Monthly Archives: November 2011

“The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael,” edited by Sanford Schwartz is a new release from the Library of America and it’s been getting a lot of press along with Brian Kellow’s Kael biography. I’m going to blog about P. Kael, who is one of my favorite writers, all week and will include all the links fit to click.

For starters, here’s a recent conversation I had with Sanford Schwartz.

Check it out:

Bronx Banter: What was your approach in selecting the material for this book? My first impression was that it seemed thin, but then I checked and it is almost 800 pages, anything but thin. Then again, I grew up reading Kael and have all of her books. Is the ideal reader for this book someone who is unfamiliar with her work?

Sanford Schwartz: My first aim in selecting Pauline Kael pieces was to give the range of her thinking and sensibility. As a kid of shadow story, I wanted the selections to give a rough sense of movie history during the years she wrote. I wanted there to be representative pieces on the actors and directors who meant most to her. So there are a number of reviews on Altman, Godard, Scorsese, and so forth. I hoped that the anthology would engage people who already knew her—but unlike you didn’t collect all her books over the years—and also people who, in their twenties and thirties, don’t know who she is. It is always a surprise to run into people who have never heard of her, and I have found that most young people haven’t.

BB. Kael was close to fifty when she started reviewing movies for the New Yorker though she’d been writing for some time. How do you think this influenced her voice as a writer, as opposed to other critics who get their start much earlier?

SS: I’m not sure that it meant a lot. Her having waited so long and absorbed so many movies along the way obviously couldn’t have hurt when it came to writing with authority and conviction. But that certainty was evident in her letters from the late 1930s and early 1940s, when she was in her early twenties—except that her subject was still unclear to her. And it was fortuitous, her coming into the field when she did—an art form was being revitalized.

BB: What did Kael bring to movie criticism in the 1960s and ’70s that set her apart from her contemporaries?

SS: Kael made reading movie reviews a more intimate and personal experience than it had ever been before. Little criticism of any kind conveyed a comparable sense of there being such a powerful, funny, opinionated, scarily shrewd, and common sensical voice there, talking to you. You wanted to know what she thought about everything. You don’t feel this with most journalists, whether they are reviewing an art of doing a political column.

BB: One of the quirks that Kael was famous for was only watching a movie once. She’s been criticized for that over the years, that it suggests a lack of reflection or the possibility that a work of art can change for you. What is it about watching a movie only one time that informed the way she wrote about it?

SS: First off, it should be noted that there were times when she saw a movie more than once. I saw a number of movies with her when it was her second time. But then it was usually because she was checking something. I think she joked about falling asleep during Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” both times she saw it. How many times she saw a movie was conditioned, actually, by her generally tight writing schedule; she usually didn’t have the time to see a movie twice. But the deeper point with this issue concerns the importance of instinct for her. She believed our truest response to a movie (or any art) was our first one, and she wanted to catch that. It was also a matter of temperament. She had on-the-spot judgments about many things. That was how she operated. Movies for her, even the great, complex ones, were about the senses in a way that books were not, and in seeing a movie once and trying to recapture its immediate impact she was, in her thinking, being true to the experience it offered.

BB. Did you re-watch any of the movies whose reviews you included in the collection?

SS: I saw some again, and initially I thought it would be good to re-see many of them. But my sense if that going back to films I loved years ago is hazardous. You re-see Truffaut, Satyajit Ray, or “The Leopard” and part of you must confront ways that the movie, and you, have changed—and altogether the event is more about time than the movie. How movies age is an interesting topic. Kael talked about it in “Movies and Television.”

BB: You’ve included her most famous reviews, ones she was chided about for over-praising like “The Last Tango in Paris,” “Nashville,” and to a lesser extent, “Casualties of War.” How do you think her takes on those movies stand up?

SS: I can’t say how her reviews of those movies hold up because I haven’t seen them recently. My hunch is that she did go overboard on them. I probably felt that then. But of course the reviews had to be in any anthology of her work. They were major pieces for her. They are statements of her belief.

BB: Kael has been ridiculed for her enthusiasm for those movies, but her take on other “classics” of that time period, particularly two “Godfather” movies or “Mean Streets” or “Shampoo” seem spot on. Are there any particular movies that she loved where you feel that her writing is especially sharp?

SS: I wasn’t that interested in whether she was, as you say about some of her reviews, “spot on.” In reviewing an art, reasoning and descriptions count for much more than opinion. As to what I think she was especially sharp on, I hope “The Age of Movies” provides an answer. Are there many more pieces that might have gone in? For sure.

BB: I like that you’ve included her major essays like “Trash, Art and the Movies,” “Why Are Movies So Bad? or The Numbers,” and the long one on Cary Grant, “The Man From Dream City.” And especially an early on, “Movies, the Desperate Art.” But you did not include her celebrated essay on “Citizen Kane.” Is that because it was just too long or because you feel it doesn’t hold up as representative of her talent?

