Blog Archives

Yanks look to keep things simple by winning a ball game.

The team is vexed, the fans are frustrated but we’ll be rootin’:

Let’s Go Ding-bats!

[Picture by Adam Fuss]

As expected, Jorge is not in the line-up tonight. He’s at the park and told reporters, “I just talked to Girardi, and I kind of apologized to him. Just had a bad day. Had a bad day yesterday. Reflecting on it and stuff, everything, all the frustration just came out.”

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

Photo Credit: Keep Cool But Care…

Have a laugh…on the house.

It is humid and uncomfortable in the Bronx today. Wet with rain expected into the night. Wonder if the Yanks are hoping for a rainout? That’s not likely and so they’ll be on national TV to face Jon Lester. I expect it will be minus Jorge Posada since he doesn’t have a hit batting righty this year.

Nice job on the whole mess from Steven Goldman.

In the meantime, there’s a Game 7 in the NBA playoffs this afternoon, a welcome distraction.

Eat well, be happy.

The Yanks showed some fight last night but it was another sloppy game for a team that hasn’t played well in more than a week. Fortunately, C.C. is on the hill tonight. Joe Girardi has rearranged the batting order in the hopes that it’ll kick start the offense. Goes something like this:

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

They’ll have their hands full against Josh Beckett cause the sombitch has been dynamite so far this year.

That won’t stop us from rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

It’s gray and wet out there today. Don’t let that stop you though. We’ll be back tonight for more of the raw.

[Photo Credit: Unknown]

Sweet Lou…

Saturday Smooch Edition…

Tough guys and hard feelings are back in business tonight in the Bronx.

Cliff has the preview.

Never mind the bollocks:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Hannes Kilian Drei Mädchen]

Berg, Eck, ’nuff said.

Classic ’90s remixes from Tha ‘Liks:

Carving by Randall Rosenthal.

Eat your heart out, Josh Wilker.

Hey Now Edition…

From I’ll Let you be in my dream if you let me be in yours…

Here’s Manohla Dargis in the Times on the “it” movie of the moment:

“Bridesmaids,” an unexpectedly funny new comedy about women in love, if not of the Sapphic variety, goes where no typical chick flick does: the gutter. Well, more like the city street that Lillian, a soon-to-be wife played by a wonderful, warm Maya Rudolph, dashes into, dressed in the kind of foamy white gown that royal weddings and the bridal industrial complex are made of. Suddenly realizing in a salon that she’s been hit with food poisoning, she flees like a runaway bride, except that it isn’t a man who’s making her, uh, run, but the giddy, liberating humor of the writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

…It would be easy to oversell “Bridesmaids,” though probably easier if also foolish to do the reverse. It isn’t a radical movie (even if Ms. McCarthy’s character comes close); it’s formally unadventurous; and there isn’t much to look at beyond all these female faces. Yet these are great faces, and the movie is smart about a lot of things, including the vital importance of female friendships. And it’s nice to see so many actresses taking up space while making fun of something besides other women. Perhaps the biggest, most pleasurable surprise is that “Bridesmaids” doesn’t treat Annie’s single status as a dire character flaw worthy of triage: she’s simply going through a rough patch and has to figure things out, as in real life.

I’m game. Looks like fun.

Nicholas Dawidoff profiles Paul Simon in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. The piece is not available on-line but here are a couple of cherce bits:

“One day not long ago, Donald Fagen, of Steely Dan, who has admired Simon’s work for decades but knows him only slightly, offered up a spontaneous theory of Simon’s childhood. ‘There’s a certain kind of New York Jew,’ Fagan began, “almost a stereotype, really, to whom music and baseball are very important. I think it has to do with the parents. The parents are either immigrants or first-generation Americans who felt like outsiders, and assimilation was the key thought–they gravitated to black music and baseball looking for an alternative culture. My parents forced me to get a crew cut; they wanted me to be an astronaut. I wouldn’t be surprised if all that’s true in Paul’s case.”

Baseball and black music? I can relate.

And this:

“One day when I am visiting Simon at the Brill Building, we go off to throw a baseball. Simon picks a guitar with his right hand, but on a baseball field, he goes the other way. ‘That’s something I remember about my father,’ he tells me. “I was five or six and we were having a catch. He got me a glove. A righty glove. I’d take it off to throw it back. He’d say, ‘No, no. We do it this way.’ Eventually he came into the house and told my mother, ‘Belle, we got a lefty!’ There’s incredible pleasure in throwing a ball. Having a catch with your dad is having a conversation. As you throw the ball back and forth it’s heavenly.”

I don’t have any fond memories of having a catch with my father–those were uncomfortable moments, filled with impatience, anger, and tears–but I loved having a catch with my younger brother (still do though I can’t remember the last time we had one). There is an intimate connection when you are having a good catch that is unspoken but powerful. The rhythm is easy, contemplative and soothing.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Davidson]

I was at the game last night in the Todd Drew box seats with Ted Berg. It was cold and the game was a dud but we had a good time. The crowd was mostly absent when Derek Jeter grounded out to end the game so I figured I might have a shot at catching a gypsy cab back home. I found a guy who was willing to take me uptown for $20. Good dude, from the west coast of Africa. We spoke French for a few minutes and then he told me in English that he’s been in the States since 1989 but that his entire family is still back in Africa. He sends them money and talks to them four or five times a week but he hasn’t been home in seven years.

He has a lot of friends in New York, almost all African. A bunch of them drive cabs too. They line up a block north of River Ave, across the street from the doughnut shop where Todd and his wife Marsha stopped before each game, and listen to the game on the radio. “John and Suzyn,” he said. I imaged them talking in their native language, standing outside parked cars with the windows open and the sounds of Sterling filling the air.

The cabbie’s favorite Yankee is Jeter. Through his thick accent, I heard “Geeduh.”

Business was slow last night. “It’s better when they win,” he said. That’s when people hang around the local bars until 2  in the morning or later so the cabbies can make three or four trips from the Stadium.

“Tomorrow they will win,” he said.

“What makes you say that?” I said.

“I just have a good feeling.”

I gave him $25 and he said, “Have a good bed.”

[Picture by Jozef Baláž]

The Yankee Score Truck has been gutted–out of service–since the team returned to the Bronx. Wha’ happened?

Son. It’s time for a tune-up.

We’ll be rootin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

The Times with the story.

ESPN with a follow-up.

There are nine days left to see the Romare Bearden show at the Michael Rosenfeld gallery on 57th street.

From the New York Times review by Roberta Smith:

Romare Bearden (1911-88) spent more than 30 years striving to be a great artist, and in the early 1960s, when he took up collage in earnest, he became one. A small exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, organized to celebrate the centennial of Bearden’s birth, delivers this message with unusual clarity. It contains only 21 collages, all superb, in an intimate context that facilitates savoring their every formal twist and narrative turn, not to mention the ingenious mixing of mediums that takes them far beyond collage.

The works at Rosenfeld were made from 1964 to 1983. Some are not much larger than sheets of typing paper; others are more than four feet on a side. Their suavely discordant compositions involve both black-and-white and color photographs and occasional bits of printed fabric; almost all depict some scene of black life, past or present or imagined.

Highly recommended.