman entering her 30s and her relationship with several complex father figures.” She does, admittedly, thrill in the sight of her name in The New Yorker — or, more precisely, take thrill in her parents’ thrill at seeing her name there. She has also learned to cope with the cognitive dissonance that comes from receiving more good fortune than seems right for one person.

“I’ve had a lot of moments in my career where I’ve had to just say, ‘I’m picking my jaw up off the floor and carrying on,’ ” she said, stroking Lamby as his self-allergies sent him into another hacking fit. “Because you don’t get much work done with your jaw on the floor.”

[Photo Credit: Jojo Whilden/HBO]

The Yanks lost again. And they are frustrated.

Jeter went 0-3 with a sacrifice. He’s only got 12 games, maybe less if he takes a day off. Never been a guy who really needs anything from the fans but now we’ll be rooting him on more than ever, even if it is just window dressing on his great career. Be nice to see him go out with a few more hits, score a couple of runs, smile that famous smile.

[Photo Credit: Design Crush via This Isn’t Happiness]

Our guy Martin Prado is out, the poor bastard. At least Cervelli’s back.

Only a few weeks left in DJ’s career. The countdown has begun. Holmes needs a hit for starters…

Jacoby Ellsbury CF
Derek Jeter SS
Brett Gardner LF
Brian McCann 1B
Chase Headley 3B
Chris Young DH
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Francisco Cervelli C
Brendan Ryan 2B

Never mind the schneid:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture Bags. 

Photograph by TS Flynn.

It’s down to me.

[Photo Via: Acidic Scenery]

Beet Ravioli with Poppy Seed Sauce.

Good profile on Al Pacino by the great John Lahr over at the New Yorker:

Over the years, there have been rumblings about Pacino’s overacting. He can certainly roar; he can pound the furniture; he can go big with the facial expressions; he has made some dud movies. But the drama, for Pacino, is almost always inherent in the character he’s hoping to convey. His portrayal of the blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in “Scent of a Woman” (1992), for instance, was considered hammy by some, but, in Pacino’s thinking, the character was a lunatic—a suicidal, narcissistic man who drew attention to himself through his affectation of swagger—and he played him that way. “I paint the way I see it, and some of the colors are a little broader and a little bolder than others,” he said, adding, “Sometimes you take it to the limit, sometimes you may go a little overboard, but that’s all part of a vision. I say, go with the glow. If an effort is being made to produce something that has appetite and passion and isn’t done just to get the golden cup, it isn’t a fucking waste. Yes, there are flaws, but in them are things you’ll remember.”

Pacino protects his talent by leaving it alone, which accounts for his vaunted moodiness. “There are various superstitions connected with reaching his center, and he doesn’t want to discuss them ever,” Mike Nichols, who directed Pacino in “Angels in America,” said. “He’s consulting somewhere else. And the somewhere else does not have to do with words.” Pacino almost never talks shop. When he was at the Actors Studio, in the late sixties, whenever Strasberg gave him notes, he said, “I would actually count numbers in my head not to hear what he was saying. I didn’t want to know. I thought it would fuck up what I was doing, where I was going with my own ideas.”

Even Pacino’s speech patterns, which forge a kind of evasive switchback trail up a mountain of thought, serve as a defense against too much parsing of his interior. “Al is dedicated, passionately, to inarticulateness,” Nichols said, pointing out that in conversation Pacino has no “chitchat.” Playing dead in social situations is his instinctive strategy.

[Photo Via]