Blog Archives

How about the Meters to start the day? Feel the funk, baby.

[Picture by Bags]

The sounds aren’t the same during the spring. The parks are small so the crack of the bat gets swallowed up in space. The light is different. The games are not played to be won. But it is still baseball and for some, that’s enough.

Enjoy it.

[Photo Credit: CBS News]

Down in Florida, exhibition games are starting up, and our man Cliff will be on pernt as usual.

The Yanks will be televised on YES this afternoon. Enjoy.

I have not seen the Cezanne Card Players’ show at the Met yet but it looks wonderful.

From the GQ vaults–and thanks to Long Form Reads for pointing it out–here’s James Ellroy’s disturbing piece on researching his mother’s killer:

The police reconstructed the crime.

My mother went out drinking Saturday night. She was seen at the Desert Inn bar in El Monte with a dark-haired white man and a blonde woman. My mother and the man left the bar around 10 P.M.

A group of Little Leaguers discovered the body. My mother had been strangled at an unknown location and dumped into some bushes next to the athletic field at Arroyo High School, a mile and a half from the Desert Inn.

She clawed her assailant’s face bloody. The killer had pulled off one of her stockings and tied it loosely around her neck portmortem.

I went to live with my father. I forced some tears out that Sunday—and none since.

[Photo Credit: xd360]

“Holiday” is playing this afternoon at 1:30 at the Modern.

In the words of the immortal Oscar Madison, “Now it’s garbage.”

Hey, Leroy, You’re Mama’s callin’:

It is dark and wet this morning so let’s get right to some nourishment of the sinful kind. The New York Times gives a tour of the best doughnut shops in town.

[Photo Credit: NY Mag and Good Point]

New York City picture by our man Bags.

Over at PB, Jay Jaffe takes a look at concussions in sports, specifically in baseball. The piece picks up on a column that Bob Klapisch wrote last week on Jorge Posada. Sobering material, indeed.

[Photo Credit: PS70]

When I was in high school, I went to Carnegie Hall one night to see the guitarist Stanley Jordan. Also on the bill was a guy named Bobby McFerrin, who put on a sensational show that I remember vividly to this day. Not too long after, he had a hit song and video. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” came and went but McFerrin continued to have a productive and fascinating career. He’s a singular talent.

I always dug this tune:

Over at Son of Bold Venture, Jeff Pearlman talks about his life as a writer:

About four years into my time at SI, though, I started getting a tiny bit itchy. I was Tom Verducci’s No. 2 on baseball, which was terrific. But… I don’t know what it was. The players were starting to get younger than I was. The clichés drove me crazy. I dreaded getting blown off so some guy could read his Field & Stream (true story). I went through the inevitable, “Is this as good as it gets?” Udall stage.

Seminal moment came in 2001. I was covering Game 4 of the World Series between the D-backs and Yankees at Yankee Stadium. Great night, amazing energy. Well, early on my stomach starts to hurt. I start cramping up, and I say to Verducci and Steve Cannella, “I’ve gotta go home.” We weren’t filing for that night (at least I wasn’t), so I left and took the train to the apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend/now-wife. The two of us sat on the couch and watched the game—this classic World Series thriller that came down to a 10th inning homer by Derek Jeter. And as I watched from afar, the fans going nuts, Jeter rounding the bases, the announcers screaming, all I could think was, “I’m so happy I’m not there right now.” That’s the 100% truth—I was thrilled to not deal with the crush; the clichés; the blather. And it was that moment when I officially started thinking about exiting SI. Because if you’re not sad to be missing Game 4 of the World Series, you need a change.

[Photo Credit: Gawker Media]

Fluffy Vanilla Marshmellows? Vhy d’hell not?

Seven Spoons gets chunky mit de flavor.

Looking for a dream job? Then dig this over at MLB.com.

Thanks to Subway Art Blog, dig the work of Enrico Miguel Thomas–the subway artist of New York.

Mr. Verdoux, I presume?

From Matthew Sweet in the Guardian:

In a bomb-proof concrete vault beneath one of the more moneyed stretches of Switzerland lies something better than bullion. Here, behind blast doors and security screens, are stored the remains of one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. You might wonder what more there is to know about Charles Spencer Chaplin. Born in London in 1889; survivor of a tough workhouse childhood; the embodiment of screen comedy; fugitive from J Edgar Hoover; the presiding genius of The Kid and The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator. His signature character, the Little Tramp, was once so fiercely present in the global consciousness that commentators studied its effects like a branch of epidemiology. In 1915, “Chaplinitis” was identified as a global affliction. On 12 November 1916, a bizarre outbreak of mass hysteria produced 800 simultaneous sightings of Chaplin across America.

Though the virus is less contagious today, Chaplin’s face is still one of the most widely recognised images on the planet. And yet, in that Montruex vault, there is a wealth of material that has barely been touched. There are letters that evoke his bitter estrangement from America in the 1950s. There are reel-to-reel recordings of him improvising at the piano (“I’m so depressed,” he trills, groping his way towards a tune that rings right). A cache of press cuttings details the British Army’s banning of the Chaplin moustache from the trenches of the first world war. Other clippings indicate that, in the early 1930s, he considered returning to his homeland and entering politics.

Found on the subway platform this morning…

Meanwhile, down in Tampa, the young guns are getting some burn: here’s John Harper on Manny Banuelos, and Jack Curry on Jesus Montero.  And for you old fogies, check out Harvey Araton’s column on Yogi and Gator.

Carmelo debuts at the Garden tonight.

Allen Barra on the new Bogie bio:

[Pauline] Kael put words to the image in her book Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) when she explained Bogart as “The man with a code (moral, aesthetic, chivalrous) in a corrupt society, he had, so to speak, inside knowledge of the nature of the enemy. He was a sophisticated urban version of The Westerner, who, classically, knew both sides of the law.”

He was, of course, faking it. As Stefan Kanfer makes clear in his new biography Tough Without A Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart, Bogart’s ancestors were more like characters in The Philadelphia Story than the ones in movies that Bogie himself would become famous in. “In the 150 year history of cinema,” as Kanfer puts it, “few performers have arrived with a more impressive resume of monetary privilege and social distinction.”