“Licensed to Ill” is 25 years old. Over at New York Magazine check out this oral history of the Beastie Boys’ first album:

Adam Horovitz: That year was basically Mike’s house during the day, writing lyrics, going to the club, going to the studio, going back to the club. We would write and write and write, then read the lyrics out loud to see who liked what. And that’s kind of how we’ve always done it since then. Rick had a drum machine, and I used to go to his dorm room and make beats. I made the beat for LL Cool J’s first single, “I Need a Beat.” I bought an 808 at Rogue Music [the Roland TR-808 was one of the first programmable drum machines] with some of the settlement money.

Mike Diamond: We would start with the music, and then Rick would clean it all up. Rick had the ability to make things sound legitimate and bigger, to make it sound like a record.

Rick Rubin: Each one had a strong personality. When we came up with rhymes, we tried to cast them for the right character and the right voice.

Horovitz: It just sort of happened. It wasn’t like, “Okay I’m going to be like Melle Mel, you’re Kool Moe Dee.”

Diamond: We never broke it down like, “Okay, I’m the baritone.”

Chuck Eddy, music writer (who did a notorious Beasties piece in 1987 for Creem): They were smart, arty Jewish kids from New York, and they created these white-trash burnout characters with the help of Rubin. And they pulled it off. ­

Dig this cool ass photo gallery of old New York over at Neat Stuff.

In the New Yorker, here’s David Remnick on a new Malcolm X biography:

For nearly twenty years, Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia, labored on what he hoped would be a definitive scholarly work on Malcolm X. During this period, Marable struggled with sarcoidosis, a pulmonary disease, and even underwent a double lung transplant. Recently, he completed his rigorous and evenhanded biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Viking; $30), but, in an echo of his subject’s fate, he died on the eve of publication. One of his goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits—“the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

The literary urge outran the knowable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood. One evening, in 1931, in Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was six, his father, Earl Little, a part-time Garveyite teacher, went to collect “chicken money” from families who bought poultry from him. That night, he was found bleeding to death on the streetcar tracks. The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

[Photograph by Ricard Avedon]

I went to Citifield yesterday. Dig these two on line at Shake Shack…

I was there with my two cousins and the wife. We had a great time (Shake Shack, Mets Win, Shake Shack)…

That’s us singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Yanks look to get greedy today against the O’s.

Hope the egg hunt treated you well.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Printresting via This Isn’t Happiness]

Yup, it’s still raining this morning. Yanks sent a pitcher down and called another up.

Listen to this…and spot the samples…

[Picture found at that most amazing spot–This Isn’t Happiness]

Yanks in Baltimore for the weekend, a perfect excuse to hip you guys to Mark Kram’s terrific piece on Baltimore, “A Wink at a Homely Girl” (Sports Illustrated, 1966):

A giant once, now a January sort of city even in summer, spring and autumn. An anonymous city even to those who live there, a city that draws a laugh even from Philadelphia, a sneer from Washington, with a hundred tag lines that draw neither smile nor sneer from the city. Baltimore: Nickel Town, Washington’s Brooklyn, A Loser’s Town, The Last Frontier, Yesterday Town.

“I’ll take a sleeping pill, just in case,” said a Briton, preparing to visit the city. “I want to make sure I can keep up with the pace.”

Over at PB, Cliff previews the weekend series.

We’ll be rootin’: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Here’s a lovely piece by Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award in 2009 for his novel, “Let the Great World Spin”:

A London nursing home. The shape of a figure beneath the sheets. My grandfather could just about whisper. He wanted a cigarette and a glass of whiskey. “Come up on the bed here, young fella,” he said, gruffly. It was 1975 and I was 10 years old and it would be the first — and probably last — time I’d ever see him. Gangrene was taking him away. He reached for the bottle and managed to light a cigarette. Spittle collected at the edge of his mouth. He began talking, but most of the details of his life had already begun slipping away.

Long wars, short memories.

Later that afternoon my father and I bid goodbye to my grandfather, boarded a train, then took a night boat back home to Dublin. Nothing but ferry-whistle and stars and waves. Three years later, my grandfather died. He had been, for all intents and purposes, an old drunk who had abandoned his family and lived in exile. I did not go to the funeral. I still, to this day, don’t even know what country my grandfather is buried in, England or Ireland.

Sometimes one story can be enough for anyone: it suffices for a family, or a generation, or even a whole culture — but on occasion there are enormous holes in our histories, and we don’t know how to fill them.

[Photo Credit: Grant Howard]

Lord have Mercy. Somebody help me say it ain’t so.

[photo credit: Polarn Per via This Isn’t Happiness]

Dough! Oh My…DOUGH!

DOUGH Donuts: A Far Cry From The Old Fashioned from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Here’s Mark Feinsand on the slumping Brett Gardner:

The Yankees may not be thinking about banishing Gardner to the bench, but his days in the leadoff spot are over for now.

“The last thing you want to do when you’re not swinging the bat well is to get the most at-bats on the team,” [hitting coach, Kevin] Long said. “It’s a smart move. He’s a smart kid, so he gets it. He doesn’t have to be happy about it, but at this point in time, it’s the best thing to do.”

…Long and Gardner watched video earlier this week and identified a flaw in his swing that the hitting coach believes will make a world of difference once it is corrected.

“He started to falter a little bit and he quit using his lower half,” Long said. “He started waving at the ball, and when you do that, your strike zone gets bigger. He’s more tentative than explosive to the ball. It all starts from the ground up. If that’s not working, it’s very difficult to hit.”

Hang in there, Slappy.

Betty Bacall…morning, Sunshine!