SS: No, the Kane article, as I say in the Introduction, is too long to be included.

BB: One of Kael’s first memorable articles was “Circles and Squares,” a harsh take on fellow critic Andrew Sarris’ ideas about the auteur theory. Why did you not include that one?

SS: I didn’t include the Sarris essay because it is too long for the points it makes. It would have hogged space from livelier writing—writing that meant more to Kael. There are good words in it on what criticism meant for her. If I had excerpts in the anthology I probably would have excerpted those passages. I felt also that readers for whom “auteur” issues mater would already know Kael’s piece, whereas for the wider audience that she wrote for at The New Yorker, and for whom “The Age of Movies” is intended, her deflating this theory—it is really a set of opinions—is not a very engaging issue. And while I think she nails Sarris and the whole approach, she doesn’t do it in a way that opens up the topic to the general reader. Unless you are already familiar with the auteur line, her essay is rather confusing, especially at the beginning. It isn’t an essay that had much long-term meaning for her; she never could take that stuff seriously.

BB: Kael’s review of the documentary, “Shoah,” was famous because she panned it but it’s not here.

SS: I didn’t have a powerful reason to skip the “Shoah” review. Probably, it was a matter of space and also the sense that the reasoning and attitude on display there was already clear from other articles. It is certainly a strong one, though.

BB: During the ’70s, Kael shared her position writing “The Current Cinema” at the New Yorker with Penelope Gilliatt. As a result, there are some classics from that time that she never reviewed properly like “Annie Hall,” “Dog Day Afternoon” (though she does mention this one in a notes column), and maybe especially, “Apocalypse Now.” Were there any movies that you missed her reviewing?

SS: Even with her half-year schedule in the beginning, I believe she managed to encompass the major films of her era (but a movie historian might have another view of this). If a movie was taken seriously or touched hot issues for people—and it came out when she was off—she generally managed to find a way to her her verdict in somewhere. The long articles she periodically wrote during the time she was off let her do just that. She used a piece ostensibly about actors to acknowledge “Jaws” and she let people know where she stood on “2001” in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”

BB: Kael had her favorites—Peckinpah and DePalma, to name just two—and those who she was famous for blasting, like Kubrick and Woody Allen. But she actually took each movie as it came, and I like that you’ve included “Lolita,” which she adored and as well as “A Clockwork Orange,” which she hated. Same goes for the early Scorsese hits, “Mean Streets,” and “Taxi Driver,” again, which she loved, and “Raging Bull,” which was the first in a long line of his movies that turned her off. Even though she was famous for her prejudices do you feel that she always gave a new movie an equal chance?

SS: Oh, yes. That is one reason I included her review of Bergman’s “Shame.” The piece shows her wrestling with the fact that a director with whom she was often at odds made a movie she had to call a masterpiece. She could always say when someone she admired—Altman, Godard, Bertolucci, Huston, even Renoir—came out flat. Her subject was the film at hand, not someone’s reputation or the credit they might have built up. She didn’t much like Robert Duvall, but after she saw “The Apostle,” which he directed and wrote as well as starred in, she said something like, “You’ve got to hand it to the bastard.”

BB: Kael once said that she never wrote a memoir because, “I think I have” in her reviews. She brought her life’s experience to her reviews, from what she knew about music and books and the theater, but also from what she knew about being a mother, having her heart broken in relationships, everything. Do you think you the story of her life can be found in her work?

SS: Yes, if the story of her life is constituted by her awareness and judgments. I don’t think she was the kind of artist whose life experience mirror or can be seen as a counterpoint to their work. For Agee and Farber, yes; their movie reviews tell us things about each man’s total contribution that we might not know otherwise. Kael, though, put most of what counted in her life in her reviews.

BB: She also once said “In movies, judgment is often not so important in a critic as responsiveness to what a movie feels like, and where it’s heading and what its vision is.” She was very tuned in to the reaction movies had on audiences, especially during her heyday in the early ’70s. Was there any other critic during that time, or any other time, that was as invested in how movies were received by popular culture and what it all meant?

SS: I believe you need a movie historian to answer this one. My feeling is that she got more of the ramifications of movies—their relation to the wider culture and society in general—than most film writers.

BB: This collection is spare toward the last 10 years of her career. Is that because the cultural moment of the movies had passed by the mid ’80s or because you were running out of room? Even though the pieces in her final two collections, “Hooked,” and particularly, “Movie Love,” are terse compared with her earlier writing, I think they had a lovely, compact quality. Were there any reviews that were hard for you not to include?

