Monthly Archives: June 2012

Sam Adams has a wonderful interview with Bob Balaban over at the A.V. Club.

I like this part:

AVC: Speaking of great directors, your role in Close Encounters was as translator to the scientist played by François Truffaut, and the sense from your diaries is that you played a similar role offscreen.

BB: It was so much fun. You can only imagine [having] one of your favorite directors be absolutely dependent on you for eight months of shooting. I could speak fairly good French, and he really didn’t like to speak English. He would bring me scripts, I would translate them, and we would have discussions afterward. He didn’t like reading the scripts in English, so I would read them and describe to him what it was, and what was going on. It was great. Truffaut was great with kids, also. At one point—I’m sure I’ve said this in my book, and three or four thousand times already—Truffaut said for him there were literally two things that interested him in all of his movies. That was it. He said life was short—how prescient he was, because he died eight years later. But he said, “I’m never going to have enough time to make all of the movies I want. So I can only make movies about men and women and their relationships, and children and their relationships. That’s it, that’s all that interests me.” That’s everything in the world, but it also rules out a huge amount of things. It mostly rules out anything mechanical. At one point, he was asked to direct Bobby Deerfield, I think. He said, “Too much ‘vroom vroom.’” What he really meant was it wasn’t about men and women falling in love, or children.

Fascinating. To have such a firm grasp on what you want to make movies about and then to do just that.

By now much of the nation was following DiMaggio’s streak on a daily basis through radio updates and newspaper reports. In addition to the fans, DiMaggio’s teammates were acutely aware of what was going on, as evidenced by the drama of this thirty-eighth game. DiMaggio flied out to left in the second, but his fourth inning at bat was more eventful. He hit a sharp grounder which shortstop John Berardino booted for an obvious error. (The twenty-four-year-old Berardino, by the way, would have a forgettable eleven-year career with a handful of baseball teams, but a forty-year career as an actor. Soap fans might remember his thirty-year stint as Dr. Steve Hardy on “General Hospital”.) As DiMaggio crossed first base safely, his Yankee teammates gathered on the top step of the dugout, peering into the pressbox and awaiting the official scorer’s decision. When the error sign was given, the players were furious. DiMaggio was 0 for 2.

After another groundout in the sixth, this time to third, the pressure began to mount, and this is where things got interesting. The Yankees led the Browns 3-1 as they came to bat for what would likely be the final time in the bottom of the eighth inning, and DiMaggio was due up fourth. The first batter, Johnny Sturm, popped up for the first out, but Red Rolfe came up next and managed a walk. With DiMaggio on deck, Tommy Henrich stepped up to the plate but realized that all would be lost if he were to hit into a double play. He had homered earlier to extend the home run streak, but now he was more concerned about DiMaggio’s streak. He called time to consult with Yankee manager Joe McCarthy and suggested that maybe he should lay down a bunt. Even though the score and game situation clearly dictated otherwise, McCarthy gave the okay. Henrich dropped his bunt and advanced Rolfe to second, avoiding the double play and bringing DiMaggio to the plate for one final shot. At this point in the streak, DiMaggio had become more aggressive than usual at the plate, prefering to jump on the first hittable pitch he saw rather than put himself in a two-strike hole or accept a base on balls. In this final at bat, he took the first pitch he saw and roped it past the third baseman and into the left field corner for a double. Both the crowd and his teammates gave him a prolonged ovation. Thirty-eight straight.

As further evidence of the crowd’s focus on DiMaggio, Yankee starting pitcher Marius Russo took a no-hitter into the seventh inning, but no one seemed to notice. The Yankees won the game, 4-1, and remained in a first place tie, but on this day at least, that didn’t seem to matter.

[Photo Credit: Alfred Eisenstaedt]

Photographs by Frank Horvat.

Over at Grantland, Michael Schur presents this Requiem for a Hardass:

In his prime, Youk was an elite hitter, and he fielded two positions quite well. His OPS+ from 2008 to 2010 were 144, 146, and 157 (all OBP-heavy), and over those three years he was among the five or so very best hitters in most ways that matter. He was one of the best players in the game. But what made him special was how weird it was that this was true.