Sometimes it seems like the Yankees must have their weight scrutinized more closely than any group besides models and female actors. Just this spring we had C.C. Sabathia’s diet tips (hint: cut out one box of Cap’n Crunch per day) and a flurry of stories about Joba Chamberlain’s weight gain. Now it’s Phil Hughes’ turn. From Joel Sherman in the Post:

I talked to a person with strong ties to the Yankees who threw out a theory I had not yet heard on what happened to Phil Hughes’ velocity: He lost too much weight.

This person said that while everyone was focused on Joba Chamberlain’s weight gain and his having to go for individual workouts following the standard spring training workouts in order to shed pounds, it was missed by the media that Hughes also showed up overweight and was dispatched also to what the team refers to as “The Fat Farm.” This person said he believes Hughes is a player who needs the extra bulk to pitch and that it was possible the loss of the bulk explains the decreased velocity.

I asked Yankees GM Brian Cashman about the theory and he essentially said: “hogwash.” He did confirm that Hughes was sent to “The Fat Farm,” but said that he was not asked to drop below last year’s playing weight and, in fact, was still above it a bit when the season began.

This manages to pull off the neat trick of calling Hughes both too fat AND too thin, a treatment usually reserved for starlets in tabloids. Look, I don’t know what’s wrong with Phil Hughes… maybe there’s something to this, maybe not. I certainly don’t blame Sherman for bringing it up – it’s what his source told him, and he’s passing it along. But as an explanation, it feels to me like grasping at straws. It seems a bit more logical to point to the fact that he pitched many more innings last year than he ever has before, but of course that’s just speculation, too.

Meanwhile, the show must go on. Is that a “baby bump” I see on Freddy Garcia?!

Serious Eats offers 30 simple ways to upgrade your ramen noodles.

True, indeed.

Home on the range.

Photographs by William Albert Allard

Things that go bump in the night…

Polanski’s “Repulsion.”

The last time Bartolo Colon started a major league game was 635 days ago . . .  July 24, 2009.  On that date, Phil Hughes still had a 94 mph fastball, Derek Jeter was hitting .320/.396/.451 and Joba Chamberlain started that night’s game, throwing 7+ innings of two-hit ball.

Much has transpired within the Yanks starting pitching ranks since then, and retirement/injury/inefficiency thrust the well-traveled (and fed) Colon into the starting rotation for tonight’s matchup against the Blue Jays, and their own “Hefty B.C.”, 6’1″ 235-pound Brett Cecil.  Cecil started five games against the Bombers in 2010 and went 4-0.  But he had been dealing with his own Hughesque decline in velocity and it continued in this game.

The Yanks eschewed their usual smashmouth offense for much of the game, jumping out to a 5-1 lead after six innings, with four of the runs scoring on either sacrifice flies or groundouts. Meanwhile, Colon turned the clock back to his Cy Young form of 2005, flashing a fastball at 93 or 94 and mixing in lots of late-breaking off-speed stuff.  His only mistake was a hanging slider that J.P. Arencibia parked in the left field stands leading off the second.  Through the first six innings, Colon allowed only two flyballs and two other hits (both singles).

Colon started to tire in the seventh, and the Jays were poised for a huge inning.  With one out, Juan Encanarcion doubled to right and Arencibia followed with a walk.  Travis Snider then singled sharply to right, and Nick Swisher charged the ball and threw a strike to cutoff man Mark Teixeira, holding Encanarcion at third.  The only problem for the Jays was that Arencibia never stopped running, rounding second too far with his head down, and he also ended up on third.  Teixeira ran over and tagged anyone with a Blue Jay uni on, and suddenly it was two outs and men on the corners rather than one out and bases loaded.

That was Colon’s 89th and final pitch (56 of them for strikes).  David Robertson came in and Jayson Nix battled him for eight pitches before driving an RBI single to center to cut it to 5-2.  Robertson held the fort there as he got John McDonald swinging.

In the 9th, Curtis Granderson greeted Frank Francisco, making his 2011 (and Blue Jay) debut, by slamming the first pitch over the RF wall for a 6-2 margin.  With Mariano Rivera needing a day off, and a four-run lead, Joe Girardi summoned Lance Pendleton to close it out.  Pendleton walked two of the three batters to face him, and Rafael Soriano had to put out the mess.  He managed to do that despite walking the bases loaded.

Final: 6-2 Yanks

Notes: Teixeira had three doubles, to three different parts of the park.  Derek Jeter went 0-5 with one of the RBI groundouts, but four ABs ended with the ball in the infield.

Apricot tart from Orangette.

[Picture by Nicole Belle]

Now Dig This: “The Boys in the Bank,” a life magazine story by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore upon which “Dog Day Afternoon” was based:

“If they had been my houseguests on a Saturday night, it would have been hilarious,” Shirley Ball recalls. “Especially with John’s antics, the way he hopped around all over the place, the way he talked. John called me ‘mouth’ because I was the talkative one. It was, ‘Hey, mouth, do this’ and ‘Hey, mouth, do that.’ I really liked them both. They tried to be nice-except when they were cornered. Such aboveboard guys, they even told us they would kill us if they had to.”

“I’m supposed to hate you guys, but I’ve had more laughs tonight than I’ve had in weeks,” bank manager Barret tells John Wojtowicz.

Recalls Barrett: “We had a kind of camaraderie. Every time he’d stress a point he’d walk around the floor three times gesturing, speaking in a real Brooklyn accent. He’d spot a police sniper outside and say, ‘What d’ya think of that sonofabitch! He really wants me, he wants me in the worst way.’ And I’d laugh and say, ‘Yeah, John, I guess he does.’ ”

Sometimes in the lengthening night, John Wojtowiez shares some of his puzzled thoughts with Barrett. He wonders aloud: “Now, I can shoot you and they won’t give me the gas chamber. But if I shoot a cop, I get it. Now I wonder: if I put a gun at your head and another gun in your hand and made you shoot the cop, would you get it?”