SS: Kael herself said that her strongest collections were those that covered the films of the 1970s. The movies were richer then. They brought out more of her. And she was first luxuriating in all the space The New Yorker gave her. It is possible that if she had first started reviewing in 1980 her pieces might have been longer and more nuances—even considering the quality of the movies. As it was, by the mid-1980s she had already put forth in some detail her aesthetic and social positions. I agree with you, though, about the “lovely, compact quality” of her reviews of the eighties.

BB: I recall Kael once writing with admiration for the discipline it took Altman to achieve a style that appeared casual and loose. I often think about that when I consider her writing—it is conversational but don’t you think it must have taken a lot of discipline to achieve that effect?

SS: Kael was almost always writing with a deadline, so the words had to come fast, and by nature she was suited to spilling her feelings. But she had to do a lot of work to get the reviews in shape. She could be making substantive changes right to the last minute.

“The Age of Movies” is out now and you can order it here.

As a follow-up to my conversation with Schwartz, I dipped into my library for more Kael and found this in “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” by Francis Davis:

Well, the auteur theory originally meant something quite different from what people understand it be mean now. What it originally said was that a director conferred value upon a film—that if a director was an auteur, all of his films were great. I think the public never understood that, and neither did most of the press. It was an untenable theory, and it fell from sight. It’s now taken to mean that we should pay attention to who directed a movie, because a director is vital to a film, and of course this is true. But it’s something that everybody has always known. I mean, everybody knew that Howard Hawks was terrific. We went to see “To Have and Have Not” and “The Big Sleep” the day they opened, and there was an excitement in the theater, because we all knew that these movies were special. They were smart, and we loved the work of smart directors, because lots of movies were so dumb…But the auteurists considered all of his movies to be wonderful by definition, because he was an auteur. It reached a point where they were acclaiming the later movies of directors who had ceased doing good work years earlier. Hitchcock’s later movies were acclaimed, and they were stinkers—terrible movies. And many routine action movies were praised because they were the work of certain directors.

It’s sometimes discouraging to see of a director’s movies, because there’s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director’s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But for all of a director’s movies to be alike in some essential way can also be a sign that he’s a hack.

And this on Andrew Sarris:

We both loved movies. We had that in common, and I enjoy reading him as I enjoy reading very few critics. He has genuine reactions to movies, and many critics don’t. He picks things up and points things out…The big difference between us is that our taste in movies is so radically different. He really likes romantic, classically structured movies. He had very conservative tastes in movies; he didn’t love the farout stuff that I loved. He’s a man who likes movies like “Waterloo Bridge,” movies that drive me crazy with impatience. It’s funny that he should have been at the Voice, and the voice of an underground paper. I think I would have been much more suitable to the Voice, yet for years I got dumped on brutally by the paper. That always amazed me, because I thought, I’m praising movies you should love, so what’s going on here? He and I were at the wrong places—it’s one of those flukes of movie history.

Also this on eroticism in movies and not being able to review “Deep Throat” for the New Yorker:

It wasn’t a good movie. But I very badly wanted to write about it, because for all that was being written about it, nobody was really dealing with what was on the screen. I think half of the reason that people become interested in movies in the first place is sex and dating and everything connected with eroticism on the screen. And I felt that not to deal with all of that in its most naked form was to shirk part of what’s involved in being a movie critic.

I’d love to have written about more eroticism in the movies. I think it’s a great subject, and I dealt with it a little bit in my reviews of “Last Tango in Paris,” “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” and a few other movies. Bertrand Blier I loved writing about, because he dealt so much in sexual areas. But it was tough to write about it all with [New Yorker editor, William] Shawn. I had a real tough time with him when I wrote about “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” The Marco Ferreri version of Charles Bukowski, about a girl who’s virtually a mermaid, with Ben Gazzara as the Bukowski, more or less. It’s an amazing movie, with some scenes that are quite erotic. I had to put up a terrible fight to get it in. Shawn wanted to know if the critics for other magazines were covering it. I said that shouldn’t be our standard for what we covered at The New Yorker. But it was hard to convince Shawn that I wasn’t pulling some sort of swindle by sneaking material into the magazine that he felt didn’t belong there. He felt he was holding the line against barbarians, and to some degree I was a barbarian.

He made it very hard to write about certain aspects of movies. Nobody, really, has done a very good job of writing on a sustained level about the way movies affect people erotically, and about the fact that they became popular because they’re a dating game. People love movies that reason, because they excite them sexually. They go to them on dates, and they go to learn more about how to behave. I never got a real crack at writing about that.

Another terrific volume for Kael nerds is “Conversations with Pauline Kael”.

From an interview with Sam Staggs in Mandate (May 1983):

Mandate: Why do you hit so many nerves among the common readers? Why do you stir up such antagonism as well as such passionate devotion?

Kael: In my writing, I was trying to get at what I actually responded to at the movies, and I couldn’t do in formal, scholarly language. I worked to loosen my style—to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice. I began, for example, to interject remarks—interrupting a train of thought, just as we do when we talk, and then picking it up again. And when I began to feel the freedom to write as easily as I spoke, the writing itself became pleasurable.

