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Another sure shot from Nicole Franzen.

Thanks to Long Form Reads for linking to this 1965 Hunter Thompson piece on the Hells Angels written for The Nation:

“We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us,” one of the Oakland Angels told a Newsweek reporter. “When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible. We are complete social outcasts–outsiders against society.”

A lot of this is a pose, but anyone who believes that’s all it is has been on thin ice since the death of Jay Gatsby. The vast majority of motorcycle outlaws are uneducated, unskilled men between 20 and 30, and most have no credentials except a police record. So at the root of their sad stance is a lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made; their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ball game and they know it–and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.

I went to one of their meetings recently, and half-way through the night I thought of Joe Hill on his way to face a Utah firing squad and saying his final words: “Don’t mourn, organize.” It is safe to say that no Hell’s Angel has ever heard of Joe Hill or would know a Wobbly from a Bushmaster, but nevertheless they are somehow related. The I.W.W. had serious plans for running the world, while the Hell’s Angels mean only to defy the world’s machinery. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. There is nothing particularly romantic or admirable about it; that’s just the way it is, strength in unity. They don’t mind telling you that running fast and loud on their customized Harley 74s gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.

Oh, Nat.

Happiness is this record:

Yeah…Uh-huh…Sure.

Before we get to the usual Yankee-Red Sox excitement, a brief word on A.J. Burnett. Here’s Steven Goldman:

His numbers aren’t that bad,” said Joe Girardi on Wednesday night. “If you look at the numbers of Hughes, I mean, Hughesy made one good start. We look at the whole year, and A.J.’s been decent for us.”

Joe: you’re measuring by the wrong yardstick, the yardstick of hyper-inflated super-offense. We aren’t there this year. The AL is scoring 4.3 runs per game. The last time you could say that was 1992. Burnett hasn’t been the outright disaster that he was last year, but “decent” might be generous. His ERA has risen every month of the season. He has a career-high home-run rate going… And he’s signed through 2013, so no one wants to admit that the higher upside is to be found elsewhere.

Mike Mussina was dropped from the rotation when he struggled in 2007. Ron Guidry was sent to the bullpen a couple of times towards the end of his career. It doesn’t have to be that Phil Hughes ends up in the bullpen, assuming he continues to pitch well (big assumption, I know) or Ivan Nova heads to Triple-A. There are other options, no matter how seemingly disruptive. The point is to win, not to spend four years avoiding the consequences of an ill-considered contract.

Loyal reader, Dina Colarossi, has a fine solution: “I think his new role should be sitting in a dunk tank outside the stadium before every game. Charge people $5 a shot, and they will recoup his contract in no time at all.”

And just think how much better we’d feel.

[Photo Credit: N.J.com]

Yanks look to sweep the White Sox tonight before they travel to Boston for the weekend.

You know the routine:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Diane hipped me to this fun list of movie tag lines.

“You are cordially invited to George and Martha’s for an evening of fun and games.”

“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it on the streets…”

“In space no one can hear you scream.”

“It’s a Strange World.”

“A Lot Can Happen In The Middle Of Nowhere.”

“Untitled (Medici Princess)” By Joseph Cornell (1948)

We’ve talked about this tomato sauce before, but since the folks at Food 52 brought it up recently, why not mention it again?

Dope on plastic.

There is a long profile on Danny Meyer in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine:

New York is a city of rooms. Most of them are tiny, dark, lonely and the wrong temperature. Meyer makes rooms that are exquisite — overlooking, in the case of the Modern, the greatest sculptures of the 20th century — and intimate. You feel at home. His goal, he told me, is for customers to make his restaurants their clubhouses.

Meyer’s track record is near perfect: one closing (Tabla, a 283-seat Indian place that lasted for 12 years), 25 openings and counting. And for most of his career he has expanded without repeating himself. He has created new restaurants as though they were each his first and only — the singularity of a place always as important as the food. His looseness and precision are qualities more reminiscent of an athlete or an artist. Whatever Meyer is engaged in — jaywalking, French-speaking, grease-inhaling — receives his complete attention.

Some of this is hereditary. Meyer’s father, Morton, owned hotels and had a gift for hospitality. As Meyer told me, “My dad gave me the gene to enjoy cooking, and to enjoy consuming good food and wine.”

