Monthly Archives: November 2012

To celebrate our 10th anniversary I’m proud to announce a new feature called “The Banter Gold Standard.”

Three times a week we’ll reprint classic magazine and newspaper stories that you can’t find on-line. In the coming months you’ll be treated to gems from the likes of Pete Dexter, Luc Sante, Gary Cartwright, Grover Lewis, Charlie Pierce, Paul Solotaroff, Richard Ben Cramer, W.C. Heinz, John Lardner, Dan Jenkins, Pat Jordan, Peter Richmond, John Ed Bradley, Leigh Montville, Ira Berkow, Larry Merchant, Bill Nack, Richard Hoffer, Tom Boswell, Tony Kornheiser, Arnold Hano, Joe Flaherty, and Rich Cohen. And that’s just for starters.

The first piece will be up shortly.

In the meantime, dig these links to reprints we’ve already posted round here:

Richard Ben Cramer

The Ballad of Johnny France

Serious Business (Yankee Stadium)

Pete Dexter

Dying for Art’s Sake (LeRoy Neiman)

No Trespassing (Jim Brown)

The Apprenticeship of Randall Cobb (Tex Cobb)

Two for Toozday (John Matuszak)

LeeRoy, He Ain’t Here No More (LeeRoy Yarbrough)

The Old Man and the River (Norman Maclean)

W.C. Heinz

One Throw (Short Story)

The Happiest Hooligan of them All (Pepper Martin)

Death of a Racehorse

Speaking of Sports (Howard Cosell)

Maybe Tomorrow, Maybe the Next Day (Jeremy Vernon)

Pat Jordan

Trouble in Paradise (Steve and Cyndy Garvey)

Breaking the Wall (Burt Reynolds)

Bad (Rorion Gracie)

The Curious Childhood of an 11-Year Old Beauty Queen

The Horse Lovers (TV movie of the week)

Inside Marilyn Chambers

A Different Drummer

Running Cars

The Haircut

Dad’s Last Visit

George Kimball

Opening Day at Fenway Park

Fighting and Drinking with the Rats at Yankee Stadium

Carlo Rotella

Bedtime Story (Marvin Hagler)

John Schulian

One Night Only (Levon Helm)

My Ears are Bent (Joseph Mitchell)

No Regrets: A Hard-Boiled Life (James Crumley)

The Professional (George Kimball)

Jack Mann (An Appreciation by John Schulian, Tom Callahan, and Dave McKenna)

Bet a Million (Vic Ziegel)

Robert Ward

Reggie Jackson in No-Man’s Land 

[Photo Via: Creative Flourishes]

Ten plus two…

Twelve

[Photo Credit: Terry Richardson]

During the storm The Wife and I tried to make an apple pie. Well, we made one, all right, but our dumb asses–and I’m not assigning blame, here–forgot one whole cup of flower and the result was apple gloop. Over the weekend I tried again and yup, this time it worked, even though I undercooked it slightly so that the granny smith apples were still al dente.

Now, the only trouble with making a pie for two is that, well, you’ve got a ton of pie leftover. We were both too lazy to bring it to work so I packed some of it in a plastic container and have been nibbling away ever since, diet be damned.

We didn’t get much sleep last night but we were happy this morning. And you know what I had for breakfast as I watched the election results?

Yo got that right: All-American Apple Pie.

Recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

To-day marks the 10th anniversary of Bronx Banter.

I started the site to learn how to write. Now, it is a way of life, part of what I do and who I am.

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the jernt through the years, from my fellow writers, to the loyal readers.

Jeter fist pump. It’s a day to celebrate.

Two takes on the cancelling of the New York Marathon: Chris Jones and Emma Span.

[Photo Via: Men’s Fitness]

Zucchini Risotto over at Lemon Fire Brigade.