Maybe part of the resentment I stir up among critics who suffer when they write is that they can tell I’m having a good time. My guess is that just as my slangy colloquial style appeals to some readers because it is sometimes enables me to get right at what I think the emotional substance of a movie is, it turns off other readers, who prefer more literary, distanced criticism. For example, I’m frequently disparaged as ‘opinionated’—I think what this comes down to is that often I don’t share in the consensus that builds up on certain movies. Sometimes, it builds up even before the critics have seen a picture, as it did on “Sophie’s Choice”—I suspect that a lot of readers are snowed by big themes and advance articles in the New York Times. And then, if they read me making fun of the picture, they’re outraged and think I’m irresponsible, and especially so because I don’t couch my review in the language that has come to be equated with ‘objectivity.’

photo by Chris Carroll

And from a Q&A by Marc Smirnoff in the Oxford American (Spring 1992) after Kael had retired from the New Yorker:

Q: Is a person lucky to be a movie critic?

Kael: It is really a wonderfully exciting field to write about when the movies are good. When they’re not good, it’s to despair. The really bad movies you can write about with some passion and anger. It’s the mediocre ones that wear you down. They’re disgusting to write about because you can feel yourself slipping into the same mediocrity and stupidity. And you feel you’re boring the readers and yourself. When you starting falling asleep while you’re writing a review, you know how dull the movie is. The danger for criticism is that people will want to become critics in order to become television celebrities, rather than enjoying the pleasure of writing and the excitement of trying to define and describe what you’ve seen.

Q: Do you miss writing reviews?

Kael: Yes, but I know I’ve got to adjust to it. That’s part of adapting to getting older. You’ve got to recognize that the time for certain things has passed and, I’m not an idiot, I know I would not write at my best if I went on. You know, you start repeating yourself—you write the same phrase, you write the same descriptions. I’ve already had the problem of working on a paragraph that I thought was pretty good and looking up what I said about that director’s work the last time I wrote about him and finding out it was almost exactly the same paragraph. Well, you know, it’s time to quit.

Ever have “The Luther”?

That’s a burger with bacon on a doughnut. It’s named about Luther Vandross.

I have not tried one.  I gotta admit the truth: I ascared.

[Photo Credit: Scene by Laurie]

Postscript

By John Schulian

I look in the mirror and see the faces I have worn. I see the kid with a baseball cap snugged on his head, and the newspaper reporter who grew a beard to look older, and the TV writer who shaved his beard to look younger. The only face I don’t see – the only face I refuse to see – is the one on my driver’s license. I look like someone Winslow Homer might have painted. Though I insist it is nothing more than the product of a bad day at the DMV, I know I will see that face in the mirror, too. But not just yet. Not as long as writing can arm me with a crucifix to ward off the vampire that is old age.

I won’t be so bold as to say writing keeps me young. If it did, I wouldn’t curse technology or struggle to remember the names of new bands or look away in embarrassment when I’m caught staring at women one-third my age. But writing gives me purpose and fills my head with the notion that there are still things to be accomplished: essays and short stories, one novel completed, another taking shape in my imagination alongside a screenplay. Somewhere around here I’ve even got a verse and a chorus written for a country song. Maybe I’ll take my guitar down from the wall and finish it someday. It will be just three chords, but what was good enough for Hank Williams is good enough for me.

This is how I always imagined life on the other side of the rainbow. Writers don’t throw retirement parties. They write, and hope their words find their way before the public. Some will, some won’t. I understand the vagaries of the process. I just need to score often enough to let whoever is out there counting know that I’m still kicking. Otherwise, I might have to answer in the affirmative the next time someone asks if I’m retired. For the moment, however, I’m proud to say hell no.

I may have lost a step or two, but that’s far different than being ready for a sedate game of shuffleboard before I sit down to the early bird special. It’s those codgers I see at the doctor’s office who are retired. I’m just a lad of 66. When Red Smith was this age, he was reviving his career at the New York Times and five years away from winning a Pulitzer Prize. Red wanted to die at his typewriter, the way his hero Grantland Rice did, and damned if he didn’t come within three days of doing it.

I wouldn’t consider changing my position on retirement unless I knew I could go out with the high style that Sheik Caputo did at the railroad. The Sheik has been part of my life since I was 13, as a neighbor, a baseball coach, a proponent of pepperoni and cold beer, and, most of all, a cherished friend. He worked as a Union Pacific machinist for 30 years, crawling inside filthy steam engines and never making as much as two bucks an hour. The day he turned 60, he showed up at the Salt Lake City yards at 7 a.m., just like always, and the foreman said, “Hey, Caputo, you’re eligible to retire.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah, if you want to.”

“Goodbye,” Sheik Caputo said, and headed for the golf course.

But there is only one Sheik, and he is 96 and still getting mileage out of that story. I’m happy just to pass it along, which probably underscores the difference between the way he and I look at retirement. He was ready for it, maybe beyond ready, because he had a job he hated. I, on the other hand, am one of the lucky ones. I love my life as a writer, so why would I want to put it behind me? Writing is the one thing I could do with any success. I couldn’t pound a nail straight or sell you a pair of shoes, and I never wanted to revisit a job I had sweeping out a ballpark after the crowd was gone, wading through peanut shells and hotdog wrappers and breathing the smell of spilled beer. I was spared the heartbreak of trying to teach kids who didn’t love reading as much as I do for the deceptively simple reason that I could write a story, be it fact or fiction. Because people would pay me for those stories, I never was a high school coach beset by parents who make more of their kids than they are. I knew the life I wanted, and I got to live it.

Now I am in the process of seeing out what else is out there. I began my search in earnest when I wrote the first two sentences of a hard-boiled novel that had been in my mind for years: “Too bad Barry was from Santa Barbara. Suki would have told him her real name if he’d been local.” Barry is a wandering husband who’s too slick for his own good and Suki is working her way through college in L.A.’s sex trade. In time they will cross paths with a boxer whose career went sideways when he killed a man in the ring. He cares about nothing, least of all his life, until he meets the girl, and then he cares too much, in the way only a noir hero can. Someone out there might be aware of all that if my novel, “A Better Goodbye,” had been published. But the manuscript languishes beside a tall stack of rejection letters.

Still, I reveled in everything about the process from the three-page-a-day discipline to the constant rewriting, and I cling to the hope that my novel will yet be published. A small press has made noises about it, but whether that happens or not, I have another novel in mind and I don’t think I can stop myself from writing it. It’s as if I’m trying to live the life of a starving writer without the risk of going hungry.

I write my fiction in bursts in a time when most literary agents will tell you fiction isn’t selling. But I am fueled by blind faith and the confidence I’ve gained from having two short stories published, one in the Prague Revue (yes, that Prague), the other on a now-defunct website called Thuglit.com. Neither paid anything, but I did receive a Thuglit T-shirt that I treasure too highly to wear. More important I gained just enough swagger to wonder why the hell my best short story has yet to be published. Nothing to do but keep sending it out, I guess.

I beat my head against a different kind of wall when I taught for a semester at my alma mater, the University of Utah, in fall 2004. The wall was constructed in part of the innocence and naivete that reminded me of myself at that age, but there was something more than that at work. There was an unsettling preoccupation with getting a degree instead of an education and, even worse, a lack of basic writing skill. One class in particular – Literary Journalism, of all things – was a wasteland that symbolized for me the parlous state of the language in this age of email happy faces and LOLs. If it weren’t for the hungry minds who made my Art of Storytelling class a joy, I might have staggered off the academic battlefield jabbering like a chimp. Of course my young scholars might tell you I was too demanding. They thought my “Always honest, seldom kind” policy was hilarious only when it didn’t apply to them. Since then, I’ve apologized to the Humanities Department’s guiding lights for being too tough only to be told I should have been tougher. I assume they would have established a bail fund for me.

If I have done anything right as I adapt to geezerhood, it is put books together. Two are collections of my sportswriting, “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand” and “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” and I will leave it to someone else to speak good or ill of them. But you will find pieces of my heart in the other three books that bear my name. When I edited “The John Lardner Reader,” I was doing more than reviving the work of a brilliant and acerbically funny sportswriter out of print for half a century. I was thanking him and all the other press box legends whose work I’d studied – Red Smith, W.C. Heinz, and Jimmy Cannon in particular – for lighting the way for me.

Editing “At the Fights,” a collection of classic boxing writing, proved even more personal because I was working with George Kimball, who stared death in the eye every step of the way. He was as heroic as any prizefighter memorialized in either that book or “The Fighter Still Remains,” the slender volume of boxing poetry and song lyrics that we spun out of it. There were many things that helped keep George alive so he could feel the love and admiration wash over him at the publication party in New York, but I’ll never stop believing it was “At the Fights” itself that gave him the will to battle cancer for the full 12 rounds. Not once did I hear him complain or wallow in self-pity. The book was always foremost in his mind, just the way George is now in mine, four months after his death at 67.

I wish he’d been here the other day when the cable guy walked into my office and saw a blow-up of the cover for “At the Fights.” “I read that book,” he said, and proceeded to tell me what is in it. It was one of those moments that prove both the breadth of the book’s appeal and the populist nature of sportswriting in general. It was, in other words, what George and I hoped for all along. I even know the song that should have been playing in the background. It’s “Too Many Memories,” by the late Stephen Bruton, and there’s a line in it that says: “What makes you grow old is replacing hope with regret.” I think about those lyrics a lot, their wisdom and humanity and how right they are for me at this time of life. I think about them especially now, as I tell you this: Goodbye but don’t call me gone.

Click here for the complete “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Sunday was Marathon Day. My wife Amelia was running so we went full out with t-shirts, posters and banners. At 124th St and 1st Ave, my older son sat on my shoulders and we yelled out to every runner we could while we waited for her to pass. The runners were psyched to get cheers, but when they came from the squeaky voice of a four year-old, their smiles were double wide. It’s a special day in New York, but I’ll let our runner explain how it feels from inside the ropes:

I am proud to live in New York City every day, but today showed me why ten times over. The support and enthusiam from EVERYONE, in EVERY Borough was just mind blowing and made me so proud to be a New Yorker!!!!

A helluva town.

This week only you can watch “Style Wars,” the classic hip hop documentary over at pitchfork tv.

Don’t sleep.

November is trophy season in major league baseball. The most anticipated awards, like the MVP and Cy Young, come later in the month, but for fans already suffering from withdrawal, the most immediate baseball fix comes in the form of silver and gold. Although the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger aren’t taken that seriously (after all, the two awards are basically a marketing gimmick for Rawlings and Hillerich & Bradsby, respectively), the selections, which this year were announced live on ESPN and the MLB Network, still generate considerable reaction. Unfortunately, particularly in the case of the Gold Glove, most of it seems to be negative.

This year, the Gold Glove selections were not as controversial (mostly thanks to Derek Jeter not winning one). In fact, five of the well respected Fielding Bible Award winners were also awarded with a Gold Glove. However, there were some glaring omissions, the most obvious being Yankees’ left fielder Brett Gardner. By just about every measure, Gardner was not only the best left fielder in the game, but he also ranked among the best outfielders. According to the Field Bible, the Yankees’ speedster tied centerfielder Austin Jackson, who was also denied a Gold Glove, for the most defensive runs saved at 22. That’s an extraordinary total for the center of the diamond, but for a corner position, it’s off the charts. Gardner also topped major league outfielders with a UZR/150 of 29.5, almost doubling the total of Jacoby Ellsbury, who finished a distant second among qualified candidates. Although UZR is a much less reliable metric, the extent to which Gardner led all others was significant. Unfortunately for the Yankees’ left fielder, the Gold Glove voters weren’t that impressed.

The Yankees had two other Gold Glove candidates make it to the “final three” (a new feature of the award) at each position, but Robinson Cano and Mark Teixeira were bested by their Red Sox counterparts. Unlike Gardner’s snub, however, the omission of Cano and Teixeira were well within reason. As a result, one year after tying a franchise record with three Gold Gloves, the Yankees were shutout for only the fifth time since 1982. Although it’s probably no consolation to Gardner, what the Yankees missed out in gold, they made up for in silver.  Both Cano and Curtis Granderson were among the A.L.’s recipients of the Silver Slugger, which honors the best offensive player at each position.

Silver and Gold: Yankees’ Award Winners, Total by Year

Source: mlb.com

Since the Gold Glove was first awarded in 1957, the Yankees have had the second most honorees, behind only the St. Louis Cardinals, who enjoy a comfortable lead over the field with an impressive 83 trophies. At the other end of the spectrum is the Milwaukee Brewers, which makes the team’s traditional ball-in-glove logo somewhat ironic. Since joining the majors as the Seattle Pilots in 1969, the Brewers have had only nine Gold Glove winners, all coming while the franchise was in the American League.

Most Gold Glove Awards, Sorted by League

Source: mlb.com

For perspective, 16 individual players won more Gold Gloves than the entire Brewers’ franchise, including Greg Maddux, who won twice as many. No other player in history has been honored more often than the future Hall of Famer pitcher, who, in addition to racking up over 300 wins, managed to take home 18 Gold Gloves. Among position players, the most gilded glove belonged to Brooks Robinson, who won 16 at third base. The most decorated Yankees player was Don Mattingly. The Captain won nine Gold Gloves at first base during his time in pinstripes, almost doubling the franchise’s next highest total of five, which is shared by Ron Guidry, Derek Jeter, Bobby Richardson and Dave Winfield.

Most Gold Glove Awards by Position, Yankees and All-Time

Source: mlb.com

The Silver Slugger is usually overshadowed by the Gold Glove, but in recent years has started to gain more exposure, including a dedicated announcement show that aired on the MLB Network. Unlike its defensive counterpart, the Silver Slugger involves more than just subjective peer review. Rather, it is based on a combination of statistics as well as the general impressions of managers and coaches. Because of this more balanced approach, the Silver Slugger selections are seldom as controversial. Then again, part of the reason for that may be the relative indifference expressed toward the award.

