Blog Archives

Afflictor is a site worth book-marking. Here’s a recent post on a 1958 BBC conversation between Ian Fleming and and Raymond Chandler.

Hefty…

[Photo Via: Ann Street Studio]

“Chair with Bowl and Towel” by Roger Fry (1917-18)

Over at ESPN, Wallace Matthews and Andrew Marchand take a look at the Yankees’ weakness for drafting and developing talent. 

[Photo Credit: Edward Linsmier for The New York Times]

The Tramp.

What if the winter Olympics were in New York?

From the excellent Fairfield Writer’s blog check out these two long appreciations of Elmore Leonard. They are packed with goodies.

Part One.

Part Two.

Coolin’.

You know it’s bad when cars in midtown are sliding all over the place, or just getting stuck. But that’s how it is today in Manhattan. It ain’t pretty.

More snow due this weekend.

Which all just sets us up for a beautiful spring!

[Photo Credit: Robert Sabo/N.Y. Daily News]

“Still Life” by Maurice de Vlaminck (1905)

April Bloomfield’s English Porridge is damn good.  I’ve made it often this winter.

David Waldstein has the story for the Times:

Other major league teams have had as many as three Japanese players on the roster at the same time, and one — the Boston Red Sox — even briefly had four. But none have had the prestigious group the Yankees now has. As a result, the entourage of Japanese news media trailing the Yankees in 2014 could be a record-setter.

When Darvish joined the Texas Rangers in 2012, he was met at their spring training facility by about 150 reporters, the overwhelming majority of them from Japan, according to John Blake, the Rangers’ executive vice president for communications. And when Darvish arrived, the Rangers already had Koji Uehara and Yoshinori Tateyama on their roster. But only Darvish was a star.

The Yankees, in contrast, were already attracting a great deal of attention from the Japanese news media because Suzuki and Kuroda are such prominent players, with Suzuki almost surely headed to the Hall of Fame. Adding to the Japanese interest in the Yankees is the simple fact they are the most famous baseball team in the world and that Hideki Matsui played in the Bronx from 2003 to 2009.

[Photo Credit: Emily Veach for The Wall Street Journal]

I haven’t read much by George Saunders but I have read many interviews with him and think he’s really wonderful, the kind of guy I’d like to know.

Here is a “personal history” essay he wrote back in 2003 for the New Yorker:

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

[Photo Credit: Satoki Nagata]

We need a laugh.

Stir it up.

[Photo Credit: Jan Pypers]

Oliver Want on drum machines. 

Pork and Chive Dumplings. Yes, please.

From Glenn Kenny:

Art Pepper, the jazz saxophonist, wrote, with his wife Laurie Pepper, one of the great books about art and addiction, his memoir Straight Life. After describing his childhood, and his discovery of music, and his development as a musician in the Central Avenue “scene” of the 1940s, and his stint in the Army, Pepper writes, with great frankness, of the sexual compulsions he struggled with as a rising star in jazz. Then he writes about the first time he got high on heroin, and how, in a flash, he realized he had “found God.”

“I loved myself, everything about myself, ” Pepper writes. “I loved my talent. I had lost the sour taste of the filthy alcohol and the feeling of the bennies and the strips that put chills up and down my spine. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila”—Sheila Harris, the singer who was getting Pepper high—”and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, ‘This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I’m going to do, whatever dues I have to pay…’ And then I knew that I would get busted and I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn’t be weak; I wouldn’t be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the nonreal, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends—the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they’re black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on—the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don’t know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness—the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, never were intending to be anything.”

In Pepper’s unstuck-in-time rant of resentment (the actual scene is set in 1950, but his voice goes ahead to his stint in prison, and speaks to a number of attitudes he was still coming to terms with as he was composing the book) will of course remind one of Lou Reed’s song “Heroin,” in which the protagonist, asserting his intention to “nullify [his] life,” sneers at “you sweet girls with your sweet talk,” and celebrates the fact that “when the smack begins to flow/then I really don’t care anymore/abouts all the Jim-Jims in this town/and everybody puttin’ everybody else down/and all the politicians making crazy sounds/and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds.” The key phrase is “really don’t care” and the key word is “really.” The ecstasy of heroin, if ecstasy it in fact is, is the ecstasy of genuine indifference. You REALLY just don’t care. And really not caring can seem like an exceptional blessing to people of exceptional sensitivity. Hell, to people of average sensitivity, even. Who knows.

Lorne Michaels talks comedy. 

Rothko…via This Isn’t Happiness.