Over at SB Nation check out this long article I wrote on an old friend:

He’d played a lot of positions over the years. Today, he was a pitcher. It was more a testament to his willingness to be a good teammate than his talent. His curveball was non-existent, his knuckler average, and his fastball wasn’t all that fast. But he worked quickly and threw strikes, valued skills on a Sunday in the Westchester-Putnam (N.Y.) Men’s Senior Baseball League. The MSBL is an 18-and-older organization whose motto is “Don’t go soft, play hardball!” The national website claims more than 45,000 members, and it’s one of several amateur adult baseball programs to form over the past several decades. Nationwide, there are perhaps as many as 100,000 grown men still playing baseball every week.

“I don’t go to court thinking I’m Clarence Darrow,” Birbrower told me this summer. “But I hit a ball in the gap and think I’m Don Mattingly.”

For the past 20 years, Birbrower, a lawyer and divorced father of a son with autism, has played ball for teams like the Alleycats and Robins, the Smokers, and now the Braves. He was the guy who’d talk about at-bats from as far back as Pee Wee League. He had stories about everything: plays the scrubs made, wise cracks from guys on the bench, what the third baseman’s father yelled at an ump. But he loved nothing more than talking about himself. Anyone who has hit a ball on the sweet part of the bat knows it’s one of the greatest feelings you can have with your pants on, and Birbrower knew that rush as well as anyone. When he was a sophomore in high school he once hit five home runs in one week. It changed the way he saw himself. He wasn’t a regular guy who had gotten lucky; he was a star and now expected more, from both himself and the game.

“Until recently, everything was exaggeration,” Birbrower said. “If I went for a run it couldn’t be a nice run. I would be like, okay, I should run a marathon. I should write a book about running a marathon. Fuck it, I should write the best book about running a marathon that’s ever been written.”

Hope you like one. It’s about a kid who has become an admirable man.

A couple of reviews of the new Denzel Washington movie: David Denby in the New Yorker, Glenn Kenny for MSN.

Here’s Denby:

Washington allows his body to go puffy and slack. His gaze is unfocussed, his walk loose and shambling, except when Whip does some coke, at which point Washington moves in a confident, swinging lope. Whip is a proud man, but Washington lets us see the narcissism and the self-pity behind the pride, a ready access to anger that gives Whip a moment of relief, as he tells people off, drawing deeper into guilt and futility. He gets drunk when he most needs to be sober. His messes are defiant, as if he thought that they were an accomplishment. The causes of his alcoholism are not examined, which is just as well—explanations of a condition so elemental and encompassing risk banality. As the film goes along, steadily, slowly, it puts us in the ambivalent position of admiring Denzel Washington’s bravery and candor and disliking the character he plays. We get tired of watching Whip fail, and we’re caught between dismayed pity and a longing to see him punished. Only a great actor could have pulled off this balancing act. I was reminded of Laurence Olivier’s bravura in “The Entertainer,” in which he plays an exhausted old vaudevillian. At a certain point, great actors want to show us the truth of something that may be far from their lives but that somehow they understand, intimately, all too well.

Via Laughing Squid, pop this.

[Picture by Craig Drake]

Over at Lo Hud, Chad Jennings examines places where they Yanks look to save money this winter.

At River Ave, Mike Axisa checks out the pros and cons of Torii Hunter.

[Picture Via: Comic Book Artwork]

“Silly Sun Walk” by Masha Sardari

This 1997 Atlantic magazine story by Ian Frazier is terrific:

Mr. Tytell goes to his shop two or three days a week, depending on how he’s feeling. Customers who want to see him call his answering machine, and he calls back and sets up appointments. A sign on the wall that says

PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR YOUR TYPEWRITER
WHETHER IT’S FRUSTRATED, INHIBITED, SCHIZOID
OR WHAT HAVE YOU

contributes to the doctor-patient quality of the visits. Plus he’s wearing a white lab coat and you’re not. Some customers arrive in limousines, which wait nearby until the sessions are through. Mr. Tytell has fixed typewriters for such people as Perle Mesta and the Archbishop of Lebanon and Charles Kuralt. Some customers climb sweating from the subway station and stop for a moment in the daylight of Fulton Street to switch the case containing the heavy machine from one hand to the other. Because of a mishap involving a romance novelist, a treasured typewriter, and the wreck of a parcel-service truck, Mr. Tytell now refuses to ship typewriters under any circumstances. Getting a typewriter repaired by him is a hands-on, person-to-person deal.

