“Everybody thinks, because you make a lot of money, that you have a lock on happiness. It’s not true…. I most fear boredom and loneliness, life after baseball. Life after baseball equals boredom and loneliness. I don’t want to be a 50-year-old guy sitting and drinking beer in some pickup bar with younger people. I’ve seen it. I don’t want to be that.”
—KEITH HERNANDEZ
Ever read Bill Nack’s terrific profile of Mex Hernandez for SI? From 1986.
It’s a good one.
From Michiko Kakutani’s review of the new Louis Armstrong biography:
Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.
His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom.
With “Pops,” his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists, building upon Gary Giddins’s excellent 1988 study, “Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong,” and offering a stern rebuttal of James Lincoln Collier’s patronizing 1983 book, “Louis Armstrong: An American Genius.”
You can order the book, here. Man, it sounds terrific. Which makes sense, because Louis Armstrong is the top of the heap, man.
The Greatest. Everything. Ever.
The AL MVP will be announced shortly. Can’t figure it going to anyone but Mr. Mauer, can you? Derek Jeter had one of his best seasons but Mauer won his third batting title as a catcher and, well, without Mauer, the Twins don’t even sniff the playoffs.
Update: Mauer makes like Special Ed and takes home the hardware. Fitting.
This update is powered by a wonderful lyricist and performer, Ray Davies:
