Blog Archives

Dig this spring loveliness from the indispensable Food 52.

Check out this cool behind-the-scenes photo gallery…

And then peep Scorsese on Kubrick (brought to us by Matt B):

many horror fans were put off by “The Shining,” and I don’t believe that Stephen King, the author of the novel on which it was based, was ever very happy with the movie. Kubrick and his co-writer, the novelist Diane Johnson, kept many elements from King’s novel, but they wrote their own work, turning to Freud’s The Uncanny and Bruno Bettelheim’s book about fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, for inspiration. In their film, the horror came from within the family — the violent father (Jack Nicholson) suffering from writer’s block and having a hard time staying on the wagon, the mousy mother (Shelley Duvall) trying to believe that everything is okay for as long as she can and the quiet son (Danny Lloyd) with an extrasensory gift called “shining” that allows him to see terrors past and future. They’re all cooped up in an enormous luxury hotel in Colorado that’s been shut down for the season and where they’ve agreed to stay for the winter as caretakers. The halls and corridors seem to extend to infinity, like the shots of interstellar travel in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the sense of space itself is terrifying, particularly in those justifiably famous Steadicam shots following Danny as he careens down the corridors on his Big Wheel.

In “The Shining,” Kubrick made potent use of ambiguity. You never really know what’s happening: Is the father hallucinating or is he the reincarnation of a murderer from an earlier era? Are there real ghosts in the hotel or are they imagined by the traumatized son? Is the son sensing the horrors that will be committed by his father or just projecting them onto him? Few movies create such a powerful feeling of unease.

The draft is tonight and for weeks, the good people at River Avenue Blues and The Yankee Analysts have the topic on lock.

Be sure to check ’em out today to keep up on the latest.

Seen in bar window, downtown Manhattan. Nothing like the Yankee logo to bring a smile to my face. I’m sure some of you agree while others…don’t.

[Panting by Wayne Thiebaud]

Ian O’Connor’s new book, “The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter” was given a fair but tough review by Richard Sandomir over the weekend in the Times Book Review:

O’Connor’s sweet Life of Derek raises a core question: Can a Jeter biography be anything less than an ode to a wonderful guy who has been the face of the Yankees for a decade and a half, since he was 22? Maybe O’Connor’s man-crush is the inevitable result of extended exposure to Jeter and his story. Without a tell-all, what’s left? The tale of a terrific fella who, as O’Connor reports, quizzes dates about their morals and has a “spectacular talent for doing the right thing at the right time.”

But O’Connor is a serious journalist, a former newspaperman and now a columnist for ESPN.com who has covered Jeter’s entire career. Surely he searched for the “other” Jeter, to balance the one who “dated supermodels at night and helped their grandmothers cross the street by day.” (Disappointingly, O’Connor’s notes do not cite any interviews with these grandmas.) Surely he wanted to find a troubled side to Jeter, so he could offer a complex picture like the ones that have emerged in definitive biographies of Joe DiMaggio (by Richard Ben Cramer) and Mickey Mantle (by Jane Leavy).

Sandomir notes that the darkness never arrives perhaps because it doesn’t exist. The book is dutifully researched, he writes, but “O’Connor rarely elevates his material beyond a narrative about Jeter’s greatness as a man and player. A straightforward storyteller, he gods up his subject without irony, detachment or recognition of the hyperbole that comes with so much positive testimony.”

If there is any darkness in the book it is reserved for Alex Rodriguez:

Rodriguez is absurdly easy to criticize. He is blunder-prone and shows none of Jeter’s sense of himself. But O’Connor’s open loathing of Rodriguez is as difficult to accept as his adoration of Jeter. “A-Rod was ruining the Yankee experience for Jeter,” he writes. Rodriguez is a “man of dishonor” after he admits to using steroids. And when he follows his agent’s advice to opt out of his Yankees contract in 2007 (he ultimately re-signed for another 10 years), O’Connor says, “On muscle memory, Alex Rodriguez played the fool.” Once the enemies find detente, with Jeter deciding that a humbled and “emasculated” Rodriguez is worth a second shot, O’Connor extends the saint-sinner imagery to an explicitly biblical level. Here he is, describing the jubilant scene after the Yankees clinched their division in 2009: “The photos captured a beaming Jeter lifting A-Rod’s cap off his head with his left hand and pouring a bottle of bubbly over A-Rod’s bowed scalp with his right. At last, the captain had baptized Rodriguez.”

As the announcer Dick Enberg says in moments of rapture, “Oh my.”

In other words, save your money.

[Drawing by Paul Mcrae]

The Yanks won a close one last night. They are 5-3 on this west coast swing. A win today sure would make for a pleasant flight back home, wouldn’t it?

