From the wide open spaces of New Mexico to the confinement of the city. Sometimes, it takes a few days to adjust, man. This was one of those times because it is easy to get used to that big sky out west. And all that space. I’ve often felt overwhelmed by it. This time, I embraced it and it felt good.
Still, I not sorry to be home. Never am.
[Photo Credit: Elevated Encouragement]
When in Albuquerque…
“Napoleon Dynamite” is an odd deadpan comedy. I remember the first couple of times I caught it on TV I didn’t know what to make of it. Then one day I saw it through to the end and it made me laugh though I didn’t know if I liked it exactly. It has a distinct tone and is self-aware but so sure. My pal Jay Jaffe loves it and every time I catch the movie on TV I can hear Jay laughing and that makes me happy.
Anyhow, it’s worth watching for this scene alone (and a nice job by the director in framing this scene so we can see Napoleon’s entire body):
“Two Tahitian Women,” By Paul Gauguin (1889)
If you’ve never read “The Boxer and the Blonde” by Frank Deford, well, here’s a reminder. It’s a good one:
The boxer and the blonde are together, downstairs in the club cellar. At some point, club cellars went out, and they became family rooms instead. This is, however, very definitely a club cellar. Why, the grandchildren of the boxer and the blonde could sleep soundly upstairs, clear through the big Christmas party they gave, when everybody came and stayed late and loud down here. The boxer and the blonde are sitting next to each other, laughing about the old times, about when they fell hopelessly in love almost half a century ago in New Jersey, at the beach. Down the Jersey shore is the way everyone in Pennsylvania says it. This club cellar is in Pittsburgh.
The boxer is going on 67, except in The Ring record book, where he is going on 68. But he has all his marbles; and he has his looks (except for the fighter’s mashed nose); and he has the blonde; and they have the same house, the one with the club cellar, that they bought in the summer of 1941. A great deal of this is about that bright ripe summer, the last one before the forlorn simplicity of a Depression was buried in the thick-braided rubble of blood and Spam. What a fight the boxer had that June! It might have been the best in the history of the ring. Certainly, it was the most dramatic, alltime, any way you look at it. The boxer lost, though. Probably he would have won, except for the blonde—whom he loved so much, and wanted so much to make proud of him. And later, it was the blonde’s old man, the boxer’s father-in-law (if you can believe this), who cost him a rematch for the heavyweight championship of the world. Those were some kind of times.
The boxer and the blonde laugh again, together, remembering how they fell in love. “Actually, you sort of forced me into it,” she says.
“I did you a favor,” he snaps back, smirking at his comeback. After a couple of belts, he has been known to confess that although he fought 21 times against world champions, he has never yet won a decision over the blonde—never yet, as they say in boxing, outpointed her. But you can sure see why he keeps on trying. He still has his looks? Hey, you should see her. The blonde is past 60 now, and she’s still cute as a button. Not merely beautiful, you understand, but schoolgirl cute, just like she was when the boxer first flirted with her down the Jersey shore. There is a picture of them on the wall. Pictures cover the walls of the club cellar. This particular picture was featured in a magazine, the boxer and the blonde running, hand in hand, out of the surf. Never in your life did you see two better-looking kids. She was Miss Ocean City, and Alfred Lunt called him “a Celtic god,” and Hollywood had a part for him that Errol Flynn himself wound up with after the boxer said no thanks and went back to Pittsburgh.
Spent last week in New Mexico.
Albuquerque.
Man..it sure was nice.
This here is one sweet tune.
Coach Cal’s Kentucky Wildcats vs. Rick Pitino’s Louisville Cardinals is the first game. Ohio State vs. Kansas comes next.
Knicks host the Cavs tonight and there is bad news to report. Jeremy Lin has a torn meniscus and needs surgery. Frank Isola reports that Lin will be out six weeks.
Here’s an excerpt from Colum McCann’s “Damn Yankees” essay:
I have been in New York for 18 years. Every time I have gone to Yankee Stadium with my two sons and my daughter, I am somehow brought back to my boyhood. Perhaps it is because baseball is so very different from anything I grew up with.
The subway journey out. The hustlers, the bustlers, the bored cops. The jostle at the turnstiles. Up the ramps. Through the shadows. The huge swell of diamond green. The crackle. The billboards. The slight air of the unreal. The guilt when standing for another nation’s national anthem. The hot dogs. The bad beer. The catcalls. Siddown. Shaddup. Fuhgeddaboudit.
Learning baseball is learning to love what is left behind also. The world drifts away for a few hours. We can rediscover what it means to be lost. The world is full, once again, of surprise. We go back to who we were.
I slipped into America via baseball. The language intrigued me. The squeeze plays, the fungoes, the bean balls, the curveballs, the steals. The showboating. The pageantry. The lyrical cursing that unfolded across the bleachers.
[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]
A sore shoulder could be what’s been ailing Michael Pineda. David Waldstein has more in the Times.
Good thing for the Yanks they’ve got plenty of arms to fill out the starting rotation.
[Photo Credit: Ron Antonelli, N.Y. Daily News]
Michael Pineda starts for the Yanks tonight. Game is on YES.
Plus, Knicks play the Hawks.
Happy Sports.
From the not so wonderful “College.” Still, it’s Buster:
“Movie Poster” by Walker Evans (1930)
Here’s Mike Downey’s review of Paul Dickson’s new Bill Veeck biography:
My first reaction when a copy of Paul Dickson’s new biography, “Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick,” lands in my lap is to be curious if justice has been done to him, before turning a single page. I touch base with Mike Veeck, the great man’s son http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-bill-veeck-20120401,0,4034572.story(a man of a few radical and wonderfully ridiculous notions of his own), to inquire if the descendants approve. “We’ve read it and enjoyed the easy flow and the research,” Mike replies. “Mr. Dickson has won me over with his gentle prose.”
Nice first pitch. So into the bio I go, wondering if there’s a chance in heck that this can be a proper bookend to one of the best of all sports books, “Veeck as in Wreck,” the long-ago collaboration of Ed Linn with his subject that established Veeck as a man who held nothing back, denigrating his own contemporaries in such a way that owners such as Gene Autry and Charles O. Finley were appalled by him.
The proof of goodness is usually in the details, so it becomes clear right off the bat that Dickson has written an authoritative work. It does take on a bit of a term-paper feel in part, since Dickson did need to rely heavily on anecdotes of old, Veeck being deceased for 26 years and therefore unavailable for beery, cheery late-night chats. But the stories are well documented and well told, so Veeck, like his kin, likely would approve.
I’m down.
[Photo Credit: Brian W Ferry]
It’s a little early for snap peas but dig this recipe from Smitten Kitchen.
