Blog Archives

Javy “Puttin Out the Fire (with Gasoline)” Vazquez makes his re-debut in the Bronx this afternoon at the River Avenue Oil Slick.

Let’s hope his stuff is as crisp as this gorgeous spring day, and…

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

I’ve long considered cilantro, what we used to call coriander, to be the Steely Dan of herbs–you either love it or hate it. For the longest, I didn’t dig it at all, but since I’ve learned to appreciate and desire Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican cuisine, I’ve also learned to appreciate, and even crave, cilantro as well.

There’s a fun piece in the Times today by Harold McGee about how cilantro: 

“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with,” [Jay Gottfried, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies how the brain perceives smells] said . “But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.”

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

[Photo Credit: Pinch My Salt]

Dining Room Overlooking the Garden, By Pierre Bonnard (1930-31)

[Photo Credit: Peter Morgan/AP]

Course there was lots to enjoy yesterday: the ring ceremony, Gene Monahan, Godzilla, (and Jerry Hairston, Jr!), the Boss, and an Opening Day win.

Alex Rodriguez was appropriately geeked about getting his ring:

“A lot of guys are saying they’re not going to wear it. They think they’re too cool. I’m calling BS on that,” Rodriguez said. “I will wear it and wear it every day.”

Fortunately, the dude is rich enough to have bodyguards cause first thing I thought about when I read this was Stephon Marbury getting robbed outside of a nightclub. Word to Herb.

Then, there was this too…

[Photo Credit: Chris McGrath/Getty Images]

What else?

[photo credit: yehwan]

Home: Where we want to be.

Mike Vaccaro in the Post:

These are the kinds of days the old place was built for, when there was bunting draped all around her, when even on the coldest April days you could always coax a whisper of summer out of the sky. Opening Day at Yankee Stadium: five words that never grew tired across the generations.

The move across the street seems more permanent now than it ever did last year. The old place is coming down in hunks and chunks — “It looks like ruins,” Yankee manager Joe Girardi said — and soon there really will only be memories where Ruth and DiMaggio and Mantle did their finest work.

No, as much as the new Yankee Stadium saw last year — all those walk-off wins, all those pies to the face, all those postseason victories and that one final, glorious, championship-clinching win against the Phillies — today is when it officially becomes the Yankees’ home for good.

This morning I see a guy on the train reading Kill All Your Darlings, a fine collection of essays by Luc Sante. So we chat for a minute and I get to thinking about this wonderful essay by Sante, My Lost City:

The idea of writing a book about New York City1 first entered my head around 1980, when I was a writer more wishfully than in actual fact, spending my nights in clubs and bars and my days rather casually employed in the mailroom of this magazine. It was there that Rem Koolhaas’s epochal Delirious New York fell into my hands. “New York is a city that will be replaced by another city” is the phrase that sticks in my mind. Koolhaas’s book, published in 1978 as a paean to the unfinished project of New York the Wonder City, seemed like an archaeological reverie, an evocation of the hubris and ambition of a dead city.2 I gazed wonderingly at its illustrations, which showed sights as dazzling and remote as Nineveh and Tyre. The irony is that many of their subjects stood within walking distance: the Chrysler Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, Rockefeller Center. But they didn’t convey the feeling they had when they were new. In Koolhaas’s pages New York City was manifestly the location of the utopian and dystopian fantasies of the silent-film era. It was Metropolis, with elevated roadways, giant searchlights probing the heavens, flying machines navigating the skyscraper canyons. It was permanently set in the future.

The New York I lived in, on the other hand, was rapidly regressing. It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were camped out amid its potsherds and tumuli. This did not distress me—quite the contrary. I was enthralled by decay and eager for more: ailanthus trees growing through cracks in the asphalt, ponds and streams forming in leveled blocks and slowly making their way to the shoreline, wild animals returning from centuries of exile. Such a scenario did not seem so far-fetched then. Already in the mid-1970s, when I was a student at Columbia, my windows gave out onto the plaza of the School of International Affairs, where on winter nights troops of feral dogs would arrive to bed down on the heating grates. Since then the city had lapsed even further. On Canal Street stood a five-story building empty of human tenants that had been taken over from top to bottom by pigeons. If you walked east on Houston Street from the Bowery on a summer night, the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square.

Bring in the bass…

Previewing the Angels…

Meanwhile, Tyler Kepner gives his first impressions of Target Field:

You cannot overstate how cool the massive old-fashioned Twins logo in center field is. The Minneapolis and St. Paul characters will share a neon handshake every time a Twin hits a homer. Like the Mets’ apple or Bernie Brewer’s slide or the Phillies’ giant Liberty Bell, this is a distinctive feature that will have special appeal to kids.

…As Peter Pascarelli of ESPN points out, it doesn’t remind you of anywhere else, and that’s a good thing. But there are some of the best elements of other parks, like the evergreen trees behind the center field fence (similar to Coors Field in Denver) and the nearby downtown skyline, like Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cleveland.

Martine’s Legs, By Henri Cartier-Bresson (1968)

Love this bass line, man.

The classic is still classic even if modern editions don’t include the recipe for simmered porcupine.

Thanks to Baseball Think Factory for the link.

A few days ago, Torii Hunter called Hideki Matsui, “The Los Angeles Godzilla of Anaheim.”

Well, done, sir.

What are you favorite baseball nicknames? I’m of the Bob Lemon School and think you should just call everyone “Meat.”

Last Sunday I was in Albeturkey and I stopped by to watch some high school kids play.

Today, the Yanks and Rays play indoors down in Tampa. Rubber game and all. Todd Drew’s boy, AJ Burnett on the hill as the Yanks look to win the series.

Second turn for Tino Martinez in the broadcast booth today. I figure Tino–eager to please in the manner of an over-achieving high school junior–to be awful on TV. Another boring ex-jock chock full of cliches. Company Man. But with O’Neill on Friday night in the blowout, he had a few moments of insight, some self-deprecating humor. Who knows, maybe he’ll have some spark, after all.

Big shoes to fill, though. I thought Coney was a budding star and he certainly was the most entertaining, unpredictable, and candid analyst on YES. If they ever get him together with Mex Hernandez, someone’s getting arrested.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

So sorry I’m late, guys. But better late than never a game thread for the Saturday Fox Game of the Week.

Grill and serve.

Zorah on the Terrace, By Henri Matisse (1912)

Since we’s in Morocco and all…

Amanda Hesser explores some recipes for a spicy organge salad, Moroccan style. Mmmm.

Malcolm McLaren, most famous for bringing us the Sex Pistols, died yesterday. He was 64.

McLaren also was the brains behind a seminial Hip Hop record in the early ’80s.

Dig the classic, Buffalo Gals: