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Is it summer yet?

[Picture by Hugues Erre]

[Photo Credit: Jhalal Drut]

On the subway this morning…A shirty voice on the loud speaker. “Attention passengers. Please do not leave…Your Arm…Your Leg…or…Your Bag…in the door. Step all-the-way into the car so we don’t delay the train behind us.”

And then, as cold as ice: “Thank You and Have a Nice Day.”

Ah, some good, old fashioned New York irritation to greet the day.

[Picture by Edi Weitz]

Woman outside of Applebee’s this morning watching the Royal Wedding.

It rains and then it stops, it’s dark and then light. Who knows what tonight will bring? But if there is a game being played in the Bronx know this: we’ll be root-root-rootin’ for dem Score Truck Kids. Mr. Sabathia is on the hill…

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Picture by Bags]

Great Comic Covers Week continues…

Word to 1979 Semi-Finalist.

I love to talk but when it comes to writing I have learned that you can talk too much. You can talk a story out before you’ve finished–or started–writing. Some talking is good because it helps formulate your thinking but I’ve discovered that it can go too far.

Talking comes naturally. When I was younger I talked because I was anxious, talked because silence was terrifying. But talking also runs in the family. My twin sister loves to talk. My old man was a champion talker. He loved the sound of his own voice. He talked instead of working. (Maybe that is why I am attracted to but mostly repulsed by Fran Lebovitz.) On the other hand, my mother walked the walk; she was pragmatic, a worker, not a dreamer.

I got to thinking about talking when I read this piece on James Agee by John Updike, a review of “Letters of James Agee to Father Flye”:

Alcohol—which appears in the first Harvard letters (“On the whole, an occasional alcoholic bender satisfies me fairly well”) and figures in almost every letter thereafter—was Agee’s faithful ally in his “enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction.” But I think his real vice, as a writer, was talk. “I seem, and regret it and hate myself for it, to be able to say many more things I want to in talking than in writing.” He describes his life at Harvard as “an average of 3.5 hours sleep per night; 2 or 3 meals per day. Rest of the time: work, or time spent with friends. About 3 nights a week I’ve talked all night. . . .” And near the end of his life, in Hollywood: “I’ve spent probably 30 or 50 evenings talking alone most of the night with Chaplin, and he has talked very openly and intimately.” And what are these letters but a flow of talk that nothing but total fatigue could staunch? “The trouble is, of course, that I’d like to write you a pretty indefinitely long letter, and talk about everything under the sun we would talk about, if we could see each other. And we’d probably talk five or six hundred pages…”

He simply preferred conversation to composition. The private game of translating life into language, or fitting words to things, did not sufficiently fascinate him. His eloquence naturally dispersed itself in spurts of interest and jets of opinion. In these letters, the extended, “serious” projects he wishes he could get to—narrative poems in an “amphibious style,” “impressionistic” histories of the United States, an intricately parodic life of Jesus, a symphony of interchangeable slang, a novel on the atom bomb—have about them the grandiose, gassy quality of talk. They are the kind of books, rife with Great Ideas, that a Time reviewer would judge “important.” The poignant fact about Agee is that he was not badly suited to working for Henry Luce.

Anyone ever try comeback sauce? I have not. Looks like thousand island dressing to me but hear that it’s special. What gives?

Yes, please.

[Photo Credit: Photocurious]

Stanley Woodward would not approve, but that’s okay…I can’t resist.

Here’s Ozzie:

“I remember in the old park in the World Series, (Braves manager) Bobby Cox told me to pinch-hit against him. I said, ‘Pack it in. We’re going to be seeing a celebration. I ain’t going to get a hit,'” Guillen said. “And I know what’s coming. Everybody knows what’s coming.”

Guillen doesn’t believe there will ever be another closer like Rivera.

“There is nobody better than this guy. Nobody. Not Goose (Gossage), not (Lee) Smith, not (Trevor) Hoffman,” Guillen said. “That mold was made in Panama and they threw it in the ocean. They don’t make a closer like that ever (again). Nobody in the history of baseball is going to be like this guy, ever.”

The PBS documentary “An American Family” is the subject of a new HBO movie.

Here is the original series (thanks to Matt B for the link).

I’ve always found it fascinating that women–who examine each other from head-to-toe without mercy–are also comfortable saying, “Oh, she’s gorgeous.” They can appreciate their beauty without shame. But it’s rare to hear men say, “Damn, that guy is a stud, what beautiful lips.” Unless of course it’s done with a wink and a nudge and one-liner. It’s not that you’ll never hear men appreciating each other, but it’s not common and you certainly don’t see many straight men at ease with it. We’ll say, “That dude is ripped,” admiringly about an athlete but that’s usually as close as most guys get to overt appreciation of male beauty.

Which is funny because we spend a disproportionate amount of time oogling men’s bodies. There is an undercurrent of homoeroticism at play in our sports lust, which doesn’t necessarily mean that straight men are privately Gay. But let’s face it, athletes are sex symbols, or at least sex objects (which is why “Bull Durham” was so good; it wasn’t just a decent baseball movie, it was a funny sex comedy). And if our attraction to them isn’t literal in a sexual way, we are drawn to their confidence, to the beauty of their physical abilities.

So at the risk of making you dudes uncomfortable, here is some male eye candy for the ladies, and some men, to dig. From Bruce Weber, whose favorite subject was, of course: men.

Here’s Brian Lewis in the Post with more on the Phil Hughes injury news.

I don’t think we’re going to see another low scoring game tonight. Nope, I expect to see the ball flying around out there. Let’s hope the Yanks are the ones putting the crooked numbers up on the board.

Never mind the Sizzlean–bring home the bacon and let’s go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Flavor Pill]

Steve Lopez, one of the last big time, big city newspaper columnists left, has a new collection out. Here’s a review by David Kipen in the Los Angeles Times:

The other thing every columnist needs, and that a Los Angeles columnist circa 2011 needs maybe most of all, is the ability to mix clarity with outrage. If things don’t break just right in Sacramento, California may just careen over its own lovely cliffs this year and L.A. right along with it. The invaluable, angry service Lopez continues to perform is spelling out the fateful connections between the lofty characters he mocks and the exploited, defenseless ones he sticks up for.

…The career of a columnist like Lopez can have three distinct phases: first, when he still nervously re-reads his work every morning to make sure it turned out right; later, when he hits his stride and makes do with reading it onscreen the night before; and, last, when he doesn’t even read it himself before filing on deadline.

It’s tricky to gauge where Lopez falls on this continuum, since the new collection is arranged thematically instead of temporally. Lopez’s kickers can get a little lazy, but the specter of burnout — when even the best tend to pull a few too many columns out of the mailbag — still looks to be safely down the road. One hopes Lopez may yet scrape together the time to write some book-length L.A. fiction, to join his three well-received crime novels set in Philly and Jersey.

[Picture by Edi Weitz]

Great Comic Covers Week–jacked from 1979Semi-Finalist–continues.

Remember…

Tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel:

Break it Down: Yankee Stadium

How good is Nick Nolte? I haven’t seen much of his recent work–although a quick trip to IMDb shows that he’s been busy–but I think he’s one of the most interesting, powerful actors of his generation. “North Dallas Forty,” “Under Fire,” “48 Hours,” “Life Lessons,” “Q&A,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Weeds,’ “Affliction.”  That’s an impressive list. And he’s been ambitious too, stretching himself in roles like “Jefferson in Paris,” and “Lorenzo’s Oil.”

I’ll bet he’s got a Jeff Bridges Appreciation run in him too.

[Picture by Christopher Wahl]

Breakfast…

Lunch…

And more (from the Full Moon Bakery)…

(more…)