From Gayl Heinz comes a letter that Howard Cosell once sent to her father, Bill (better known as W.C. Heinz). It concerns a Mets game back in 1962.
The handwritten P.S. from Cosell reads: “The gist of the mail and calls was…at last we understand Stengelese.”
Man, do I ever miss El Duque. He was the king of style.
If you’ve never read The Duke of Havana, put it on your holiday wish list. Reads more like a Graham Greene novel than a baseball biography.
Here’s Charlie Pierce on the end of the NBA lockout:
The NBA lockout was as exclusively about money as it was exclusively about astrophysics. One way you know this is that the settlement that finally was reached was one that could have been reached last June. Like Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1972, the league and its players struck a deal they could have had much earlier, and without the extended bloodletting in the meantime. The players took a reduction in the amount of basketball-related income — and can we find a rocket and fire that little bit of business-school jargon off to Pluto, please? — while winning some concessions as regards the league’s salary structure and in the rules regarding free agency. And that was pretty much it after five or six months of loud public wrangling — a brief outburst of authentic MBA gibberish and (poof!) back to work, gentlemen.
Another way you know that it wasn’t really about economics is that the league’s economic public case for its position became more and more preposterous as the weeks went by, and even the public began to notice that it was being taken for a fool. The hilarity hit high tide for me when David Stern started going around explaining that 22 of his 30 franchises were losing money. Tell me, do you suppose that when Stern sat down and chatted with the Nike corporation, or with the People’s Republic of China, to name only two of the wildly successful authoritarian operations with which the league does its business, the first thing he explained while pitching the NBA to them was that 73 percent of his league was in the red? Did you, at any time, expect to see Herb Simon, the shopping-mall billionaire who owns the “small-market” Indiana Pacers — a team that he bought for $11 million and which is now estimated to be worth $269 million — swiping the leftover bourbon chicken off abandoned plates in his various food courts unless the players surrendered to him a chunk of their dough? Of course you didn’t, because your mother didn’t raise a fool when she raised you.
…Stern’s concern for his league’s fans was as transparently phony as was Carnegie’s concern for his workers. (Hearing the commissioner’s unctuous solicitude for the paying customers must have occasioned rueful chuckling, and projectile vomiting, in Seattle.) His primary constituency is a group of 29 men who don’t have to deal much with unions in their principal occupations anymore and who, therefore, are not accustomed to reacting well when the help gets, well, uppity. The lockout was THE perfect oligarch’s answer.
They got most of what they wanted, which means that most of them are probably very unhappy. The league suffered a public-relations debacle that very nearly became a public-relations catastrophe. But David Stern showed himself to be the tinhorn-in-charge once again, and there will be games on Christmas Day. God bless us all, every one.
[Photo Credit: Craig Brewer]
A new book on the Doors, reviewed by Steve Zeitchik in the L.A. Times:
At first glance, the Doors seem to be an unusual object of study for Greil Marcus, the music critic and cultural historian who likes to draw connections between punk music and world history (“Lipstick Traces”) or Elvis Presley and the American myth (“Mystery Train”). The Los Angeles band is, after all, an act that these days mainly gets airplay for a few scattered hits such as “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” They wouldn’t seem substantial enough for Marcus’ intense gaze. And besides, didn’t Oliver Stone already spend too much time engaging us in a discussion about the Doors’ legacy?
But as he often does, Marcus dives deep, in this case into rare tracks, seminal performances and offhand interviews. The band of Morrison, Manzarek, Densmore and Krieger — referenced by last name only, like old high school friends (they are of course the late frontman Jim Morrison as well as keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger) — is in fact worthy of the author’s scrutiny. As he makes clear, this is a band “at war with its audience,” and thus merits a paradox-riddled Marcus-ian exploration.
Readers don’t need to be especially familiar with the Doors’ music to appreciate Marcus’ meanderings. But they’ll need to know, or at least quickly adjust to, the author’s unique blend of rock criticism, cultural commentary and first-person narrative, which once again takes the form of impression more than argument. It’s not often one finds a meditation on a song — say, the Doors’ ode to that woman fashionably lean and late, “Twentieth Century Fox” — wandering into a discussion of the Pop Art movement, post-feminist sexual politics and the author’s own childhood.
And also by Dwight Garner in the New York Times:
The best piece of advice I’ve heard someone give an aspiring rock critic is this: For God’s sake, don’t try to write like Greil Marcus.
It was meant as a compliment. Mr. Marcus’s style — brainy but fevered, as if the fate of Western society hung on a chord progression — is nearly impossible to mimic without sounding portentous and flatulent. This voice is so hard to pull off that 15 percent of the time even Mr. Marcus can’t do it. He takes a pratfall in the attempt.
But, oh my, that other 85 percent. Reading Mr. Marcus at his best — on Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Sly Stone, the Band, Sleater-Kinney, Dock Boggs or Randy Newman, to name just a few of his obsessions over the years — is like watching a surfer glide shakily down the wall of an 80-foot wave, disappear under a curl for a deathly eternity, then soar out the other end. You practically feel like applauding. He makes you run to your iPod with an ungodly itch in your cranium. You want to hear what he hears. It’s as if he were daring you to get as much out of the music as he does.
Mr. Marcus’s acute and ardent new book, “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” is his 13th and among his best. I say this as someone who has never cared deeply or even shallowly about the Doors, a band that to my ears (I was 6 in 1971, the year Jim Morrison died in Paris) has always been classic-rock sonic wallpaper.
And here is a recent profile of Marcus by Sam Whiting in the San Francisco Gate.
[Photo Credit: SF Gate]
Any goldbrickers out there? Got something for you.
White Heat, which to my mind is Cagney’s greatest gangster movie, is playing at the Museum of Modern Art this week, Wednesday through Friday at 1:30 in the afternoon.
“The Lacemaker,” Johannes Vermeer (1669-70)
As a kid, the scariest neighborhood I could think of outside of Harlem was Alphabet City. It was a world away from the Upper West Side, which had its tough blocks and dangerous stretches. I heard about Alphabet City in frightening terms, as in “You don’t want to go down there.” Then, when I was thirteen, I remember this movie poster:
I never saw the movie and it would be years until I went downtown to that neighborhood. By the time I got there it was called the East Village.
[Photo Credit: Ribonyc]
Over at River Ave Blues, Moshe Mandel thinks that despite the risks taking a risk on Yu Darvish is the right play for the Yanks.
[Photo Credit: Japanese Baseball Players]
Welp, thats one holiday down. Bring on the Christmas carols and serious, Oscar-contending movies.
It’s a quiet night in the city. Dig the picture by most talented Joseph Holmes. We’ll see you in the a.m.
Sarah…
[Light painting by Natalie Jean, basketball player painting by Ernie Barnes]
A day late…
I’ve never gone to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade but I have an uncle who used to go every year. It was one of those things that he couldn’t imagine not doing and didn’t understand why everyone didn’t feel the same way he did.
The floats are cool, though, aren’t they?
You ate it, Ralph.
How bout you guys? Do any major damage yesterday? I did. Three pieces of pie, and cookies and…plop, plop, fizz, fizz.
Madlib+M.F. Doom=Madvillain.