Kevin Youkilis is one of the most oddly shaped human beings in professional athletics. His torso is giant and cylindrical — he looks like a cartoon poor person wearing a barrel. He is completely bald — like, aggressively bald, like he hates hair — except for a fiery red goatee bush that tumbles out of his face like Play-Doh from a fun factory. When he hits, he stands with his feet so close together the ump could tip him over with one quick index-finger jab to the sternum — an action that must have been tempting for many umps over the years — and as he raises the bat above his head and aims the barrel back toward the pitcher in a manner any Little League coach would surely curtail (“No, Kevin, not like that, that’s all wrong … just … is your dad here? I need to talk to him”), his hands are a foot apart on the handle of the bat, and he then slowly slides them toward each other as the pitcher moves through his delivery. It’s fucking insane. (“Kevin? Buddy? Hands together, buddy. See? Like this? … Is your dad here?”) From this stevedore’s frame, alopecic head, and just completely goofy stance came a truly elite ballplayer. Who is also kind of a dick.

[Photo Credit: AP]

[Featured Image (by Frank Horvat) and Video Via Retro New York]

My wife is reading “Charlotte’s Web” to my soon-to-be Kindergartner, one chapter a night before bedtime. The younger guy doesn’t have the attention span for that yet, so we read picture books while they visit with Templeton and get ready for the fair.

When it’s time to say goodnight, one parent stays in the room while they drift/wrestle to sleep. Allegiances from story time carry over. The little guy demands that I stay in the room; my older son wants my wife. Tonight it was my turn and it was a disaster. My older son wailed for Mommy for a long time. I pleaded half-heartedly, but basically was just hoping he was going to run out of tears.

Finally I got up and and calmly walked to the kitchen, snatched the iPad from the wall socket and, just as calmly, re-entered the room. I said, “I know you want Mommy, but I if I stay I can tell you the baseball scores.” He jumped into bed like Jack Flash and the “tears,” if there ever were any, dried up before his head hit the pillow.

In the dark I whispered updates and he counted runs the way some people count sheep. By the time the Yankees got to six, he was asleep and the Yanks were on their way to an easy victory.

The Yankees won a game tonight the old-fashioned way. By kicking Cleveland’s ass up and down; by having all the best players on the field and dominating every aspect of the game. Hiroki Kuroda’s splitter dug into the dirt around home plate with such precision that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he was writing a message down there – “Sit Down” or something to that effect. The Indians swung over it again and again and Kuroda racked up seven strikeouts.

The Yankees scored two runs in each of the first three innings. Everyone’s noticed that Robinson Cano is, suddenly and by far, the best hitter on the team? He drove in three on a ringing two-run double and a solo homer. Dewayne Wise knocked in another three runs – two with a homer and one with a triple.

But this 7-1 win is best summed up by the three outs of the top of the eighth. Girardi tried to squeeze the eighth out of Kuroda, but he was over 100 pitches and Sin-Soo Choo’s double put Indians at second and third with no outs. Clay Rapada replaced Kuroda and faced three Indians. None of them were especially turned around by his sidewinding delivery and all three slashed dangerous looking drives into right field.

Nick Swisher, breaking on balls like he was Carnac the Magnificent, tracked down all three. He raced in and towards the line to make an excellent sliding grab on the first ball. He went back toward right center to stab the second. And he ran deep into the right field corner to haul in the third. It’s not so much that any of the catches were difficult, it’s that he covered a ton of ground each time. And he did it with an ever-expanding grin. By the time he caught the third ball right in front of the fans in the right field corner, his smile was epic.

He led off the next inning and I was kind of glad he struck out. Had he hit his second homer of the game, he might have pulled the muscles in his face.

