Blog Archives

He wouldn’t do me wrong.

[Painting by Winslow Homer]

Pumpkin pie crumb bars. No use steering now.

Bill.

[Image: “Portrait of Sylvette David in Green Chair” by Pablo Picasso, 1954]

TV Theme Song of the Week:

Okay, we need a better title but thought it’d be fun to highlight a catchy TV theme song each week round here.

Lil’ help with a title?

“Jeanne Hébuterne” by Amedeo Modigliani (1917/18)

Michael Weiner, the executive director of the MLBPA, passed away yesterday at 51. Over at ESPN, Jerry Crasnick salutes a voice of reason.

Furious Cool is the title of a new book about the great Richard Pryor by Joe Henry and David Henry. Here’s a Q&A with the author’s over at the Atlantic. And a review of the book at the A.V. Club.

Painting by Mary Cassatt.

Alexandra makes Alice Waters’ Potato Gratin.

Cool.

Tomorrow night at 7 out in Queens gives one of the great movies of them all. Even if you have a big HD TV you should treat yourself and see this on the big screen.

Stakes is High. Dig Greg Hanlon’s entertaining New York Observer story on the big money world of Bridge:

Compare bridge to poker, its coarse cousin. While bridge is infinitely analytical, poker is more psychological: In high-level matches, every player at the table can compute the odds instantaneously, and what separates the best players from the pack is the ability to pick up “tells,” such as the furrowing of the brow as an indication of bluffing.
Mr. Bayone said, “The best bridge players are, as a group, finance people, actuaries, lawyers. The best poker players are 19- to 22-year-old kids who have never done anything else.”

Another difference is that money is central to poker, while bridge is played for no stakes other than “masterpoints,” a running tally of points that ranks players similarly to chess ratings. Thus, bridge satisfies the universal truth that those who have vast sums of money are loath to talk about it.

Mostly, though, the nature of bridge presents an enduring intellectual challenge for people whose success in life leaves them seeking further challenges. It has a “comforting leveling aspect,” as psychiatrist Melvyn Schoenfeld, a regular at the Manhattan Bridge Club, put it.

Take fashion mogul Isaac Mizrahi, who learned the game at the behest of his bridge-playing mother, who told him that, if he didn’t learn to play by age 30, he wouldn’t have any friends by 40. Mr. Mizrahi described a bridge tournament to me as “the most fantastic use of three hours of your life.” In bridge, he finds intellectual and psychological nourishment.

“I think it’s really important to keep that state of vulnerability,” he said. “You have to give it up every once in a while. You have to walk into a room and be an idiot and not know what you’re doing. That’s the only way you can get anywhere in the world. And that’s the great lesson of bridge.”

Do the Yanks dare to let Robbie Cano go? No, they don’t. They’ll sign him. But Tyler Kepner thinks it is a decent idea:

Losing a superstar is not always as devastating as people fear at the time. Two winters ago, the St. Louis Cardinals watched Albert Pujols leave for a 10-year, $240 million deal with the Los Angeles Angels. They responded by signing Carlos Beltran for two years, giving contract extensions to Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright, and using their compensatory draft pick on Michael Wacha. Discipline sometimes works.

The Yankees are willing to give Cano $23 million or so for each of the next seven years, a $161 million package that is already too generous. That kind of deal has put the Yankees in their present state — decaying and injury-prone — and the team needs to break the cycle.

An influx of fresh talent from the farm system is the best way to start. The Yankees do not have those players, but that should not make them desperate. Desperate teams make the costliest mistakes.

[Image Via: Rob Tringali]

Wow. 

More mishegoss at the Rodriguez hearing. 

Ry Cooder has a new live record out. Alec Wilkinson has a thoughtful post about Cooder and performing live over at the New Yorker:

Absent disabling cases of stage fright, emotional reversals, or predatory addictions, performers who withdraw from performing—who liberate themselves straight into a private life—are rare. One of the few popular musicians I can think of who has done so happily (besides George Harrison) is Ry Cooder. Perhaps in Cooder’s case it isn’t surprising since he began his career as a studio musician, when he was still a teen-ager—he grew up, that is, in a context where music was made in rooms with only a few people present, not on a stage for an audience. He once said that the people who want the applause should have it, but he wasn’t one of them. He didn’t like being watched. He didn’t like the pressure of having to deliver a performance—as opposed to just playing music—and he didn’t like being analyzed by the guitarists who stood as close as they could to try and figure out what he was doing. The whole experience was draining. After a concert, he once said, he felt like a withered balloon under a chair at the end of a children’s party. About thirty years ago, he reached a point where he could no longer go out on stage and say one more time, “Ladies and gentlemen, and especially you ladies…”

…Another reason Cooder didn’t tour is that in middle age he felt he could no longer perform many of the songs he had recorded when he was younger. Some of them had relied on a jauntiness he no longer felt.

Pumpkin Pie Rugelach? Sure, why not?

O’ Look Misery by Blind Blake. 

[Photo Via: Lover of Beauty]

“Vista a través del Patio (en el nº 48 de la calle Lille, París)” by Edward Hopper (1906)