Even if the Silver Slugger doesn’t carry much cachet, it’s still an honor to be named the best offensive player at a particular position. Since it was given out in 1980, the Yankees have had 39 players deemed worthy of that distinction, more than any other team. Meanwhile, among teams in existence during the entire tenure of the award, the Athletics and Royals ranks dead last with only nine.

Most Silver Sluggers, Sorted by League

Source: baseball-almanac.com

Barry Bonds holds a number of high profile records, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he is also the owner of the most Silver Sluggers with 12. Not too far behind are Mike Piazza and Alex Rodriguez, who each have 10. However, Arod has the further distinction of winning his at third base (3) and shortstop (7), making him the only player to win multiple awards at two different defensive positions. In addition to Rodriguez, 11 other players have won at least one Silver Slugger at two defensive positions (not including DH and with no differentiation for the outfield), including Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, who are the only players to be honored at three places on the diamond.

Most Silver Slugger Awards by Position, Yankees and All-Time

Source: baseball-almanac.com

Even though many baseball fans claim not to care about the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger, both awards have endured for a significant period and, by doing so, become a part of the game’s historical record. Despite this, some will probably still accuse me of digging too deeply into a mundane topic, or mining too hard for content in the off season. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t mean a review of baseball’s metallurgical record is completely without merit. For example, if someone can answer how the 1985 Yankees managed to win seven combined Gold Gloves and Silver Sluggers without a winning the division, it will have all been worthwhile.

Man, look at this beautiful thing that I found over at Nicole Franzen’s blog.

[Photo Credit: UK Expert]

From Joe Sports Fan, Ron Washington talks to his team before Game 7 of the Whirled Serious:

Ron Washington’s Game 7 Clubhouse Speech from JoeSportsFan.com on Vimeo.

Listen, Baby Doll, let me say it slow: I. Have. To. Go.

[Photo Credit: Ursacheundwirkung]

I don’t know from college football but one of my favorite books is about the college game–John Ed Bradley’s memoir, “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.” If you haven’t read it, put it on your holiday wish list, you won’t be sorry.

Tonight, there’s a big game between LSU and Alabama. I won’t be watching but when I check the score I’ll be thinking of John Ed, hoping the Tigers make him happy.

Sometimes, a song and a smile is enough.

[Photo Credit: Orta San Guilio]

Big city of dreams.

Pictures of New York by Louis Faurer via Everyday I Show.

Notorious. 

Serious Eats presents: 30 Sandwiches We Loved This Year in NYC.

Dig this fine-looking thing from Rubirosa.

Eddie.

Eddie Harris – Listen Here (Atlantic 2487) from boogaludo on Vimeo.

By Jon DeRosa

Just like most other genres these days, successful horror movies spawn franchises. The studios have indulged lengthy strolls down Elm Street and at one point, seemed to have taken great care to make sure there was a fresh installment of “Friday the 13th” every time the calendar dictated.

I’ve never seen any of them, but does the number of times people wanted to sit through the same basic story to be scared in the same basic way tell us something of ourselves as a species? I’ll leave that for someone who watched those movies to decide.

In fact, to be a successful horror movie franchise, the film doesn’t even have to be a true horror movie. Both “The Evil Dead” and the “Scream” movies are horror-movie derivitives, distilling or reducing the elements of horror movies and packaging them up with laughs for a new twist.

“The Evil Dead” is a horror movie that has mostly discarded plot, writing, acting, sound, editing, cinematagrophy, and lighting. All that is left is gore, suspense and comedy. It’s poorly made but still spectacular – I challenge you to look away during a screening. The efforts appear earnest, and it’s hard to believe the people responsible for “The Evil Dead” (Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert) would someday create the best super hero fight on film (Raimi’s Doc Ock vs Spiderman on a skyscraper) and torment our hero John Schulian (Tapert).

That’s not to say the movie just a bucket of corn syrup dyed red and an eerie score. There’s a lovely moment where Ash, played by cult hero Bruce Campbell, holds a gift for his girlfriend, Linda, and pretends to be asleep. Linda wants to to grab the gift, but she suspects he’s faking. The camera catches just their eyes as she looks between him and the gift and Ash takes occasional peeks to see if his ruse is working. And then of course when Linda dies, Ash tries to bury her before she can turn into a zombie-monster. He’s too late, but she fakes him out with the same game, pretending to be dead while he digs her grave, sneaking peeks to see if her ruse is working.

When he slices her head off with the shovel, there’s an extra pang between the chuckles. The movie rightly has a devoted following for it’s knack of being bad in just the right ways. And now a remake? I wonder…

On the other side of the same coin are the “Scream” movies. These films are loaded with everything modern Hollywood does best, and then polished to a sheen. The derivative nature of “Scream” lies within the plot of the film as the psychotic killers and the hapless victims of the film are themsleves horror film fanatics. They know how horror movies work inside and out, and when they find themselves inside one, they keep track of what is happening like play-by-play commentators at a sporting event.

