Blog Archives

My wife is having a holiday Sale on her photography notecards over at her website.

Peep don’t sleep.

As the winter meetings begin, the Yanks have their sites set squarely on Cliff Lee. According to George King in the Post:

“My priority list is pitching, pitching, pitching, pitching, pitching — I’ve been focusing on pitching,” GM Brian Cashman said yesterday.

…”When you’re a free agent, we kind of have to dance to their dance card,” Cashman said. “I’ve kind of been reacting to them.

“I flew into Arkansas especially to meet with Cliff Lee and his wife and his agent. I did that very early in the process. I was the first one out of the gates there.

“So, everybody knows I got ahead of everybody else. But it’s their dance card. They’re setting the pace of this thing. I can only wait and respect the process they put themselves in. It took them a long time, they fought through a lot of different cities to get to this point. I’m hoping this will be the last city he ends up in, in New York.”

It will cost the Yanks plenty in dollars and years to secure Lee.

UPDATE: Hall of Fame disgrace continues as Marvin Miller comes up one vote shy. No shock there.

UPDATE: Really nice breakdown of the Adrian Gonzalez deal by Jay Jaffe.

UPDATE: Klap tweets that Andy Pettitte will likely retire.

The Winter Meetings opens on a busy not as the Red Sox will get Adrain Gonzalez after all.

Jayson Werth, to the Nats, for many dollars.

Hey, Now. And they’re just getting warmed up.

Cliff Lee, of course, with back-up plans aplenty.

The Winter Meeting start tomorrow, but I’m sure we’ll start getting word from Disney World by tonight.

The wife, out on the town, is ready for the holidays.

It is done. George King with the scoop.

As the Yanks and Derek Jeter inch closer to a deal–one that could be finalized before the end of the day–it appears that the Red Sox have a trade in place for Adrian Gonzalez. The San Diego front office is filthy with former Red Sox employees who are more than familiar with Boston’s farm system. Word is the Pads will receive prospects in return for Gonzalez, who the Sox have coveted for several years.

The Hot Stove is heating up just in time for the Winter Meetings. Gossip Mongers and Baseball Nerds Rejoice!

[Picture by Bags]

What’s up with the Corey Haim look, Cash?

From Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York blog, a Bronx Banter favorite, dig this post on the New York Accent.

Sticking with old Stretch Armstrong Show freestyles, here’s a good one from Q-Tip and Mad Skillz (I remember a lot of heads turned on Tip after hearing this cause it was like hearing Cosby trying to be Pryor):

Ron Santo has passed away. The former third baseman who was as close to a Hall of Famer as you can get without actually being one, was 70.

 
Another tough loss for the baseball world.

Scott Raab is a one-man gang after LeBron James. I think his stuff on the James Misghegoss has been funny.

I admire Wright Thompson for many reasons, chiefly his talents as a reporter and his ambition as a bonus piece writer, but his most recent article is a bloated and self-important piece on James’ return to Cleveland. It brings out Thompson’s worst quality, all too often, he WRITES FOR THE AGES, and in the process he gets in the way of the story.

I like Charles Pierce’s take best:

This Blog would like to state for the record how tired it has become of the city of Cleveland, and its basketball team, and its basketball fans, and anything to do with how all of the above had their poor widdle hearts broken last summer when a player decided that seven years was long enough for anyone to play basketball in Cleveland. (And no more bellyaching about The Decision, either. Had The Decision gone the other way, and had he announced that he was staying, nobody in Cleveland would have been clutching their pearly about the good taste of it all.) This also goes for everyone else in every other city — including this one — who has been wailing the Ich bin ein Clevelander blues all season. Not one of you really cares about Cleveland or its basketball fans. Do not assume everyone in your audience is as dumb as a rock.

Seriously, get over yourselves, all of you.

I say James and the Heat romp tonight.

Oh, hell yes. Classic late-night freestyle:

Parsnip and Potato Mash: another sure shot from Food 52.

