Blog Archives

Spotted in midtown. The Score Truck? The Yankee Score Truck? Nah, but close enough.

Never mind the offense and head on over to the Pinstriped Bible and check out this post by Rebecca Glass on the Yankees’ pitching.

Nice piece by Sarah Weinman over at Slate on Penelope Gilliatt:

In her first few years at The New Yorker Gilliatt wrote, as sharply as she ever had, on films as varied as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. She’d always made the case for comedy as an art form, helping to revive the reputation of the “poetic widower” Buster Keaton with a crucial 1964 profile in the Observer. In The New Yorker that advocacy continued. “Maybe all funniness has a tendency to throw settled things into doubt,” she wrote in The New Yorker about a Jacques Tati revival. “Where most people will automatically complete an action, a great comedian will stop in the middle to have a think about that point of it, and the point will often vanish before our eyes.” Even when Gilliatt got things wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, she did so with panache. (On the “Gynecological Gothic” 1968 Polanski film Rosemary’s Baby: “Why on earth does a major film-maker feel seduced by a piece of boo-in-the-night like this story?”)

Gilliatt also thrived, at first, on the half-year schedule of reviewing films in New York and writing for page and screen in London. Her screenplay for 1971’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday garnered an Oscar nomination—as well as [Pauline] Kael’s approval—for its sensitive portrayal of a love triangle between a divorced working woman, a well-off Jewish doctor, and the man they both fall for. (Triangles figured prominently in Gilliatt’s fiction, from her 1965 debut novel One by One to the playlet Property, a devastating portrayal of a woman caught, like chattel, between her first two husbands.)* Her strongest short-story collection, Nobody’s Business (1972), featured charming, off-kilter, dialogue-driven portraits of those looking for “grace of mortal order” in a chaotic world. (One prescient story looks at the relationship between a cyberneticist and his creation, FRANK, for “Family Robot Adapted to the Needs of Kinship.”)

Andrea Gentl hooks up a slammin’-looking tomatillo salsa over at Hungry Ghost.

Seen a few weeks ago on a warm night in Times Square.

Emily and I said congratulations as the bride and groom swept passed us.

“Nice quiet getaway,” I said. “Don’t worry, nobody will notice.”

A few people around us laughed. It wasn’t an imaginative thing to say but the moment cried out for a remark and it’s better to try and fail than to keep quiet. At least in this town it is.

Coolin’.

Collage by Tim Jarosz

Another cold winter night in the city.

Sox looking to add pitching. Maybe the Yanks move a pitcher before Opening Day. Prince Fielder’s deal: pro and con.

Have at it.

[Picture by Uros Begovic]

Check out this interview with Stuart Galbraith IV over at DVD Savant.

Check out this cool-ass 1990 interview with Ry Cooder by Jas Obrecht. The talk is Blind Willie Johnson and the Blues:

Q: What’s your attraction to “Dark Was the Ground – Cold Was the Night”?

RC: That’s the most transcendent piece in all American music, the way he used his voice and the guitar. This other tune that I love so much is “God Moves on the Water.” Oh, that thing is like a roller coaster, man. He’s got an energy wave in there that he’s surfing across the face of that tune so mighty! He hits the chorus, and to me it’s like ice skating or downhill racing – it’s an awesome physical thing that happens. But “Dark Was the Night” is the cut – everybody knows that lick. You can throw that lick at anybody nowadays. I threw it up inside Paris, Texas, you know, and everybody relates. And now you play that lick, and everybody knows what it is. It’s like an unspoken word. It’s really amazing. [Legally download these tracks at http://www.archive.org/.]

I’ll really tell you, Blind Willie Johnson is in the ether somewhere. He’s up there in the zone somewhere. But if he played flat . . . And at this point, after talking with you, I’m starting to feel that really would account for it. Because I know that if it was regular, I could be doing it. I can do what he did – I can play those notes now. I mean, I have learned. My co-ordination and understanding have developed to the point where I am capable of executing those passages, but it sounds really different when you play flat.

Here’s Cooder’s version.

Click here for more on Cooder’s recent book of stories about Los Angeles.

A day late, but for you peanut butter freaks out there, dig these recipes for your favorite food over at Serious Eats.

Last week, there was a wonderful essay in The New Yorker by Donald Hall called “Out the Window” (subscription only):

After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other–thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty–and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I travelled to another universe. However alter we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying–in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way–but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

People’s response to our separateness can be callous, can be good-hearted, and is always condescending. When a woman writes to the newspaper, approving of something I have done, she calls me “a nice old gentleman.” She intends to praise me, with “nice” and “gentleman.” “Old” is true enough, and she lets us know that I am not a grumpy old fart, but “nice” and “gentleman” put me in a box where she can rub my head and hear me purr. Or maybe she would prefer me to wag my tail, lick her hand, and make ingratiating dog noises. At a family dinner, my children and grandchildren pay fond attention to me; I may be peripheral, but I am not invisible. A grandchild’s college roommate, pulls a chair to sit with her back directly in front of me, cutting me off from the family circle: I don’t exist.

A few years ago I spoke to the writer Arnold Hano on the phone. He was 90. Profane and funny. He told me that something had been written about him in the local paper and the writer had called him spry. “How come you only hear the word spry when people talk about old people?” he said. “That drives me crazy. C’mere, and watch me stick my foot right up your ass.”

Click here to listen to the New Yorker podcast with Hall.

And click here to read Hank Waddles’ two-part interview with Hano.

[Photo Credit: Matthew Gordon Levandoski]

Check out the  Something to Write Home About series over at the beautiful site, Pictory Mag.

[Photographs by Emily Raw and Larissa Zhou]

Extra points if anyone can guess who sampled this one (no cheating, now).

[Picture by Bags]

Before cell phones and before Purell I never thought twice about using a pay phone. Yeah, I’d look at the receiver before I put it to my ear but don’t recall getting all Felix Unger about it. Now I can’t remember the last time I used a pay phone, can you?

Money Grab.

[Photo Credit: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Image]

Untitled by Morris Barazani (1965)

We are familiar with Nicholson’s greatest performances. Here’s a list of worthy ones that are less celebrated:

The Missouri Breaks, Reds, Heartburn, Hoffa, and The Pledge. There are others, of course. He’s funny in a cameo role in Broadcast News.

But one of my favorite Nicholson movies is The Border. He’s coiled but not a ham. It’s a wonderful performance.  Put it on your Netflix queue.

[Photograph by Annie Leibovitz]

Jorge Posada officially retired today.

Here’s video of Diane Munson from the YES Network:

From Brother Stein: