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Don’t Stop…

Summer is over but it’s not too late for this story by Allison Glock on the wonders of sweet tea (from the terrific Garden and Gun Magazine):

When you drink sweet tea, your body starts to pump out insulin like water from a fire hose. Then, you have the caffeine. Which stimulates your adrenaline. Which confuses your metabolism. And keeps you from feeling sated, as one normally would after swallowing that much sweetness. Only a select few can eat seven pieces of cheesecake at a sitting, for example. But nearly everyone I know nods and says, “Just one more” when the lunch lady comes around toting the clear pitcher with the rubber band snapped around the handle. Say what you will, but sweet tea is the real hillbilly heroin.

To say Southerners drink sweet tea like water is both true and not. True because the beverage is served at every meal, and all times and venues in between—at church and at strip clubs, at preschool and in nursing homes. Not true because unlike water or wine or even Coca-Cola, sweet tea means something. It is a tell, a tradition. Sweet tea isn’t a drink, really. It’s culture in a glass. Like Guinness in Ireland. Or ouzo in Greece.

(When I was stuck in New York for a stint, a bout of homesickness led me to get the words sweet tea tattooed on my left arm. I could think of nothing else that so perfectly encapsulated the South of my pining. Now that I have moved home, it serves less as a touchstone and more as a drink order.)

Theories abound: Southerners prefer sweet tea because back in the day we used sugar as a preservative and our palates grew to crave the taste. Southerners like sweet tea because it is served ice cold and it is hot as biscuits down here. Southerners like sweet tea because we are largely descended from Celts and Brits, making a yearning for tea a genetic imperative. Southerners like sweet tea because Southerners are poor and tea is cheap. (Cheaper than beer anyway.) Southerners like sweet tea because it is nonalcoholic but it still gives you a hearty, if somewhat diabolical, buzz.

[Photo Credit: WelchOK.com]

Shane Spencer, Kevin Maas, and going back even further, Joe Lefebvre and Sam Militello…still, nice that the kid had a good game yesterday.

Seen, downtown Manhattan.

The train was packed this morning. The space is filled, summer is over. Folks have returned from vacation, kids going back to school. It is gray and raining but the faces I saw are still tanned. There are new clothes, bright and crisp.  My only complaint is that some of the perfume and hair product that came in my vicinity was enough to knock a buzzard off a shitwagon.

Otherwise, welcome back, World.

Freddy Garcia got lit up but good this afternoon. He gave up seven runs, didn’t make it out of the third, and yet the Yanks were still leading when he went to the showers. That’s cause they put up six runs in the second inning, highlighted by a grand slam from Robinson Cano. It came off the second Orioles pitcher of the day, Chris Jakubauskas, who threw Cano nothing but fastballs. I couldn’t figure it at the time and sure enough, Cano ripped the seventh pitch he saw into the right field bleachers.

The Orioles kept at it–they scored a run off our old pal, Scott Proctor (and yes, the comments section here was alive with mordant humor)–but the Yanks stayed in front thanks to two home runs by Jesus Montero, a solo homer and a two-run shot, both to right field. Couple of curtain calls, the full Monty.

Sometimes they don’t come easily and even Mariano Rivera struggled.

He allowed a run in the ninth and there were runners on second and third when he struck out J.J. Hardy to end the game.

Hey, perfection is overrated. Bottom line, Mo got the save, Yanks got the win.

Exhale, lay back, smile.

Final Score: Yanks 11, O’s 10.

Freddy G. Do it.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Andruw Jones RF
Russell Martin C
Jesus Montero DH
Brett Gardner LF

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

C.C. Sabathia, another fine performance. He left the game with one out in the eighth and the best player in the American League did this to Rafael Soriano. (Never mind that he’s 0-18 against Sabathia.)

But then the Yanks scored a mess-o-runs in the bottom of the inning and sailed to a 9-3 win. Mariano Rivera was warming up in the Yankee bullpen when Nick Swisher hit a two-run home run to make it 7-3. Before the ball landed, Rivera stopped throwing, and headed back into the bullpen clubhouse. Not a wasted movement with that man.

Derek Jeter hit a three-run homer and had 5 RBI in all. Alex Rodriguez added a solo shot–he got jammed and was frustrated with the swing but the ball carried over the right field fence all the same–and Jesus Montero had a couple of hits.

The Red Sox lost. Sabathia has win #19. We are happy.

Meanwhile, after the game, Joe Girardi announced that the Yanks are sticking with a six-man rotation for now.

[Photo Credit: Icekingg]

Hotter, steamier today. Guess summer doesn’t want to end just yet.

And that’s okay with us, because we don’t want this winning streak to end, either.

Fire up the grill and:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

I went to the game today with the wife. Her favorite Yankee is Francisco Cervelli though she didn’t care for his hand-clapping schtick the other night in Boston. When he hit a long line drive in the second inning, I knew off the bat it was headed over the fence. I jumped up and started pushing and grabbing at her. She knew something good was happening though she wished I’d stop shoving her.

