Blog Archives

If you get a chance to catch About Face, an HBO documentary about Super Models, check it out. It’s especially good.

Phil Hughes got his tits lit today and the Yanks were getting trashed 10-1. Happens. But they came back before they lost 10-7. Nice effort, got to like this team’s fight but this game will be remembered for Raja Davis’ sensational catch. Robbed a homer Casey McGeheeand will never forget it either.

[Photo Credit: Fred Thornhill/Reuters]

Hughes and the Yanks go for the sweep this afternoon in Toronto.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Robinson Cano DH
Andruw Jones LF
Curtis Granderson CF
Casey McGehee 3B
Russell Martin C
Jayson Nix 2B

Never mind those brooms just yet: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Humans of New York Via It’s a Long Season]

Always exhale the facts cause I don’t inhale lies.

[Photo Via: Obey the Streets]

Ivan Nova was good today as the Yanks zipped to a 5-2 on the strength of Casey McGehee’s three-run home run. Here’s the recap by David Waldstein in the Times.

After the game, the team placed C.C. Sabathia on the 15-day DL with a sore elbow. “As for our concern,” said manager Joe Girardi, “it’s pretty low-level.” That takes C.C. out of the Texas and Boston series but Yanks are thinking big picture, of course.

Bummer but sounds like it could have been much worse.

[Photo Credit: Rock the Pixel; Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images]

Ivan Nova looks to regain his touch this afternoon in Toronto.

Never mind the exchange rate: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via NBC]

“Oooh! Look-A There, Ain’t She Pretty” Fats Waller

Why, yes, in fact. Yes, she is.

[Photo Via: She is Glorious]

Freddy Garcia kept the Yankees in the game and then some last night. It helps when you face a team of hacks like the Blue Jays. Took four pitches for Garcia to get through the sixth inning when the game was still 3-2 Yanks. Then a late barrage from the Score Truck, seven runs in the last two innings, and the Yanks cruised to a 10-4 win.

You never know what to expect when Fab Five Freddy is on the mound. Here’s hoping the Yanks pile up the runs for him.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Andruw Jones LF
Jayson Nix 3B
Russell Martin C
Ichiro Suzuki CF
Casey McGehee 1B

Never mind customs: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: Mortality]

Over at Strictly Cassette J Zone ‘splains himself.

It’s a Daily Operation.

[Photo Credit: Razor Burn]

Here’s a nice appreciation of Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man by Malcolm Forbes:

Throughout his career, Ross Macdonald—the pen name of Kenneth Millar—was hailed as the true heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as master of the hardboiled mystery. But accolades beyond the reach of a genre writer still eluded him—until towards the end of his career, when he was finally acknowledged as not “only” a crime writer but a highly regarded American novelist. Macdonald subverted the genre by delivering the riddles and intricacies demanded of the crime novel in language that could be stark but also subtly nuanced and beautifully cadenced, while never slowing the requisite pace or diluting the excitement. In doing so he silenced those naysayers who had previously scoffed at the idea that the humble detective novel could possess any intrinsic literary worth. Praise finally came from both sides of the literary divide, with James Ellroy acknowledging his debt to Macdonald’s Lew Archer books and Eudora Welty lauding him as “a more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were.” Five of the gripping Lew Archer novels have just become part of the U.K. Penguin modern classics series. For many, this anointment is long overdue.

The Underground Man is the only Lew Archer mystery I’ve read. It’s enjoyable. The private eye helping out the lost hippie kids. Like Altman’s Marlow without the satire.

Now, here’s a meal. From the most beautiful site: Manger.

Supposed to rain all day. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing, right?

[Photo Via Tig Tag]

Robert Motherwell collage over at Just Another Masterpiece.

I loved rooting against the Lakers when I was a kid–during the Showtime Era I pulled for the Celtics–but I don’t mind them these days. I’m not a fan but I don’t hate them at all. I like rooting for Kobe. He’s a dick but that’s okay. Plus, I’m continually impressed that the Lakers win and win some more and are still able to bring in major talent. Like say, Dwight Howard. They are the anti-Knicks.

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed this morning and saw this from Howard Bryant: “There are the Yankees and there are the Lakers. And there is everyone else…”

Guess that explains it.

[Photo Via: Alex Ross; St_uff (of) St.]

Tomorrow at BAM check out one of the Marx Brothers’ classic Paramount comedies: Horse Feathers (1932).

Yanks look to break even in Detroit this afternoon. Our man Hiroki is on the hill–and boy do the Yanks need a strong performance from a starting pitcher.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Eric Chavez 3B
Curtis Granderson CF
Raul Ibanez LF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Chris Stewart C

Never mind the getaway jet:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: C.F.B.; Mortality]

From High to Low…

Over at the New York Review of Books, here’s Joyce Carol Oates on the mystery of Charles Dickens:

Biography is a literary craft that, in the hands of gifted practitioners, rises to the level of art. Yet even its most exemplary practitioners are frequently left behind, like hunters on the trail of elusive prey, in the tracking of genius. Claire Tomalin’s biography is likely to be one of the definitive Dickens biographies in its seamless application of “the life” to “the art”—and what a perilous balancing act it is, in which, just barely, Dickens’s art isn’t lost amid a smothering welter of facts. “This may be more detail than one normally wants about anyone’s life,” Tomalin acknowledges. And indeed there is an inordinate amount of detail in this biography, particularly in regard to Dickens’s frantically busy social life, his scattered interests, and his grinding public career. (How many reading tours Dickens embarked upon before, finally, his “last farewell to the London reading public” in 1870! The reader begins to be as fatigued as Dickens.)

The problem with such assiduously recorded lives of great artists is that one is drawn to an interest in the artist’s life because of his or her accomplishments, primarily; the “life” in itself is of interest as it illuminates the work, but if the often banal details of the life detract from the work, the worth to the biography is questionable. Even an ordinary life, cataloged in every detail, will bloat to Brobdingnagian girth, distorting the human countenance. Only a very few encyclopedic biographers—Richard Ellman most illustriously, in his long yet never dull biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde in particular—transcend the weight of their material, and make of it an intellectual entertainment commensurate with its subject.

[Photo Credit: Cecilia Majzoub via Film is God]