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A new Martin Scorsese interview book, reviewed in the L.A. Times:

Brilliant, brazen, engaging, esoteric, reverent, irreverent, ironic — all are qualities that have forged the 68-year-old director into an unqualified master. Much revered, once reviled, Scorsese has created some of the most extraordinary work in modern cinema: the gangster leitmotif of “Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas,” “Casino” and “The Departed”; the awakening feminism of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”; the brutal anger of “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull”; the unsettling treatise on fame in “The King of Comedy”; the respectful religious provocation of the much-maligned “The Last Temptation of Christ”; and on it goes.

The length and breadth of that work is the starting point for longtime film critic, author and documentarian Richard Schickel in “Conversations With Scorsese,” his intriguing, sometimes maddening but ultimately satisfying new book. Though billed as a conversation, it often reads more like a lecture series as the men discuss each of Scorsese’s feature films, a smattering of his documentaries, his views on editing, music, color, storyboarding and everything else in the filmmaking process.

As anyone who’s ever caught the filmmaker on TV or in person knows, everything about him seems irrepressible — his humor, his passion, that rubber-band grin, the Buddy Holly horn rims and those caterpillar brows. That nature is both the appeal and the conundrum of the book — when to rein him in and when to let him run. Schickel does a good deal of both, though the book would have benefited from more tightening.

I’m sure there is some good stuff in here and I’m not surprised that Scorsese is less than candid about his failures and his personal life.

Good looking to Long Form Reads for linking to Hilton Als’ 1999 New Yorker profile of Richard Pyror:

Pryor’s art defies the very definition of the word “order.” He based his style on digressions and riffs—the monologue as jam session. He reinvented standup, which until he developed his signature style, in 1971, had consisted largely of borscht-belt-style male comedians telling tales in the Jewish vernacular, regardless of their own religion or background. Pryor managed to make blacks interesting to audiences that were used to responding to a liberal Jewish sensibility—and, unlike some of his colored colleagues, he did so without “becoming” Jewish himself. (Dick Gregory, for example, was a political comedian in the tradition of Mort Sahl; Bill Cosby was a droll Jack Benny.) At the height of his career, Pryor never spoke purely in the complaint mode. He was often baffled by life’s complexities, but he rarely told my-wife-made-me-sleep-on-the-sofa jokes or did “bits” whose sole purpose was to “kill” an audience with a boffo punch line. Instead, he talked about characters—black street people, mostly. Because the life rhythm of a black junkie, say, implies a certain drift, Pryor’s stories did not have badda-bing conclusions. Instead, they were encapsulated in a physical attitude: each character was represented in Pryor’s walk, in his gestures—which always contained a kind of vicarious wonder at the lives he was enacting. Take, for instance, his sketch of a wino in Peoria, Illinois—Pryor’s hometown and the land of his imagination—as he encounters Dracula. In the voice of a Southern black man, down on his luck:

Hey man, say, nigger—you with the cape. . . . What’s your name, boy? Dracula? What kind of name is that for a nigger? Where you from, fool? Transylvania? I know where it is, nigger! You ain’t the smartest motherfucker in the world, even though you is the ugliest. Oh yeah, you a ugly motherfucker. Why you don’t get your teeth fixed, nigger? That shit hanging all out your mouth. Why you don’t get you an orthodontist? . . . This is 1975, boy. Get your shit together. What’s wrong with your natural? Got that dirt all in the back of your neck. You’s a filthy little motherfucker, too. You got to be home ’fore the sun come up? You ain’t lyin’, motherfucker. See your ass during the day, you liable to get arrested. You want to suck what? You some kind of freak, boy? . . . You ain’t suckin’ nothing here, junior.

Als contends that Pryor’s two greatest albums are “That Nigger’s Crazy,” and “Bicentennial Nigger.” I love the former but think the later is not nearly as good as “Is it Something I Said?” and “Wanted: Live in Concert.” But I do think that Pryor at his peak reached a place that no comic has ever approached, before or since.

[Picture by Ken Taylor]

The Yanks lost to the Phillies today. Cliff has the recap.

[Drawing by Mary Byrom]

Writing ain’t easy…even for Tina Fey.

There was a good piece on why writers abandon novels in the Book Review last Sunday. I like this bit from Stephen King: ““Look, writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub,” he said. “Sometimes the damn tub sinks. It’s a wonder that most of them don’t.”

From the Brick City Gutter to a Touch of Class…

Picking up on yesterday’s tune by Joe Cocker, let’s do it right:

And since we’re dippin’ into the K-Solo, here he is with Red flippin’ the old Just Ice beat. Time to get your ass to the gym and work it out to this banger:

On the heels of the new Joe D book, consider Derek Jeter: From the Pages of the New York Times. It’s handsome, with lots of glossy photographs as well as a fine introduction by Tyler Kepner. For the serious Yankee fan, this one is a keeper.