Cervelli hit the ball hard four times today and had two hits to show for it. Bartolo Colon was decent, struck out seven, though he wasn’t his usual efficient self. Ricky Romero, on the other hand, kept the Yankees off-balance, but he left the game on a sour note, hitting Curtis Granderson and walking Alex Rodriguez with two men out in the seventh. His day was over but both runs came round to score on a double into the right field gap by Robinson Cano. That put the Yanks ahead for good. Nick Swisher followed with an RBI single, and David Robertson pitched the final two innings for the save. Oh, and Jesus Montero singled passed the shortstop, good for his first big league hit.

There were some Jays fans sitting about ten rows behind us. Two couples, late forties. The two women clapped loudly anytime the Jays did something good. Don’t know why, but they irked the hell out of me and I glared at them a few times. Wouldn’t you know it, with one out and the tying run on second in the ninth inning, they left. Talk about a bunch of Herbs.

Yankee fan, starching-up this afternoon

It was a good day. My favorite moment came in the top of the eighth just as warm-ups ended. When Cervelli threw down to second, Cano fielded the throw and then made like the was shooting a jump shot, and plopped the ball a few feet to his right, over to Eduardo Nunez. Silly moment but I liked it.

Yanks 6, Jays 4.

Time to cool out.

The heat is back. It’s humid and hazy in the Bronx. Thunderstorms this afternoon.

Never mind the sunblock:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Bags]

Yanks back home to face the Jays.

Cliff’s got the preview.

Brett Gardner LF
Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Robinson Cano DH
Nick Swisher 1B
Eric Chavez 3B
Andruw Jones RF
Russell Martin C
Eduardo Nunez 2B

We root:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Oh, Julie.

David Lebovitz does pizza.

Found on-line: Joan Didion’s famous 1966 piece for the Saturday Evening Post, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.”

This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an houreast of Los Angeles by way of the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal the California of subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mohave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalypts windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

The Mormons settled this ominous country, and then they abandoned it but by the time they left the first orange tree had been planted and for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would draw a kind of people who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in die dry air, people who brought with them Mid-western ways of building and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land. The graft took incurious ways. This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers’ school. “We were just crazy kids” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. The case of Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller is a tabloid monument to that new life style.

Check out this cleverness from BP:

Rest in Peace:

Kase 2.

The King of What? King of Style.

Tribute to Kase 2 by Dame

Over at the Paris Review, dig this interview with the late Budd Schulberg. Here he is talking about his debut novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?”:

INTERVIEWER: I didn’t grow up in Hollywood. I grew up in Indianapolis. But when you wrote this book, I said, “This guy’s got to be crazy. Putting himself in such terrible danger.” Didn’t you realize it was a dangerous thing to do?

SCHULBERG: Well, yes I did. Of course, with the warnings that my father gave me, I realized it was dangerous, but I couldn’t help it. I wrote it, and I wanted to write it. I was doing what Sidney had told me to do—to write what you feel, what you want, what you know. I had to do it. I should also add that before I saw Goldwyn, just after I got back, I went into Chasen’s Restaurant, which was the place, the in place, where all the big shots hung out. I knew so many of them, so many familiar faces, and they literally turned away from me. They turned away so they wouldn’t have to look at me and say hello.

I heard that at a meeting of the producers’ association presided over by Louis B. Mayer and the head of MGM, Mayer had looked down the long table at my father and said, “B.P., I blame you for this. Why didn’t you stop him? You should have stopped him!” My father said, “Well, as a matter of fact, Louie, I did write to him—” Mayer said, “Well, you know what I think we should do with him? I think we should deport him.” He really meant it. In Mayer’s mind he was the king of a country. Hollywood was like Liechtenstein or Luxembourg. The district attorney was on the studio payroll; you could and did commit murder, and it wouldn’t be in the paper. That was the kind of power that he wielded. My father—who was much more intelligent than Louie, but not nearly as street smart or studio smart, whatever—said, “Louie, he’s one of ours, for God’s sake. He may be the only novelist who came from Hollywood instead of to Hollywood!” Then he said, “Well, where do you think his St. Helena should be? Maybe Catalina Island?” My father reported that rather proudly because he was sort of proud of the joke. He was proud of the jokes that often got him in a lot of trouble.

That’s the kind of thing that he got on their shit list for. Because Mayer wasn’t kidding. Anyway, it was at that point I quit. I didn’t want to stay there any longer and, of course, if I had wanted to, I couldn’t, and that was it.

Schulberg led a fascinating life. Hollywood, boxing, novels. This is a solid interview, I only wish it were longer. This bit is good, though:

Scott Fitzgerald often wished that after Gatsby he had never done anything but just stuck to his last. Sometimes at night I feel that way. I have a little bit of that feeling, that I probably would be more respected as a novelist if I had just stayed on that track. Instead, I have this sort of fatal problem of versatility. Because I was raised in such a writing atmosphere, it got so I could write anything. I could write a movie; I could write a novel; I could write a play, I could even write lyrics, which I did for A Face in the Crowd. Always there were these different strings, so many different ones. I was sort of cursed with versatility. My problem is that I’m just not going to live long enough to do all the different things I want to do.