…It has taken Meyer 26 years to go from the owner-manager of a single place to C.E.O. of a company — Union Square Hospitality Group — that employs 2,200 people and oversees the operations of all his restaurants. His mother calls the company “his business family.” Its core is a tight-knit group of five general partners whom Meyer has known for an aggregate of 102 years. Together they oversee three places that are in the Zagat Guide’s Top 5 (Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Union Square Cafe), plus the Modern, Maialino, Blue Smoke, the two cafes at the Museum of Modern Art, the newly opened restaurant at the Whitney, a jazz club, a handful of seasonal stands including one at Citi Field and a catering and events company. Meyer is on the board of Open Table, the Internet restaurant reservations service that not only allows him to materialize midlunch for a full-body hug but also tracks the eating habits of his 3,500 or so fine-dining customers each day. (Shake Shack feeds more than 12,000 daily.) This has all taken decades. And Meyer might have remained an incrementalist were it not for Shake Shack, which began as a hot-dog cart that he told the staff of Eleven Madison to set up in the park across the street in 2001. The cart was such a sensation that he expanded the menu to include burgers and milkshakes and opened an actual 400-square-foot shack in the park in 2004. Eleven Madison owned Shake Shack from 2004 to 2009, when it became its own company — but the mobbed burger stand provided the capital required to hire the Swiss chef Daniel Humm away from a restaurant in San Francisco, reduce the seats in his new dining room, double his staff and establish a venue so elevated in its pursuits that it’s less a restaurant than a graduate program in taste. Four stars from The Times ultimately followed.

I know some people in the restaurant business in New York and they all speak highly of Meyer. He’s the Mariano Rivera of the industry.

Over at ESPN, Howard Bryant writes about the unfairness of trading prospects for stars:

In San Diego, one of the great robberies (an inside job, really) in recent baseball history took place in the Gonzalez deal this past offseason. The Padres, who missed the playoffs on the last day of the 2010 season, dealt their best player to the Red Sox even though he was under contract for another year. Instead of selling their fans in 2011 on the optimism of 2010’s great 90-win season, playoff appearances in 2005 and 2006 and a thrilling one-game playoff in 2007, San Diego folded, giving Gonzalez to the Red Sox for first-round picks Casey Kelly (a pitcher) and Reymond Fuentes (an outfielder), along with Anthony Rizzo, a first baseman. Remember, the Padres were an afternoon away from the playoffs, then traded their best player and received nothing in return to help them win this season or probably next. Rizzo has appeared in 35 games for San Diego this season, and he’s hitting .143.

The Red Sox didn’t part with any of their big league players in the deal. Not Jacoby Ellsbury, not Clay Buchholz, not Josh Reddick. Both Kelly and Fuentes have potential–Kelly is 21, Fuentes is 20–but neither is yet in Triple-A. Much space exists between Class A Lake Elsinore and Petco Park.

So as the Red Sox win, the Padres sold their fans a future that is at best cloudy and at worst illusory. Each day the Red Sox benefit from Gonzalez while the Padres wait for Kelly and Fuentes to reach the big leagues underscores the need for San Diego’s front office to have acquired big league talent that, at least, would have sent the message to fans that every year is next year.

Rest in Peace, Bubba Smith.

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

I saw a girl on the subway this morning looking at her IPAD. She looked so content. The light from the screen reflected on her face. It reminded me of an illustration of a kid looking at a secret treasure that glowed. I wondered what she was reading and almost envied her happiness but all I could think about what that she was a perfect mark to get robbed.

A.J. Burnett has to be a stud if the Yankees are going to win the World Serious this year. Maybe not an ace, but damn close to one. He should be as nasty as Erwin Santana has been of late. I’m not confident that he will be but you never know.

We’ll be pulling for the big lug.

Meanwhile: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Michael Shapcott]

Serious Eats picks their favorite recent sandwich finds in New York.

I was at Citifield last night. The place was quiet as the top of ninth began, the Mets leading by a run. I was with a friend who was at Opening Day of Shea Stadium in 1964. “It’s quiet because everyone is waiting for something bad to happen,” he said.

Expecting something bad to happen. Which is exactly what happened. An error with the bases loaded turned a 3-2 lead into a 4-3 deficit.

I thought about Mariano Rivera as my friend and I walked through the parking lot after the game. We won’t have him much longer. Maybe another season or two. But the peaceful, easy feeling he gives us is temporary. It might dry up before retires. If only there was a way to bottle it.

The Job, Chicago Style 

By John Schulian

The best advice I ever got about business came from my old baseball coach, Pete Radulovich: “Nobody plays for free.” My lawyer passed Pete’s wisdom along to the brass at the Sun-Times when the New York Times was courting me, and the next thing I knew, I got a raise and a deal with Universal Press Syndicate, which had made a fortune with “Doonesbury” and a host of other wildly successful comic strips. Funny how a little leverage works, isn’t it?

Close to 100 papers bought my column at one point, some because they actually used it, like the Atlanta Journal and Miami News. The talent-rich Boston Globe, on the other hand, bought it just to keep it out of the Boston Herald’s hands. Whatever their motivation, those big city papers all paid a decent buck. It was the small papers, however, the ones in Iowa and Louisiana, that relied on me most heavily for a national voice, even though they paid only a couple of dollars a week. But I stopped worrying about the price when John Ed Bradley, that most poetic of sports writers, told me his father used to cut my column out of his hometown paper and mail it to him at LSU.

With syndication, I was traveling the same road that Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and Jim Murray had before me. That was an honor in itself, but Universal Press made things even better by publishing my first book, “Writers’ Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists.” It’s a collection of my boxing writing that came out in 1983 and has achieved what is best described as cult status. God knows it was never a big seller, but there are still people who speak of it fondly, not just old goats of my vintage but young writers and fight fans who stumble upon it. I’m not sure it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with any book by Hugh McIlvanney, the superb British boxing writer, but I’m still grateful that people haven’t used it for kindling.

For all this talk about the fruits of being a columnist, it’s high time I said a something about the job itself. At the Sun-Times I wrote four a week–Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. They ran 1,000 words apiece, which was standard for my generation but looks like literary abuse compared to the three that today’s columnists get by with. Of course the old-timers thought guys like me were pansies because they had written as many as seven a week. Red Smith, when he worked for the Philadelphia Record, even covered a beat in addition to writing his column. And then there was Arthur Daley of the New York Times, who was writing seven when his editor cut his load to six. Instead of celebrating, Daley thought his boss didn’t like him anymore.

Whether you’re doing seven columns a week or three, it’s still tough to do them right. Anybody can fill space, whether it’s an overmatched kid or an old hack running on Jack Daniels fumes. But if you really care about the craft right down to the last syllable, you inevitably wind up feeling like you’re married to a nymphomaniac: as soon as you’re finished, you’ve got to start again. For all the joy that attends a column you get right, whether it’s funny or sad or angry, you’re still staring into a black hole when you wonder what you’re going to do for an encore. There were times I started worrying before I finished the column I was working on. Other than that, it was the best job on the paper.

I’ve always felt lucky that I worked in Chicago, which, in addition to being a great city, overflowed with sports to write about, professional and college. The National League was on the North Side, the American on the South. I could write about the Bears any time of year. I could have done the same with Michael Jordan, but I was gone by the time he arrived. The best I could do in basketball was DePaul, which had a great run in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Talk about an embarrassment of riches. Better yet, most of the time I was there, the teams were terrible-–and terrible teams are a hell of a lot more fun to write about than good teams. When a team is good or, worse, great, most everybody connected with it turns secretive. They don’t want to run their mouths for fear the fates smite them. But when a team is bad, the fear is gone. Players start to reveal their true selves, whether they’re hilarious or soulful or complete assholes. There’s always something going on, always somebody running his mouth, always somebody begging to have his ears pinned back.

There isn’t a more reliable bunch of losers in all of sports than the Cubs. And yet, in my Chicago years, they had a world-class right-hander in Rick Reuschel and a great reliever in Bruce Sutter and a batting champion in Bill Buckner, whose bad legs should have qualified him for handicapped parking and who was the bravest player I ever covered. Each was a good guy in his own way. Not the life of the party, by any stretch of the imagination, but honest and insightful and professional in surroundings that would have turned lesser men into drooling loonies. There was one year when, miraculously, the Cubs were still in the pennant race on September 1 and Buckner came to Wrigley all fired up for a game he thought would sell the old joint out. Instead, it was almost empty. “It’s like they turn the lights out every August 31st,” he said. He deserved better. They all did.

No, let me amend that. There were exceptions. There were those Cubs who were such chowderheads that they were like batting-practice fastballs for a columnist. The biggest one of all was Dave Kingman. Of course you couldn’t say much bad about him the year he hit 48 homers, but he showed what a wasted blob of protoplasm he was when he spent most of the next season lolling on the disabled list. He’d come in early in the morning for treatment on whatever his injury was, but he wouldn’t hang around to watch the game, ever. One day, one of the team’s good guys pulled me aside and told me Kingman was hustling jet skis at a big summer blowout called ChicagoFest when he should have been at the ballpark. I did my due diligence as a reporter and then ripped him as a feckless, narcissistic slug. I thought he’d try to strangle me the next time our paths crossed, but he didn’t say a thing. He just looked scary, the way he always did: 6-foot-6, with a permanent Charles Whitman stare.

