Here’s a great gift idea for the movie nyerd in your life. Thomson is terrific fun to read even when you don’t agree with him.
Here’s a few other movie books of note…
“Lulu in Hollywood,” By Louise Brooks:
“The Parade’s Gone By,” By Kevin Brownlow.
“The Pat Hobby Stories,” By F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“Hitchcock,” By Francois Truffaut:
“Chinatown and The Last Detail: Two Screenplays,” By Robert Towne:
So Zack Greinke went to the Brewers and the Yanks are still waiting to hear from Andy Pettitte…Grienke wasn’t a New York Guy…
Things are slow for the Bombers as Christmas approaches. But that doesn’t mean the Yankee blogosphere is dormant–peep the latest from the fine folks at Replacement Level Yankees Weblog, Pinstriped Bible, Was Watching, The Captain’s Blog, River Ave Blues, It’s About the Money, Stupid, Yankeeist, Zell’s Pinstriped Blog,No Maas, and of course the Lo-Hud Yankees Blog.
In the meantime, dig this real rap session on the craft of hitting featuring Don Mattingly, Wade Boggs and Ted Williams. Peter Gammons is the writer, SI is the mag–back from April, 1986.
[Photo Credit: Nittanywhiteout.com, the Boston Globe.]
Long Sunday for the Giants. Long day. This one will sting for more than a minute…
Here’s a homemade hot coco recipe from the folks over at Serious Eats.
The Knicks lost their third straight last night, but UConn Women’s goes for a record-tying 88th consecutive win today. This afternoon also brings Giants and Eagles as well as Jets and Steelers. Greinke to the Brewers and also some big names moving in the NBA.
Should be a good sports Sunday, Cha-Cha. Enjoy.
The wife and I took a ride up to Port Chester this afternoon to check out the Mario Batali-Joe Bastianich food jernt, the Tarry Market.
Nice place. Not cheap, but no surprise there, right?
Then we stopped in for a bite next door at the Tarry Lodge:
Artichokes with mint.
Pizza with Guanciale, black truffles and a fried egg. Ka-Boom.
So many celebrity deaths lately. Blake Edwards, most popular for his work with Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther movies, passed away yesterday.
Here’s a You Tube highlight reel:
From “The Party”:
Mary Poppins is a Goin Off:
General Silliness:
She’s still a Beaut, ain’t she?
[Picture by Bags]
I haven’t thought about this tune in years but I started singing it in the shower the other night out of the blue:
Bob Klapisch just tweeted that the Yanks are “getting closer” on Jose Feliciano. Sctach that, Pedro Feliciano.
Discuss.
At least it did for me. My wife got me the complete Larry Sanders Show dvd set. It arrived in the mail last week. She said, “G’head, open it.”
Hey, Now.
I only saw about a dozen episodes when the show was originally aired so this is my first time watching it through.
I’m a heppy ket.
Thank you for Soul Sides and Long Live La Murga!
There’s a nice appreciation of Elia Kazan by John Lahr over at The New Yorker to mark the release of a new 18-DVD set, The Elia Kazan Collection:
“I’ve never seen a director who became as deeply and emotionally involved in a scene,” Marlon Brando wrote in his autobiography, “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” “Kazan was the best actors’ director by far of any I’ve worked for. [He] got into a part with me and virtually acted it with me.” Arthur Miller wrote, in “Timebends,” “Life in a Kazan production had that hushed air of conspiracy. A conspiracy not only against the existing theatre, but society, capitalism—in fact everybody who was not part of the production.” Kazan didn’t razzle-dazzle his actors with talk. Instinctively, when he had something important to tell an actor, he would huddle with him privately, rather than instruct in front of the others. He sensed that “anything that really penetrates is always to some degree an embarrassment,” Miller noted, adding, “A mystery grew up around what he might be thinking, and this threw the actor back on himself.” Kazan, who was no stranger to psychoanalysis, operated on the analytic principle of insinuation, not command. He believed that, for an interpretation to be owned by an actor, the actor had to find it in himself. “He would send one actor to listen to a particular piece of jazz, another to a certain novel, another to see a psychiatrist, another he would simply kiss,” Miller recalled. Kazan’s trick was to make the actors feel as though his ideas were actually their own revelations.
Kazan’s ability to submerge himself in a story served writers as creatively as it did actors. “I tried to think and feel like the author so that the play would be in the scale and in the mood, in the tempo and feeling of each author,” he said. “I tried to be the author.” Kazan is remembered primarily as a director, but his invisible contribution to writers is equally important. Blanche DuBois, Stanley Kowalski, Willy Loman, Big Daddy, Brick, Maggie the Cat, Chance Wayne—defining figures in the folklore of the twentieth century—all bear the marks of Kazan’s shaping hand. Of the many playwrights with whom he collaborated—William Inge, Arthur Miller, Archibald McLeish, Thornton Wilder—he had no partnership that was more intimate or influential than his work with Tennessee Williams. “It was a mysterious harmony,” Kazan wrote. “Our union, immediate on first encounter, was close. . . . Possibly because we were both freaks.” Kazan and Williams also had in common an oppressive father, a doting mother, a faith in sexual chaos as a path to knowledge, and a voracious appetite for success.
Kazan’s 1988 memoir, “A Life,” is well-worth tracking down.
Here’s Joe Sheehan, writing for SI.com:
There’s an assumption that the Yankees will use prospect Jesus Montero to acquire someone to fill the Lee-sized hole they see at the front of the rotation. They traded Montero once, remember, agreeing to a deal with Seattle for Lee himself back in July before the Mariners decided to trade him to the Rangers instead. The idea that the Yankees will use Montero, who compares to Mike Piazza both offensively and defensively, to get Zack Greinke has been in play for some time, but it’s not a particularly good fit. Greinke is a very good pitcher, but he’s signed through just 2012. If the Yankees are determined to trade Montero, who is one of the top five prospects in baseball, they should target less-obvious candidates who can contribute for more than 70 starts — even if it seems like these pitchers will, or should, be untouchable.
…The Yankees were unable to use their money to add a frontline starter, because the situation wasn’t entirely in their control. What they do with Montero is entirely in their control, however, and their disposition of this fantastic young hitter will tell us a lot about the Yankees’ creativity and imagination in solving problems that writing checks can’t fix.
Your move, Cash.
From the City of Brotherly Love…