It’s Colon vs. Joel Pineiro.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Nick Swisher RF
Jorge Posada DH
Brett Gardner LF
Francisco Cervelli C

Happy Sunday and…

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Jason Varitek and Jonathan Papelbon were kicked out of the game this afternoon in Boston. The Sox blew a 7-3 lead but eventually won in extra innings. Meanwhile, out west, Dan Haren was scratched and Ervin Santana will start in his place for the Angels. He’ll face this line-up:

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Russell Martin C
Nick Swisher RF
Jorge Posada DH
Brett Gardner LF

Good ol’ C.C. goes for the Yanks. Never mind the preamble:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Painting by Benjamin Anderson]

The Yanks take on the Angels tonight. The rivalry isn’t the same as it was a few years back when the Angels were, you know, good. (That said, my buddy Rich Lederer will be talking big trash if the Yanks lose the series.)

Hopefully, the Bombers continue their string of good fortune against good pitching as Jered Weaver gets the start. It’ll be interesting to see what Ivan Nova’s got to offer. All eyes in the Bronx are pulling for him to have a good outing cause he has struggled of late.

Cliff has the preview. We do the rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Pictures by Kevin Roche]

Roger Federer, that great champion, that old man, beat Novak Djokovic, who was previously unbeaten this year, today at the French Open to advance to the Final.

Word to God.

Federer will play his nemesis Rafa Nadal on Sunday for all the marbles. Here’s hoping he’s got one more great match in him. To beat Nadal at the French would be something.

And now we take a moment from last night’s thrilling Game 2 win by the Mavericks to address the Knicks:

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

That is all.

[Picture by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images]

Yanks are in Anaheim this weekend to play a three game series against their old nemesis, the Angels. But even though the Halos will be trotting out Jered Weaver and Dan Haren, they have fallen on tough tough times as evidenced by this letter by Rich Lederer.

From the New Yorker…

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

Saveur takes a look at the best dried pepper flakes.

Here is a compelling essay Pete Hamill wrote in 1996 for Esquire—“Blood on Their Hands: The Corrupt and Brutal World of Professional Boxing”:

On the night of the Tyson-Bruno fight, I went to a place called the Official All Star Cafe in Times Square. There was a huge private party to honor the twentieth anniversary of the first Rocky movie, and crowds packed the sidewalks for a glimpse of Sylvester Stallone and the celebrities he might draw. One of those celebrities was Muhammad Ali.

Ali was already there when I arrived, dressed in a dark-red long-sleeved shirt, seated at a table with his wife and young son. To his right was a movie-size screen on which the preliminary fights were being broadcast from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The room was crowded with citizens of the fight racket: Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis, Ray Leonard and Willie Pep, managers and promoters, wives and girlfriends. Everybody tried to avoid looking at Muhammad Ali.

His head was bowed and he was trying to eat. But his right hand was shaking so hard that he could not get the piece of chicken to move two inches to his mouth. His wife, Lonnie, put her hand over his to quell the shaking and gently guided the chicken to its destination. Ali chewed diligently but did not raise his head.

Across the evening, people came over to the table to lean down and speak to the ruined fifty-four-year-old man. Sometimes he smiled. Sometimes he whispered a reply. Sometimes he rose to pose for pictures. But then he would be back in the chair, the once lithe and powerful body sagging, the eyes wide and wary, a plastic strew clenched in his mouth, all of him shaking with the Parkinson’s disease, with the damage caused by the fierce trade he once honored.

The disease, caused in Ali’s case by repeated blows to the head, is insidious, degenerative, humiliating, a thief of will and memory. I know: My mother, who was hit in the head by a mugger in 1979, is now eighty-five and trapped in its silent prison. I’ve fed her, as Lonnie feeds Ali.

Only when the fight started and Mike Tyson came down the aisle in Las Vegas did Ali’s eyes focus intensely. We’ll never know what now moves through his mind. But he had made that same walk so many times, with entire arenas and stadiums roaring the chant Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee…. When young, he had been among great throngs where half the audience hated him, and had stayed long enough to convert them all. For Ah-lee, Ah-lee wasn’t about celebrity or even success; it was about excellence and heart. And it was about personal defiance: of odds, of skeptics, of racists, of the American government, and of pain. Along the way, Ali became myth; most myths, alas, are also tragedies.

Happy Birthday a day late…

Where the subway goes to die…

The New York Times has a slide show.

There’s something about the water that scares me. I’m not afraid to go in the ocean and I like to swim. But when I see something sinking, man, it hits me right in the gut and brings on a kind of panic. It’s primal fear.