Most of them still die, but it’s a lot funnier when the victim does something stupid a few minutes after she discussed the universal stupidity of female horror movie victims.

Like Alex, I don’t seek out a lot of horror movies. However, consuming American popular culture for over thirty years ingrains horror movie formulae in the brain. So it doesn’t take an expert in scary movies to enjoy seeing them turned in on themselves in ingenious ways. And with all the laughs “Scream” and “The Evil Dead” bring to the table, suspense is such a potent ingredient that even these horror-comedies will take you to the edge of your seat before you’re rolling in the aisles.

By Bruce Markusen

This is the only Topps card that shows Matty Alou as a Yankee. Upon first look, most fans are struck by the enormity of the Yankees’ “NY” logo. But it’s not the actual Yankee logo; it’s been airbrushed onto the photograph, along with the Yankee pinstripes and the navy blue cap. The artist who did the airbrushing simply overestimated the size of the interlocking “NY.”

In the actual photograph that Topps used, Alou is wearing the colors of the A’s, with the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum providing the backdrop. Alou spent the latter half of the 1972 season with the A’s, and played a subtle role in helping Oakland win its first world championship, before being purged by Charlie Finley in a cost-cutting maneuver. Without any photos of Alou in Yankee pinstripes, the people at Topps opted for the old airbrushing route.

All these memories of this card come back to me with the news of Alou’s death. He passed away on Thursday at the age of 72, apparently from the effects of diabetes. This is particularly hard news for me because Matty Alou was one of my favorite players. Though he only played part of one season with the Yankees, he was a guy who left me with a boatload of memories from various points throughout his career.

Why did I like Alou so much? I think part of it has to do with his unconventional hitting style. He used a very unorthodox style at the plate–he swung a heavy bat, often hit off his front foot, and blooped a lot of singles to the opposite field–all of which made him intriguing. Ted Williams, the most scientific hitter in history, used to say that Alou broke every rule of batting, but somehow managed to succeed. And unlike Williams, Alou was an extremely aggressive hitter who didn’t walk all that much. But the man could hit singles with the best of them. Alou batted for a very high average, which coupled with his base stealing ability and the speed that allowed him to go first to third, made him a useful player.

Alou began his career with the Giants, where he had the privilege to play in the same outfield with his older brother Felipe and his younger brother Jesus. But Matty never found his way in San Francisco. It was not until he was traded to the Pirates, where he worked with manager Harry “The Hat” Walker on his hitting. The Hat completely retooled Alou’s approach, and to his credit, Alou openly accepted the advice.

The results were undeniable. In 1966, Alou batted .342 to lead the National League. In his next three seasons, he batted .338, .332, and .331. That represents one of the great four-year stretches a hitter has ever experienced. Alou was also a very good center fielder with range and a plus arm, making him a fairly complete package in Pittsburgh. All that he lacked was power.

By the time that Alou joined the Yankees in 1973, he was no longer the same player. Injuries robbed him of his arm strength, while slowing bat speed erased his abilities as a .330 hitter. But the Yankees felt he could help fill a void in right field. The Yankees were set in the other outfield spots–Roy White played left and Bobby Murcer starred in center–but right field had become a problem. Alou stabilized the position somewhat, though he lacked the arm or the ideal amount of power that once expects from a right fielder. He also made 40 appearances at first base, something he had done previously with the Cardinals. At five feet, nine inches, Alou looked odd playing first base; he could have used a phone book to stand on first base and corral high throws from Gene Michael and Graig Nettles.

Alou hit well for the Yankees, batting .296 with an on-base percentage of nearly .340. If the Yankees remained in contention, Alou would have lasted the entire season in New York. But the Yankees fell out of the pennant race, convincing them to try a late-season youth movement. So they sold Felipe Alou to the Brewers and sold 34-year-old Matty to the Cardinals, ridding themselves of two expensive contracts in the process. And that was it for Matty Alou in pinstripes.

As it turned out, Alou did not have much left in his hitting tank. He batted only .198 for the Padres in 1974, but he did not want to call it quits. So he headed to the Japanese Leagues, where he put in three seasons before retiring.

Alou was still playing in the Far East by the time the Yankees became good again and won back-to-pennants in 1976 and ‘77. Like so many of my favorite old players, like Johnny Callison and Walt “No-Neck” Williams and Jim Ray Hart, he did not last long enough to see the glory years in pinstripes.

But at least fun players like Matty Alou made those lean years of the early 1970s a little more bearable for a Yankee fan like me. For that, I will be ever grateful to Matty Alou. Rest in peace, Matty.

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Some of you guys might have some trouble resetting your password this morning. If that is the case, be sure and check your spam folder for the reset e-mail. That should do the trick. Anyhow, thanks for putting up with us.

T.G.I.F.

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