Blog Archives

The people ride in a hole in the ground… Oh, for the love of Julie Munshin.

Edward Steichen, 1936

Then I rose, wiping a blunt’s ash from my clothes, then froze only to blow the herb smoke through my nose.

Lyrical masterpiece.

I never liked Madonna’s records or her acting. Watching her being interviewed is painful. And as a sex symbol I’ve only occasionally been drawn to her. I’m not turned on by the women-pretending-to-have-balls schtick, at least not in her case. So when she was in her prime, I didn’t dig her.

That said, I admire her for sticking around so long and for all that she’s accomplished as a pop icon. And I learned some more about appreciating her after reading this 2002 GQ article by Jennifer Egan:

For Madonna, it’s fantasy only; even when her moves have looked self destructive, she’s always emerged unscathed. To be loved as a celebrity, she once said, “You need to disappear, run out of steam, run out of ideas…You need to have a drinking or a drug problem. You have to go in and out of rehabs so people can feel sorry for you. Or you need to kill yourself, basically.” But Madonna has avoided all of that: no rehabs or suicide attempts, no arrests or collapses or devouring lawsuits or serial divorces or appalling plastic surgery — scandals, yes, but always of her own making and always, finally, to her own advantage. Sometime very early on, Madonna learned a different way to subvert her rage and quell the fear and pain that are usually handmaidens to an ambition as ravenous as hers: hard work. “I ultimately end up making my own work,” she has said. “I don’t sit around waiting for other people to give it to me. I’ve had to do this to ensure myself constant employment.”

Morton’s account of Madonna’s early performing years is a litany of wrong turns (including the fact that her first single, “Everybody,” was marketed as the work of a black artist) that could have terminally discouraged a less tenacious and resourceful performer. But no matter what went wrong, Madonna always had a next move. She kept producing good material by playing to her own strengths and finding people to compensate for her weaknesses. This ability to create year after year in the face of loud and persistent nay-saying is the single thing that has ensured Madonna’s ongoing success. I can only admire it.

Now comes the point where the writer is supposed to indulge in a bit of prognostication: what’s next? I could do this–ruminate sagely over the staying power of her marriage to a macho guy ten years younger or tsk that those tank tops might not cut it when she’s 50. But by defying twenty years’ worth of such speculations, Madonna has made a lot of smart people look like dummies. So I’ll pass. Better to admit that I have no idea what she’ll do, except that I can’t imagine her stopping. There’s pleasure in not knowing–especially when term limits on fame seem shorter than ever and the surprises we get from celebrities are rarely pleasant. Madonna hasn’t exhausted us because we haven’t exhausted her, which is another way of saying that she hasn’t exhausted herself.

[Photo Credit Via Village9991]

It’s the All-Star Game. Hot stuff.

Have at it.

[Photo by Sarah Illenberger via This Isn’t Happiness; featured image by Joel Zimmer]

Funcrusher plus. Aie, papi.

[Illustration by Namio Harukawa (warning, erotic content)]

Over at Grantland Alex French and Howie Kahn offer up this entertaining oral history of WFAN.

And here’s Nick Paumgarten’s 2004 New Yorker profile on Mike and the Mad Dog.

The Wife loves gazpacho. I make it for her all the time. Here’s a good recipe over at Lemon Fire Brigade.

The Yanks have the best record in baseball at the break. Alex Rodriguez is in decline, Russell Martin has suffered through his worst offensive season but first place is first place. So, what’s missing?

Mo, of course.

Here’s an article on Mariano by Joel Sherman in today’s New York Post.

Rafael Soriano has pitched well since Rivera went down. But if you think that’s going to continue indefinitely I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you…

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Photograph by Amanda Marsalis via Rustic. Meets. Vintage.

All the nightmares came today/And it looks as though they’re here to stay…

[“Learning to Fly,” by carlybartel]

Wayne Coffey has a nice piece in the Daily News today about R.A. Dickey and my friend, the late Mike Gitelson. Mike died earlier this year from myeloid leukemia.

It is a touching story. Mike, who we called “Getty,” was my best friend in middle school. We collected comics, records, and pined for someone to take us to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the 8th Street Playhouse. Getty did not care about sports. At all.

My mother once took a group of us to Yankee Stadium for my birthday to see the Angels because Reggie Jackson was my favorite player. We sat in the bleachers. Mike made a placard at home and brought it with him. It read: Reggie Sucks. During batting practice, Reggie shagged flies near us and Getty waved the placard and yelled at him. At one point, Reggie turned in our direction, grabbed his crotch and spit on the ground. Getty whooped and laughed, his mission accomplished.

He was a political kid. Both of Getty’s parents were social workers and so he came by his left-leaning attitudes naturally. (I remember him railing about something once when we were in high school. We were  in the car with his father, who was a funny guy, and his dad said, “Michael, you are the only socialist I know with a bank card.”) By the time we were upperclassmen in high school, Mike had gone through the Clash and the Sex Pistols and was listening to the Dead Kennedys and Jello Biafra. He was the only guy we knew who was into the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone and Bad Brains.

His senior quote came from a Chili Peppers song: Don’t be a slave/No one can tell you/You’ve got to be afraid.

Getty was an angry kid (then again, so was I). He couldn’t wait to get to college. We had a falling out by then and I didn’t talk to him again for more than twenty years. But because we still had some of the same interests, I ran into him periodically: at a rest stop in New Jersey in 1994 or ’95 on the way home from a Mumia Abu Jamal demonstration in Philadelphia; at Fat Beats, a hip hop record store in the village; in ’96, on the night the Yankees won the Whirled Serious, at a De La Soul/Fishbone concert at Roseland; on the subway platform of the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn. I approached him at the rest stop after the Mumia Abu Jamal rally and startled him. It was clear that he didn’t want to reconnect so the other times I saw him–“Getty Sightings”–I left him alone.

I was surprised, then, when he reached out to me about five or six years ago. We exchanged e-mails and whatever hard feelings that might have existed were gone. We didn’t see each other but touched base every now and then. Mike had become a baseball fan through his wife who was–and is–nuts for the Mets. I thought that was amusing coming from a guy who loved to ridicule overpaid, conceited jocks.

Mike suffered with Crohn’s and he died too young. Go figure that baseball would provide distraction and comfort for him. His encounter with R.A. Dickey was moving. You know, when we were kids, Getty laughed in the movie theater at the end of Terms of Endearment when everyone else sobbed. During The Breakfast Club when the kids bared their souls and the theater was quiet, Getty cackled.  He was allergic to sentiment. But after R.A. Dickey called him on the phone, Mike cried. And I think he’d very much appreciate Coffey’s article.

Yet another reason to pull for Mr. Dickey who sounds like some kind of mensch.

[Photo Credit: Matt Cerrone]

Tonight gives the Home Run Derby.

For those of you who like that sort of thing. Chris Berman hosting so you might want to watch with the sound turned off.

[Photo Credit: David J. Phillip/AP]

Reggie’s in the penalty box.

Here’s Phil Taylor’s story from last week’s SI…If Reggie had gone straight the police, none of this would have ever happened.

SI‘s Scott Price was with Roger Federer yesterday after Federer won Wimbledon for the seventh time:

Finally he left the broadcast center, and stepped outside into the rain. Centre Court loomed a few hundred feet away. Federer’s sneakers squished on the slick tiles; workers hauling equipment stood aside to stare. This Wimbledon gives him 17 majors in all, six more than his archrival, Nadal: A nice cushion in the great race the two run but rarely admit. On Sunday, Federer just might have put the greatest-of-all-time title out of reach for good.

“Do I care?” he said. “I guess I do, because I’d be lying if told you I don’t care at all. But for me it’s the same thing as the Novak loss and trying to beat him. Rafa has an amazing career, we have two such separate lives and worlds and things we do and the way we do them. He’ll always be a legend and a great champion, so for me if he does beat my record it almost doesn’t matter. Because I did things he can never do. He did things that I can never do. It’s the moments that live and the memories that are with me that are most important.”

Still, he was asked, it’s nice to widen the gap?

“Yeah,” Federer said, smiling. “If you like.”

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

From Charles Simic:

No city displays its mixture of beauty and ugliness as brazenly as New York does. It’s one thing to see a city with cathedrals and other church towers from an approaching train as one does in Europe and another to see Manhattan with buildings of every size thrown together more or less haphazardly and its streets packed with humanity all coming into view simultaneously. I still can’t believe my eyes every time I see it.

[Photo Credit: A crowd watching the news line on the Times building at Times Square, NYC, on D-day, June 6, 1944. Large-format nitrate negative by Howard Hollem or Edward Meyer, Office of War Information…via New York History]

Over at the Atlantic dig this from Elmore Leonard (and stick around to watch the video):

THE DAY VICTOR turned twenty he rode three bulls, big ones, a good 1,800 pounds each—Cyclone, Spanish Fly, and Bulldozer—rode all their bucks and twists, Victor’s free hand waving the air until the buzzer honked at eight seconds for each ride, not one of the bulls able to throw him. He rolled off their rumps, stumbled, keeping his feet, and walked to the gate not bothering to look at the bulls, see if they still wanted to kill him. He won Top Bull Rider, 4,000 dollars and a new saddle at the All-Indian National Rodeo in Palm Springs. It came to … Jesus, like 200 dollars a second. That afternoon Victorio Colorado, the name he went by in the program, was the man.

He left the rodeo grounds as Victor to celebrate with two Mojave boys, Nachee and Billy Cosa, brought along from Arizona when the boss, Kyle McCoy, moved his business to Indio, near Palm Springs. The Mojave boys handled Kyle’s fighting bulls, bringing them from the pens to the chute where Victor, a Mimbreño Apache, would slip aboard from the fence, wrap his hand in the bull rope tight as he could get it, and believe he was ready to ride. He’d take a breath, say “Let me out of here,” and the gate would swing open and a ton of pissed-off bull would come flying out.

“His mind made up,” he told the Mojave boys at Mi Nidito in Palm Springs, “to kill anybody’s on his back. See, he behaves in the chute. What he’s doing, he’s saving his dirty tricks till he has room to buck you off and stomp you, kick out your teeth.”

[Featured Image by Travis R. Wright; Drawing by Brett Weldele]

Lime on my mind.

The Sprouted Kitchen gives us:  pasilla chile and lime cabbage slaw.

From Smitten Kitchen: cold rice noodles with peanut-lime chicken.

“Quantum Leap,” by Craig Wylie  (Oil on Canvas”

Here’s some Monday morning soul to ease you into the week…

[Photo Credit: Jason Travis]