Monthly Archives: June 2015

“Davis House” by Edward Hopper (1926)

Forget Paris, if you’re in Boulder, Colorado this summer, you’ve got to hunt around and try some of my man’s pretzels. Or pretzel breads. He sells them all around town–and yeah, he’s been a Banterite for years now. Follow him on Twitter. You can even get at me if you know you’ll be in that neck of the woods and I’ll find out who sells his goods.

In the meantime, feast your eyes on this.

Can I get an Amen?

Ivan Nova, welcome back.

The Score Truck delivered, clobbering Cole Hamels and the Phillies to the tune of 10-2.

Picture by Bags

It’s the return on Ivan Nova as the Yanks look to stop sucking. At the very least, they’re looking to avoid being swept.

Welcome back, Hoss, no pressure.

Yanks have a tough assignment this afternoon in Cole Hamels.

Brett Gardner CF
Chase Headley 3B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Mark Teixeira 1B
Carlos Beltran RF
Chris Young LF
John Ryan Murphy C
Didi Gregorius SS
Jose Pirela 2B

Nice to see Tex back too.

Never mind this losing:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Eric Branco.

Writing for The Independent, here’s Martin Scorsese on Carol Reed’s classic, The Third Man:

About four months ago, I screened a beautiful 35mm print of the picture for my daughter and her friends. “Why do we keep watching this?” I suppose it’s [Joseph] Cotten and [Alida] Valli – that’s the emotional core of the picture. For instance, the scene where Holly Martins (Cotten) finally goes to her apartment. He’s a little drunk, and he tells her he loves her and he knows he doesn’t have a chance. That’s when she says, “The cat only liked Harry.” So that leads right into the great revelation of Harry Lime in the doorway with the cat – which is iconic. But it’s more than that – it’s one of the great epiphanies in movies: the cat turning the corner and nestling itself on those wing-tip shoes, and then Harry Lime being revealed when the light is turned on in the doorway and it shines in his face.

Remember Walker Percy’s great novel The Moviegoer? He refers to that moment in such a beautiful, special way. It became a moment internationally, a shared experience for a vast audience seeing that film. It’s not just a dramatic revelation – there’s something about Orson Welles’ smile at that point that shifts everything to another level, and it sustains no matter how many times you see it. Welles comes into the picture about halfway through. That’s the first time you actually see him, after you’ve spent so much time picturing him in your mind because everyone has been talking about him and thinking about him. So that might be the best revelation – or the best reveal, as they say – in all of cinema.

S’long, Holly.

Man at work. Seen on 231st Street in the Bronx.

How’d they get my name and number?

[Photo Credit Anthony Gerace via MPD]

David Lebovitz visits the Le Creuset factory. This is just an incredibly dope post.

Et tu, Dellin?

Another tough night for a Yankee starter, and an even rougher one for the Yankees’ closer as the Phillies beat the Yanks again, 11-6. Dellin Betances had given up one run all season. Last night he gave up four.

Alex Rodriguez had a couple of hits, including a solo home run, but with runners on second and third, one man out in the bottom of the sixth, he could not drive a run home. Brian McCann followed and grounded out to end the inning and that was the last real threat posed by the Bombers (Brett Gardner hit another dinger too because that’s, apparently, what Brett Gardner does).

So this is what it is–another losing streak. Today won’t get any easier despite the return of Ivan Nova as Cole Hamels is pitching for the Phils.

We can only hope, true to form, that this losing streak will be followed by a winning streak.

Picture by Bags

Brett Gardner CF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Brian McCann C

Carlos Beltran RF

Garrett Jones 1B

Chris Young LF

Didi Gregorius SS

Jose Pirela 2B

It’s CC and get your head-out-of-your-ass boys.

Never mind last night:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags

Chica Who? Chica Boo.

Photo Via Back Then.