Photo by Elsa/Getty Images

Should the thunder and lightning easy up Hiroki Kuroda and the Yanks will host the Indians tonight at the Stadium:

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Raul Ibanez LF
Eric Chavez 3B
Dewayne Wise CF
Chris Stewart C

Never mind the letdown: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Drew Medlin]

Here is an insightful piece on “The Great Gatsby” by Jay McInerney written for the Guardian:

The enduring appeal of Fitzgerald’s third novel, as with many great novels, is partly dependent on a benign misinterpretation on the part of readers, a surrender to fascination with wealth and glamour, and the riotous frivolity of the jazz age. Fitzgerald was by no means an uncritical observer, as some have suggested; the most villainous of these characters are the wealthiest, and Nick Carraway is something of a middle-class prig, who, much as he tries to reserve judgment, is ultimately sickened by all the profligacy and the empty social rituals of his summer among the wealthy of Long Island. “I wanted no more riotous excursion with privileged glimpses into the human heart,” he says at the end. And yet Fitzgerald had a kind of double agent’s consciousness about the tinsel of the jazz age, and about the privileged world of inherited wealth; he couldn’t help stopping to admire and glamorise the glittering interiors of which his midwestern heart ultimately disapproved. Gatsby’s lavish weekly summer parties are over the top, ridiculous, peopled with drunks and poseurs, and yet we can’t help feeling a sense of loss when he suddenly shuts them down after it’s clear that Daisy – for whom the whole show was arranged in the first place – doesn’t quite approve. We shouldn’t approve either, and yet in memory they seem like parties to which we wish we’d been invited.

In Gatsby and his best fiction, Fitzgerald manages to strike a balance between his attraction and repulsion, between his sympathy and his judgment. As a middle-class, midwestern Irish Catholic from what Edmund Wilson called “a semi-excluded background” vis-a-vis the Ivy League and the world of eastern privilege, he seems capable of double vision, the appearance of viewing character, from inside and outside. Fitzgerald’s best narrators always seem to be partaking of the festivities even as they shiver outside with their noses pressed up against the glass. In this manner, Nick Carraway doesn’t entirely approve of Jay Gatsby, the party-giving parvenu with his pink suits and his giant yellow circus wagon of a car. But he deeply admires Jay Gatsby the lover and the dreamer, the man for whom the mansion and the bespoke clothes were only the means to reclaim his first love. Nick admires his fidelity to that first love and his ability to keep it pure and undefiled, even as he wades through the muck to pursue it, even if the object of that love isn’t, in the flesh, worthy of such devotion.

[Photo Credit: Heather.Dyan]

DiMaggio didn’t wait nearly as long as he had the previous day to keep his streak alive. He smashed a two-run homer to left in the fourth inning, extending the team streak to twenty straight games with a homerun and moving his number to thirty-seven in a row. He was now only four games shy of George Sisler’s 41-game streak. The homerun was DiMaggio’s 16th long ball of the year, and it moved him into first place in the American League in that category. Building on this early lead, the Yanks went on to top the Browns, 7-5, and moved into a tie with Cleveland for first place in the American League.

[Photo Credit: Carl Mydans]

This is a most delicious dressing from April Bloomfield. Curiously strong but excellent. I had it on asparagus recently and it was lovely.

The recipe, from Bloomfield’s new book, is adapted here at Food 52.

[Photo Credit: James Ransom]

Well, I never kept a dollar past sunset/it always burned a hole in my pants…

[Photo Via: Blossom]

“Red Sun Rising” By Bleed Clarity [Via Beneath Your Soul]

Alex Maclean looks at New York’s hidden skyline spaces. Dig the “Up on the Roof” gallery over at Fast Company.

R.A. Dickey’s scoreless streak ended in the third inning tonight when Mark Teixeira’s sacrifice fly score the first run of the game. Nick Swisher followed with a three-run home run and with C.C. Sabathia on the mound, things looked good for the Yanks.

Nobody, however, had the good sense to alert Robinson Cano that there was a ball game going on. He botched a throw from Chris Stewart that led to a run and Cadillaced a routine ground ball into an error with one out in the sixth. The Yanks were ahead 5-2 but by the time the Mets were retired, Sabathia was on the bench and the score was tied.

Cano knew better than to smile.

If you are looking for a cheesy redemption story, Cano was happy to oblige. He hit a long solo home run against Miguel Bautista to lead off the eighth inning. It proved to be the difference.

David Robertson worked around a two out base runner–and a balk–in the eighth, and Raphael Soriano did the same in the ninth (his strike out against David Wright to start the inning was a tense, exciting confrontation).

By that point, the rain poured on the field. The Yankees appeared to have the game in hand, then to blow it, but Cano–who was partially responsible for squandering the lead–came through with the biggest hit of the night.