Several afternoons last spring I sat on a swiveling typing chair by the clear space on the table where Mr. Tytell lets people test their typewriters before taking them home, and he and Mrs. Tytell and I talked. “People get very emotionally involved with their typewriters,” Mr. Tytell said. “I understand it — I talk to typewriters myself sometimes. On the one hand, you have people who love a machine for whatever reason. On the other, sometimes you find a person with an extreme dislike, almost a hatred, for a particular machine. It’s funny how the two go together. Recently I got a call from a lady and she had a portable typewriter, like new, and she wanted it out of her apartment right away. It’s from a divorce or something; I didn’t ask. She’s not selling it, she says she’ll pay me if I’ll just come and take it away. Well, three hours earlier I had gotten a call from another lady; her husband had just lost a typewriter he loved, somebody stole it, and it was the exact same make and model this other lady described. So I went and picked up the machine, and when I got back, I called the other lady, and she rushed right down and bought it and carried it out the door. She was overjoyed.

“People hug and kiss me when I fix their typewriters sometimes. That call just now was from a lady I did a Latvian typewriter for — she was so happy I could hardly get her off the phone. I don’t know why, a typewriter touches something inside. A couple — she’s the secretary to the Episcopal Church in Manhattan — brought in an old Underwood for an overhaul, and I made it sing, and they came by the shop with coffee and cake to thank me, and the husband wrote me a poem in iambic pentameter. It’s called ‘Tytell, the Wizard King of Fulton Street.’ You see, people get carried away. They write me letters, they send me fruit baskets, they give me miniature typewriters made out of porcelain. Almost everybody I deal with is an interesting person of some kind. Here’s an invoice for a job I did for the only harp mechanic in the New York area, a guy who tunes and repairs harps, and he’s decided he wants to translate Homer from the original Greek, and he wants me to make a typewriter in Homeric Greek for him. That’s no problem — I’ve done ancient-Greek typewriters before. I even did a typewriter in hieroglyphics one time, for a curator at the Brooklyn Museum.”

…And when the band plays “Hail to the Chief”…

[Painting by Jasper Johns]

Over man Cliff with a good piece over at SB Nation–The Conscience of a Lapsed Yankee Fan:

My favorite baseball books are about losers, oddballs, and failures, and what draws me back to every new baseball season isn’t whether or not the Yankees are going to win 95 or 100 games (they’ve won fewer than 94 just twice in the last 16 seasons), it’s seeing how the teams on the fringes perform. Is that rebuild working? Will this be the year that talented young team coalesces into a contender? Will that big trade acquisition or free agent signing take his new team to the next level? Can his previous team compensate for his loss? Can that talented but star-crossed team can stay healthy enough to contend? Did that perennial playoff loser miss its window for a championship? With that managerial change have any impact? How will that new stadium play? How ugly will those new uniforms really be? How will the new playoff or scheduling format impact the pennant races?

As for the Yankees, I don’t worry about them, and that’s what worries me. I want my daughter to love baseball, in part because I’ve dedicated part of my life to it and don’t want her to feel shut out of that. Baseball is a novel that unfolds over years, individual teams are puzzles that take years to solve. The Yankees, however, are more of a long-running television procedural. They hit all the same beats and catch phrases, the credits roll, and then they do it all over again. I spent my childhood hoping I’d see the Yankees win the World Series during my lifetime (yes, really). I suspect I’m now going to spend my daughter’s childhood hoping she’ll see them have a losing season.

A recipe for sweet potato fries over at Food 52.

[Photo Credit: Add a Spoonful of Sugar]

Over at Poynter, Caitlin Johnston has the story of how Iwan Baan got the New York Magazine cover shot.

“Eines Morgens im November” By Quint Buchholz via Dream Landscapes.

Over at Lenscratch…

dig this wonderful photo gallery by Robert Herman.

“Unfaithful Servant” The Band

[Photo Credit: Adios Sergio]

Yeah, that was the commute this morning. Most of the people in my vicinity had a sense of humor but there were still some cross words.

Ill.