Monthly Archives: January 2014

I just got The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook and it’s not only handsome but approachable. Can’t wait to try some of the recipes.

Like this one for apple pie.

“Woman with Yellow Flowers” by Elmer Bischoff (1958)

Thanks to Egotrip to pointing out this dope Solid Steel PE mix. 

Neil Young is performing at Carnegie Hall this week (our pal Matt B caught one of shows). The Times had a piece about the first performance.

Then this morning on the subway I read “Loss Prevention” a short story in Richard Lange’s impressive collection Dead Boys.  Here’s how it begins:

Every junkie I’ve ever known has had a thing for Neil Young. Be he a punk, a metalhead, or just your garden-variety handlebar-mustachioed dirtbag, if he hauls around a monkey, he’s going to have Decade in his collection, and he’s bound to ruin more than a few parties by insisting that you play at least some of it, no matter that the prettiest girl in the room is begging for something she can dance to. Even if he gets off dope, he sticks with Neil, because by then Neil’s become the soundtrack to his outlaw past. Let him hear “Old Man” or “Sugar Mountain” years after the fact, and everything in him will hum like a just-struck tuning fork as mind and body and blood harmonize in mutual longing for a time when desire was an easy itch to scratch.

So this is why, when the deejay announces that a rock block of Neil is coming up next, three classic cuts in a row, I know there’s no hope of Jim budging until the last song ends.

First up this season: the Rodriguez suspension. Then, Tanaka. Here’s the latest on Rodriguez, as reported by Wallace Matthews at ESPN. 

Picture by Pawel Kuczynski. 

Down from the heavens above:

[Photo Credit: Miro Simko via MPD]

Goodness. 

“Delfina Flores” by Diego Rivera (1937)

Over at Buzzfeed, check out this terrific interview with George Saunders talking about Arthur Miller’s memoir, Timebends:

CW: What drew you into this book, initially? What kept you reading, and what inspired the recommendation today?

GS: At first I was just loving the descriptions of his childhood and being reminded of the fact that the only thing that will evoke the world as we actually experience it is great sentences – the difference between a boring, banal account of childhood and one that feels properly rich and mysterious (i.e., like one’s own actual childhood), is the phrase-by-phrase quality of the prose. Perceptions truthfully remembered make great sentences and great sentences provide the way for that truthful remembering to happen – something like that. I guess I’m just saying it was a pleasure to read such intelligent writing.

But also – lately I find myself interested in anything historical that can open up my mind afresh and get me really seeing the past, with the purpose of adding that data to my evolving moral-ethical view of the world. (We only live in one time but can read in many, etc., etc.) To have a witness as intelligent and articulate as Miler is almost (almost!) like having been there oneself. So here, wow, the stories and details – New York before the war, all his crazy relatives and their various ends; stories about Odets, Kazan, et al, Miller’s deep periods of artistic immersion, life with Monroe, trips to Russia, walking around with Frank Lloyd Wright (and finding him unlikeable), the moral-spiritual breakdown of Untermeyer, the way Lee J. Cobb first “got” Willy Loman, and on and on – I just came away thinking, “Jeez, what a life. Good for you, Arthur Miller. We should all live so fully.”

I also found myself really excited by Miller’s basic assumptions about art: it’s important, it is supposed to change us, it’s not supposed to be trivial or merely clever, it’s one human being trying to urgently communicate with another. But it was also exciting to see his uncertainty around this stance – the way he couldn’t always execute, and sometimes doubted those ideas, and found himself fighting against the prevailing spirit of the time – like in the 1960s, when everything felt, to him, ironic and faux-cynical. I found myself inspired by the way he went through his life, always holding out a high vision of what art is supposed to do – he strikes me as having been a real fighter.

I read the book when it came out. Sounds like it’s time to dive back in.
[Photo Credit: Elliot Erwitt]

Over at Deadspin I found two posts–with related links–of interest: one on Greg Maddux, the other on Jerry Coleman.  Dig in.

Cool.

Swiping more wonderfulness from Kottke, dig Greg Alessandrini’s NYC photographs…

Via the always nourishing Kottke, check out Studs Terkel’s 1963 interview with Dylan. 

Yes, please.

Still crazy…

[Painting by Robert Henri]

Rothko.

Funny people.

Ray Ratto delivers the best–and least self-important–Hall of Fame column of the season.

The vote comes this afternoon and word around the web says that Maddux, Glavine, Biggio and the Big Hurt all make it.

Jay Jaffe’s got the scoop. 

I was hipped to Belgian and French comics as a kid. Tintin and Asterix, of course, but Gaston LaGaffe was my favorite. I couldn’t read french but I loved Gaston’s slapstick comedy and Andre Franquin’s drawing style. Gaston is a goofball, a guy forever trying to find ways to avoid work.

This here image is one that struck me as the ultimate escape. It’s Gaston’s cave, underneath a mountain of paperwork. Cozy and serene. Yeah.

Seriously easy soup.