Final Score: Yanks 6, Mets 5.

Yanks take the season series, 5-1.

[Photo Credit: Elsa/Getty Images]

C.C. vs. R.A. ‘Nuff said. Terrific match-up.

1. Jeter, SS
2. Granderson, CF
3. A-Rod, 3B
4. Cano, 2B
5. Teixeira, 1B
6. Swisher, RF
7. Ibanez, LF
8. Stewart, C
9. Sabathia, LHP

Never mind that damn knuckler: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

Kevin Youkilis has been traded to the Chicago White Sox. Jon Heyman broke the story. Details to come…

Youk was a classic Boston Red Sox, one of the dreaded “dirt dogs” and out of respect, I hated his guts. He was a tough, pain-in-the-ass out for a long time. Now, other than Pedrioa and Ortiz, the old Red Sox are but a memory.

[Photo Credit: Willa Dios]

Cool sounds on a hot day.

[Photo Credit: Good Veg]

The St. Louis Browns, one of the worst teams in baseball, came to Yankee Stadium for a three-game series, and the Yankees took advantage immediately, taking the first game in a walk, 9-1. Red Rolfe homered for the Bombers in the second inning, keeping the homerun streak alive, but DiMaggio made the fans wait a bit longer to see if he could extend his hitting streak. He grounded out in the first, popped out in the third, and then fell victim to the dimensions of the Stadium as he smashed a long fly to left center, only to have it hauled in some 457 feet from the plate for a long out. Finally, in the eighth inning, the Clipper ended the suspense and came through with a clean single over the head of the shortstop. Elsewhere, Ted Williams was “slumping.” He was hitless for the second game in a row, and his average plummeted to .403.

The Yankees had lost three straight going into last night’s game and frustration built by the inning as Chris Young was stingy and kept the Bombers off the board. Frustration turned into irritation when Young hit a two-out RBI single in the sixth inning to put the Mets up, 3-0.

And then, over the course of four pitches, the game changed.

Mark Teixeira led off the seventh against Young and worked the count full. He hit a foul tip that was dropped by the catcher, Josh Thole. The next pitch was over the plate but low for ball four. Close, and on a different night with a different umpire it could have easily been called a strike. Nick Swisher took a big swing at the first pitch he saw and it was likely his swing that caught right fielder Lucas Duda off-guard. Duda stepped back, hesitated, and then ran forward. Swisher hit the ball off the end of the bat and was so sure that he’d made an easy out that he ducked his head and loafed out of the box. But Duda’s hesitation was costly as he ran ahead and dove for the ball. He missed and the ball squirted behind him. Teixeira moved to third and even without hustling Swisher made it to second.

Before Yankee fans could say “runners in scoring position” Raul Ibanez hit a line drive on the first pitch he saw from Young. It was a seed, headed for the right field corner, and whoosh! it went over the fence, a three run homer. Four pitches and the game had changed.

Jon Rauch relieved Young, struck out Russell Martin and got ahead of pinch-hitter Eric Chavez 0-2 when he looked to waste a pitch up in the zone. It was at Chavez’s shoulders but the lefty fought it off and hit a fly ball to left. It appeared to be a long foul ball, but it stayed fair and went over the fence to put the Yankees ahead 4-3.

That’s how the score remained as the Bombers worked out of trouble in almost every inning–David Robertson pulled his usual Houdini act in the eighth, walking two and striking out the side–as it was the Mets’ turn to come up short with men on. Raphael Soriano got the save. The last out, a long fly ball off the bat of Daniel Murphy, looked scary coming off his bat. But it didn’t have that good sound and it fell into Swisher’s glove.

Yanks look to end their modest three-game skid tonight with Ivan Nova on the hill. I like their chances agains Chris Young. This weekend will get a whole lot more uncomfortable for Yankee fans should the Mets win what with R.A. Dickey pitching tomorrow night.

1. Jeter SS
2. Granderson CF
3. A-Rod 3B
4. Cano 2B
5. Teixeira 1B
6. Swisher RF
7. Ibanez LF
8. Martin C
9. Nova P

Never mind those scrappy underdogs: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Shannon Stapleton]