Herman Franks did two tours as the Cubs’ manager while I worked in Chicago. It’s hard to believe a bigger lout ever darkened baseball. Some days his greatest joy in life seemed to be throwing his dirty laundry at the clubhouse man and telling him, “Get the brown out, Jap.” The clubhouse man was, as you probably guessed, Japanese.

To say Herman was an uninspired manager would be understatement. He consistently made a bad team worse, and when I kept calling him on it in print, he whined to friends back home in Salt Lake City. That’s right. We came from the same town. We even went to the same high school, albeit 30 years apart. “Get this goddamned Schulian off my back,” Herman begged a friend with whom he had played CYO ball. Not a chance. Herman was just too much fun to write about. There was, for instance, the day he said the difference between Jose Cardenal, who’d been traded from the Cubs, and Greg Luzinski was the difference between ice cream and horseshit. I seized the moment and wrote that the difference between Cardenal and Herman was the difference between ice cream and, taking my readers’ sensitivities into consideration, horse manure. The next time I was beside the batting cage at Wrigley, Herman challenged me to a fight. When he saw that I couldn’t stop laughing, he stomped away.

I wasn’t wild about George Halas, either. Forget the Monsters of the Midway and the Decatur Staleys and the running board of the car that he and the NFL’s other original owner posed beside. All of that was real, but it became part of a mythology that served Halas as a protective shield. He was about 1,000 years old when I worked in Chicago, and he could give you an E.T. smile that was supposed to pass for charm, but underneath it all, he was still a tightwad and a mean SOB. For years he employed a team physician who did nothing but screw up players’ knees. Big name players like Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus. I always wondered about Halas’s feelings about race, too. He was, if I recall correctly, the next-to-last NFL owner to integrate his team. And even at the end of his reign, he publicly tortured Neil Armstrong, an eminently decent man who happened to be a less than wonderful head coach. I’m not sure Halas a word of what I said about him, but it still felt good to tee off on the old bastard.

All things considered, I’d rather be remembered for the work I did that wasn’t the product of outrage–the magazine pieces about Josh Gibson and Chuck Bednarik and the old Pacific Coast League, the newspaper columns about Muhammad Ali and Pete Maravich and a high school basketball star named Ben Wilson whose dreams were canceled by a stranger with a gun. But raising hell was part of the job, too, and I did my share of it. Maybe I even liked it too much. I remember Mike Royko telling me there’s no sense in peeling a grape with an ax. Sometimes I forgot to heed his advice. But other times the grape deserved the ax.

Unquestionably the toughest column I ever wrote was about Quentin Dailey, a basketball player the Bulls shouldn’t have drafted. He’d terrorized a student nurse at the University of San Francisco. Didn’t rape her, mind you. But left her with bad dreams that still may not have gone away. The Bulls drafted him No. 1 in 1982, and I went to the press conference where they introduced him. I was the only one there who asked if he had had any regrets, was getting any counseling, was doing anything positive to make amends for the harm he had done. And he turned out to be utterly unrepentant. I went back to the paper and wrote the harshest column I could. It might be the harshest column I’ve ever seen by anyone. Then I waited to see what would happen.

There were calls and letters that accused me of being a racist, lots of them. But there was also an invitation to appear on Oprah Winfrey’s show as a defender of women. I accepted, of course. NOW thanked me and started making plans to picket the Bulls’ games. Reggie Jackson called and said he’d paid for Dailey’s lawyer because his niece had been going out with Dailey. Bill Veeck called and said he wanted me to know he was in my corner. Best of all, my wife said she was proud of me.

Still, it felt like I was breathing thin air, maybe having an out-of-body experience. I felt terribly self-conscious. It wasn’t like seeing my face in an ad on the side of a bus, and it wasn’t like my wife nudging me in a restaurant and saying, “Those people over there recognize you.” It was disconcerting. When I walked to a courthouse a few blocks from the Sun-Times to take care of a ticket-–I’d raced a stoplight and lost-–I couldn’t help wondering if some cop was going to get in my face and call me a racist motherfucker. And if I would have the stones to hold my ground and say that race had nothing to do with what I wrote. It never happened, though. Life went on, the way it usually does.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

“Zorah on the Terrace, By Henri Matisse (1912-13)