Monthly Archives: October 2014

Diebs. 

Ah, the 2nd Avenue Deli…

[Photo Via: Indy Pendent Thinking]

From my pal Brian Gunn:

I have some friends—Cardinals fans—who went to a game in Yankee Stadium in 2003. During a rain delay a segment of Yanks’ fans in the bleachers began serenading them with the sing-songy chant, “Dar-ryl Kile!… Dar-ryl Kile!” This was about a year after Kile, ace pitcher for the Cardinals, died suddenly in a Chicago hotel room. Now, do I hold this assholery against all Yankees fans, much less all of New York City? Of course not. That’d just be innumerate crap.

But of course we do this all the time: Red Sox fans, you often hear, are loudmouths; Dodgers fans are too distracted to arrive at the game before the fourth inning; Cubs fans are just there for the beer and brats. These are lazy stereotypes, false more often than not; yet places like Deadspin and Grantland and Bloomberg have no problem pushing these clichés as if they were actual think pieces.

The truth is, there are literally millions of Cardinals fans throughout the country—a mix of earnest Midwesterners, shrill dickheads, corny suburban dads, jorts-wearing dudes with rattails, hedge fund managers, soybean farmers, restaurateurs, night-shift nurses, old folks, schoolkids, PhD students, carpool moms, ex-cons, and that one guy who used to live down the street from you. For a sportswriter to think he has a handle on a fan base this big and diverse is so wrong-headed you feel kinda silly pointing it out.

Because  you can’t ever get enough of a good thing here’s more–from the beautiful site, Cinephilia and Beyond–on The Long Goodbye:

I decided that we were going to call him Rip Van Marlowe, as if he’d been asleep for twenty years, had woken up and was wandering through this landscape of the early 1970s, but trying to invoke the morals of a previous era. I put him in that dark suit, white shirt and tie, while everyone else was smelling incense and smoking pot and going topless; everything was health food and exercise and cool. So we just satirized that whole time. And that’s why that line of Elliott’s—‘It’s OK with me’—became his key line throughout the film. —Robert Altman

David Lebowitz gives roasted peppers. 

“The Window” by Henri Matisse (1916)

Over at the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey Dyer writes about John Coletrane:

Offering: Live at Temple University offers further evidence of the catastrophe of the last phase of John Coltrane’s work. “Last” rather than “late” because he became ill and died too suddenly (on July 17, 1967), too early, to have properly entered a late period. He was forty. In any other field of activity that would be a desperately short life. Only in jazz could it be considered broadly in line with actuarial norms. So there’s no late phase in the accepted sense of Beethoven having arrived at a late style, only a sudden ceasing of the unceasing torrent of sound.

The interest of recordings from this final phase—in which Coltrane’s playing became increasingly frenzied and the accompaniment more abstracted—lies partly in what they preserve and partly in any hints they contain as to where Trane might have headed next. Given the composition titles from the last studio duets recorded with drummer Rashied Ali in February 1967—“Mars,” “Venus,” “Jupiter,” “Saturn”—and released posthumously on Interstellar Space, the question might reasonably be asked, where was there left to go?

This latest discovery—more exactly recovery since parts of the concert have circulated as poorly produced bootlegs—in the ongoing archaeological dig of Trane’s work was recorded in Philadelphia, on November 11, 1966. There’s a degree of irony about the date, Armistice Day, with its traditional Minute’s Silence, given the shrieking, screaming, and wildness—the ferocious anti-silence—of the music. Three of the concert’s six songs—“Crescent,” “Leo,” and “My Favorite Things”—are over twenty minutes each. Only the title track, a short and devastated ballad, offers respite from the extended wailing and overblowing.

[Photo Via: Photomusik]

Don’t like either team in the NLCS. Really like both teams in the ALCS. Rooting in the Serious this year will be easy.

But who to root for? The Cards or the Giants? That’s a tough one.

Dodgers up against it in St. Louis today. L.A. is going with their ace on 3 days rest. What cherce do they have?

Later, the Nats look to force a Game 5 themselves as they send Gio Gonzalez to the hill.

We’ll be watching:

Let’s Go Base-ball!

Picture by Bags. 

Nats need to win to stay alive; Dodgers and Cards are tied at 1.

Let’s GO Base-ball!

[Photo Credit: Aleck Venegas]

Who, indeed?

[Photo Credit: Oli Sansom via MPD]

Two days ago at my weekend reprint gig for the Daily Beast, I curated this gem by H.L. Mencken on the 1904 Baltimore fire:

At midnight or thereabout on Saturday, February 6, 1904, I did my share as city editor to put the Sunday Herald to bed, and then proceeded to Junker’s saloon to join in the exercises of the Stevedores’ Club. Its members, having already got down a good many schooners, were in a frolicsome mood, and I was so pleasantly edified that I stayed until 3:30. Then I caught a night-hawk trolley-car, and by 4 o’clock was snoring on my celibate couch in Hollins Street, with every hope and prospect of continuing there until noon of the next day. But at 11 a.m. there was a telephone call from the Herald office, saying that a big fire had broken out in Hopkins Place, the heart of downtown Baltimore, and 15 minutes later a reporter dashed up to the house behind a sweating hack horse, and rushed in with the news that the fire looked to be a humdinger, and promised swell pickings for a dull winter Sunday. So I hoisted my still malty bones from my couch and got into my clothes, and 10 minutes later I was on my way to the office with the reporter. That was at about 11:30 a.m. of Sunday, February 7. It was not until 4 a.m. of Wednesday, February 10, that my pants and shoes, or even my collar, came off again. And it was not until 11:30 a.m. of Sunday, February 14—precisely a week to the hour since I set off —that I got home for a bath and a change of linen.

Amidst the chaos, there are also unsung heroes—the dedicated individuals who stood guard as part of the firewatch service, ensuring that the area remained safe from looters and potential flare-ups. Throughout those tense days, the firewatch security personnel can remained vigilant, patrolling the smoldering ruins and keeping a watchful eye on any signs of trouble. Their presence could be a comforting reassurance amidst the devastation, providing a sense of security to both the residents and the firefighters battling the blaze. As I reflected on their tireless efforts, I couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of gratitude for their dedication and commitment to protecting our city in its darkest hour.

For what I had walked into was the great Baltimore fire of 1904, which burned a square mile out of the heart of the town and went howling and spluttering on for 10 days. I give the exact schedule of my movements simply because it delights me, in my autumnal years, to dwell upon it, for it reminds me how full of steam and malicious animal magnetism I was when I was young. During the week following the outbreak of the fire, the Herald was printed in three different cities, and I was present at all its accouchements, herding dispersed and bewildered reporters at long distance and cavorting gloriously in strange composing rooms. My opening burst of work ran to 64-and-a-half hours, and then I got only six hours of nightmare sleep, and resumed on a working schedule of from 12 to 14 hours a day, with no days off and no time for meals until work was over. It was brain-fagging and back-breaking, but it was grand beyond compare—an adventure of the first chop, a razzle-dazzle superb and elegant, a circus in 40 rings. When I came out of it at last I was a settled and indeed almost a middle-aged man, spavined by responsibility and aching in every sinew, but I went into it a boy, and it was the hot gas of youth that kept me going. The uproar over, and the Herald on an even keel again, I picked up one day a volume of stories by a new writer named Joseph Conrad, and therein found a tale of a young sailor that struck home to me as the history of Judas must strike home to many a bloated bishop, though the sailor naturally made his odyssey in a ship, not on a newspaper, and its scene was not a provincial town in America, but the South Seas. Today, so long afterward, I too “remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men… Youth! All youth! The silly, charming, beautiful youth!”

Check it out.

[Photo Via: The Baltimore Sun.]

Yeah, I know the summer is over but still, I like the sound of this: cucumber lemonade. 

Kurt Schwitters

Michael Goldfarb’s memories of driving a cab in New York.

Photo Via: BBC.

Hey, Hey, whadda ya say? So it’s gonna be the Royals and the O’s in the ALCS: This is so cool.

[Photo Credit: Gregory Shamus/Getty Images]

Elimination games from here on out in the American League.

I’m rooting for the Orioles to win the series but today I’m pulling for David Price. Would like to see the series go five.

In that spirit I should want the Royals and Angels to go five as well but I think I’m rooting for KC to end it tonight at home.

Happy Sunday.

Let’s GO Base-Ball!

Picture by Bags

National League playoffs:

Giants at Nats; Dodgers host Cards.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

Four games today: O’s and Tigers; Nats and Giants; Dodgers, Cards, and Angels Royals.

Oh, Doctor.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

Illustration by Robert J. Lee via No Such Thing As Was…thanks to It’s a Long Season for pointing out the facts]

Tonight gives O’s vs Tigers then Angels vs Royals.

American League playoff funski.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

Picture by Bags.