Over at The New York Review of Books, check out this essay by Mark Strand on Edward Hopper:

Recent major exhibitions in London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid testify to the universality of his appeal. It couldn’t be just the way New York looked in the first half of the twentieth century or the dated look of hotel rooms, of people in offices, staring blankly or dreamily into space, that accounts for such interest. Something lifts the paintings beyond the representational registers of realism into the suggestive, quasi-mystical realm of meditation. Moments of the real world, the one we all experience, seem mysteriously taken out of time. The way the world glimpsed in passing from a train, say, or a car, will reveal a piece of a narrative whose completion we may or may not attempt, but whose suggestiveness will move us, making us conscious of the fragmentary, even fugitive nature of our own lives. This may account for the emotional weight that so many Hopper paintings possess. And why we lapse lazily into triteness when trying to explain their particular power. Again and again, words like “loneliness” or “alienation” are used to describe the emotional character of his paintings.

My own encounters with this elusive element in Hopper’s work began when I would commute from Croton-on-Hudson to New York each Saturday to take a children’s art class in one of those buildings on the south side of Washington Square that were eventually torn down to make room for NYU’s law school. This was in 1947. Just a year after Hopper painted Approaching a City (1946), I would look out from the train window onto the rows of tenements whose windows I could look into and try to imagine what living in one of those apartments would be like. And then at 99th Street we would enter the tunnel that would take us to Grand Central. It was thrilling to suddenly go underground, travel in the dark, and be delivered to the masses of people milling about in the cavernous terminal. Years later, when I saw Approaching a City for the first time, I instantly recalled those trips into Manhattan and have ever since. And Hopper, for me, has always been associated with New York, a New York glimpsed in passing, sweetened with nostalgia, a city lodged in memory.

Alexandra gives Blueberry Cobbler.  Diggum, smack.

Picture by Rosalyn Drexler via This Isn’t Happiness. 

If you happen to be in Paris this summer this sure looks like a lovely show.

Big Mike, what’s doing on, Dude?

The Yanks pitching was horseshit for the most part last night and got their tits lit by the lowly Phillies.

The hitters put in work, scored 8 runs but it wasn’t enough.

Final Score: Phillies 11,  Yanks 8. 

Phooey.

[Photo Credit: Jim McIsaac/Getty Images]

Nova’s coming back this week. Tonight gives Big Mike.

Brett Gardner CF

Chase Headley 3B

Alex Rodriguez DH

Brian McCann C

Carlos Beltran RF

Garrett Jones 1B

Didi Gregorius SS

Chris Young LF

Stephen Drew 2B

Never mind playing down to the competition:

Picture by Bags

R.I.P. Jack Rollins: showbiz legend.

[Photo Via: Bob Weide]

File Sunday’s game under the Every-beating-deserves-another file.

Masahiro Tanaka had an off-day, J.D. Martinez hit three home runs, and the Tigers pounded the Yanks, 12-4.

Peter Richmond is a good man, loyal friend, and a gifted writer. Here he is at his best, writing about his father for GQ in December of 1993. The article was the genesis of Richmond’s beautiful memoir, My Father’s War: A Son’s Journey.

To celebrate Father’s Day—and much respect and love to all the dad’s out there—I can think of no finer piece to share with you. Head on over to the Beast and check out–“My Father’s War”:

He survived Guadalcanal, and then New Britain, and then Peleliu, and came home in 1944 to take over the family business, manufacturing paper bags in a gray factory next to the railroad tracks in Long Island City. He married the woman who would become my mother and moved to Westchester County, and died in 1960, at the age of 44, when I was 7, so I never had much of a chance to ask him about his war.

But it was always there. I could hold it to my face. My father’s war was tucked into the trunk that sat in the darkest corner of the cellar: a Japanese flag, stained with Rorschach blotches of blood, the red circle still bright, the field of white crowded with the Japanese characters that identified the man whose blood graced it.

As a child, I spent a lot of time with the flag, running it through my hands, marveling at the liquid feel of the silk, at how different it was from the rest of my father’s memorabilia: the .30-caliber Japanese machine gun, the Japanese hand grenade, the rifles–all of them so inconceivably heavy and redolent of good grease and iron that I knew they carried the real weight of war.

Picture by Bags