Best Pizza is reviewed in the Times:

Most garlic knots let you down. After one or two salty, satisfying bites, you’re left to chew on the increasingly impenetrable thing like a masticating cow. It’s a snack food for suckers and optimists, anybody with a Charlie Brown-like faith that maybe Lucy Van Pelt won’t pull away the football, that this time it might be great.

The garlic knots ($3 for six) at Best Pizza in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, deliver on that hope. Baked in a century-old brick oven, they arrive charred on top and creamy inside, more gougère than repurposed crust. There are no tricks, just good technique: dough that rises all day; a drizzle of garlic oil after the knots come out of the oven; a dusting of shaved pecorino; chopped parsley, because that’s what you do. The knots are served on a flimsy paper plate with pickled vegetables (fennel, mostly) because Best Pizza is a slice joint, where $3 will feed you, and $15 will pay for a feast.

The good–it looks damn tasty, the bad, it’s in Williamsburg. But if you happen to find yourself in Hipster Dufus Heaven, looks like it is worth checking out.

[Photo Credit: Brooklyn 365]

Over at Esquire, Scott Raab interviews Chris Rock.

My main concern with spring training is that nobody on the Yanks gets seriously hurt. Otherwise, I avoid watching games and I don’t follow the stories out of Florida too closely, because I don’t want to know too much. I crave the element of mystery and surprise and I want to be fresh once the season begins. There are other sports to keep me busy now–it’s hoops galore these days–and other interests, book and movies, that I’ll put aside once the regular season starts.

This is will be the ninth season for me at the Banter and, as you can tell, baseball alone, never mind the Yankees, is not enough to sustain my interest. Writing is hard, even when it is a quick blog post, and it is important for me not to become jaded and bored. Which is why I’m lucky to have a great crew of contributors as well as a cherce group of regular readers.

Here’s hoping this season turns out to be a fun one. I’m counting on it.

I took pride in my ability to imitate batting stances growing up so I never fell in love with the Batting Stance Guy. He is good, very good in some cases, but I’m a tough critic. But I have to say, the kid has skills. This made my day (the Boswell is killer, love Dan’s Sideshow Bob wig, and Ozzie, well, see for yourself and smile):

Thanks to Cliff for pointing out the facts.

Manhattan in Moscow, via Mark Lamster…cause he’s got it like that.

There is an excerpt from the new Joe D book in this week’s issue of SI. Check it outski:

JOE DIMAGGIO sat reading Superman and smoking in his room at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. He adored Superman comics, although he did not want many people to know this. If the newspapers picked up on it, who knew what people might think? What if they made fun of him? His roommate, Lefty Gomez, had the assignment of discreetly buying the weekly comic book for DiMaggio; whenever Joe himself carried a copy he tucked it out of sight. He read the daily Superman strips in the newspaper too.

Superman was a story of unambiguous heroism in which the seemingly impossible was routinely achieved. Something important was always at stake. Everybody loved Superman, and unfailingly he saved the day. There was also the ever-present element of secrecy, of Clark Kent’s disguising a completely other identity that no one, not even Lois Lane, could know.

“Why, Joe, you’re just like him,” Gomez would kid. “He puts on his uniform, and all of a sudden no one can stop him! He’s everyone’s hero.” Sometimes when Gomez bought the comic—and DiMaggio always had him get it the very day it came out—he would goof around by calling out to DiMaggio, who hovered off to the side, “You mean this comic book, Joe? Or this one, the Superman?” DiMaggio would scowl and turn his back and walk off a few paces. Only Gomez could get away with tweaking him like this.

That night, June 28, 1941, with a chance for DiMaggio to pass George Sisler’s American League record during a doubleheader at Griffith Stadium the next day, he and Gomez would stay in the room. DiMaggio’s hitting streak was at 40 games, one short of Sisler’s mark from 1922, and as the 26-year-old DiMaggio had realized over the last few days in New York City and Philadelphia, being out in public now meant being subjected to almost relentless pestering.

For the unleavened experience…

Check out this piece on Matzo.

Charles Pierce is the latest in Chris Jones’ compelling Five for Writing series:

At one point in one of the stories, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that he is related to a famous French painter named Vernet. Watson expresses surprise that Holmes is not a painter himself. “Art in the blood,” Holmes tells him, “takes the strangest forms.” My grandfather was a sign-painter and a landscape artist. One of his best hangs in my living room. His daughter, my mother, played piano in a saloon. I do what I do. Art in the blood takes the strangest forms.

Shouldn’t we find the art, or love, or whatever you want to call it, in everything that we do? From they way we look, and see things to how we treat people? From the work that we do–no matter what it is–to the way we cut an onion and prepare a meal. That’s why life is art and vice versa.

Kostya Kennedy’s new book on Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak makes for a great Sports Illustrated cover this week.

The Daily News ran an excerpt a few days ago. Dig in. And also, check out this SI podcast with Kennedy.

“The Big Lebowski” like you’ve never seen it before, compressed into a single image like a bar code. There’s plenty more of them, here. Man, there’s all sorts of curious and weird things on the Internet, eh?

Cause we can never get enough James…