In the everybody loves an underdog department comes the winner of the National Book Award for fiction.

Dig this belated review in the New York Times by Janet Maslin:

Ms. Gordon began her serious writing career in 1963, at 19. She wrote a linguistically quaint parallel-universe novel, “Shamp of the City-Solo,” that appeared in 1974. Regarded by some as an underground classic, it had fallen into relative obscurity by the middle 1980s, when Ms. Gordon discussed it in a long interview with Gargoyle Magazine. Gargoyle is the sort of publication that has ardently scrutinized Ms. Gordon’s work over the years. More mainstream ones, like The New York Times, have managed barely to notice her at all.

So how should her win be understood? Should it be seen as a general triumph for small-press authors (Ms. Gordon’s publisher, McPherson & Company, which has championed her work for decades, remains a company with a post office box for a mailing address), or as a full-blown, legitimate recognition of 2010’s best work of fiction? Perhaps “Lord of Misrule” would not be so startling if Ms. Gordon’s other books had been more widely read. But this novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue.

Mornin’ y’all.

The Yanks have re-signed Serge Mitre. We haven’t got a worry in the world! Also, I was struck with a second-guess last night. Cliff Lee has made such a good nemesis for the Yanks the past few years, what if he signs for less and spurns the Bombers? Then, we’ll have something to get all sweaty about.

The Times goes Ghetto.

Here’s Steve Davis, writing in the Texas Observer about curating Cormac McCarthy’s archives:

McCarthy grew up in Tennessee, and he published four critically acclaimed novels set in the South during the 1960s and 1970s. Each sold poorly, and he lived at the edge of poverty. A fiercely private man, he refused to do book signings, lectures, or interviews. One former wife, British singer Anne DeLisle, once lived with McCarthy on a pig farm. She recalled that, “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

In 1981, McCarthy bought a house in El Paso after receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. There he began writing books set in the Southwest. His 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, received little attention at the time but is considered a classic today. In 1992, McCarthy’s fortunes changed with All the Pretty Horses, which made the best-seller list and won the National Book Award. McCarthy did not show at the ceremony to claim his prize.

…Another screenplay, No Country for Old Men, was finished in the 1980s. Yet nothing happened with it for nearly 20 years, until McCarthy rewrote that story as a novel, published in 2005. The early version of No Country for Old Men is unusual by McCarthy’s standards because it contains a conventional happy ending. Sheriff Bell and a very-much-alive Llewelyn Moss team up in a climactic gun battle to take down the Evildoer—named “Ralston” in this draft. Having the good guys prevail was an obvious ploy to a potential buyer, another indication that McCarthy was more market-oriented than his legend would have it.

When I’d begun my research in the McCarthy archive, I’d pretty much believed in the mythological version of him. I viewed McCarthy as the ultimate literary outsider, a man immune to most commercial considerations. As he’d told Oprah on TV, he didn’t really care whether millions of people read his books. The portrait of McCarthy that emerges in the archives is more complex. McCarthy had briefly allowed me into his living room that cold December morning, but it was the archives that allowed me to wander around the rooms of his house.

I like Ben Affleck more as a director than I do as an actor and “The Town” is an efficient, if implausible, entertainment. Affleck has good taste and the movie is well-cast, shot, and edited. Affleck is wooden as an actor and I just don’t buy him as a tough guy. That said, I would have liked to see him swap roles with Jeremy Renner who is largely wasted in the Johnny-Boy Nutzo role. Renner, at least based on his work in “The Hurt Locker,” would have brought so much more to protagonist than Affleck. Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper are terrific in supporting roles.

Then there is “Winter’s Bone,” the critical darling of the summer. If you missed it the first time around, do yourself a favor and rent it. It is a chilling movie that features a sensational lead performance (one that we should be hearing about come Award season). Everything about the movie is sure without being over-the-top. This is one of the special movies of the year, the kind that gives you faith in the medium. And that’s word to Uncle Teardrop.