Blog Archives

Our own Emma Span is part of Gelf Magazine’s Varsity Letters series tonight. If you are around, troop over to Dumbo and check, check her out. As you know, we think the world of her because she’s one-of-a-kind. And funny…In the meantime, dig the interview she did for Gelf:

Gelf Magazine: Many of us have our own generalizations about Yankees fans and Mets fans. You mention that your father accused you at a young age of having an inner Mets fan inside you, even though you grew up a Yankees fan. What are these most predominant generalizations, and how true do you find them to be? Are there a lot of Mets fans trapped in Yankees fans’ bodies, and vice versa?

Emma Span: For the most part, those generalizations are a myth. With millions of Yankees fans and millions of Mets fans, they obviously aren’t all the same. That said, I think people do take on certain influences. It’s easier for Yankees fans to be a little arrogant because they’ve had so much success. The team itself also has a kind of pompous arrogance about its history: the greatest sports franchise ever, blah, blah, blah. I think the generalizations, though, are mostly bullshit. I do ask in the book, however, that if you grow up as a kid watching Mariano Rivera as your closer, if that has a slightly different effect on your personality and your outlook on life than if you grew up watching Armando Benitez. I think somehow it might.

Gelf Magazine: I think an interesting litmus test, at least for the nature of the Mets fan, was, who they would choose to cheer for in the Yankees-Phillies World Series last year? What does it say? Who are the Mets fans cheering for the Phillies and who are the Mets fans cheering for the Yankees?

Emma Span: There was a serious debate about it. Mets fans actually got pissed because they couldn’t believe that certain people would support the Phillies or that certain people would support the Yankees. Obviously they weren’t really supporting either team, but when you watch the World Series, it’s always more fun to have one team you’re rooting for. I think a slight majority—and this is based just on personal observation—but I saw a slight majority pulling for the Phillies. You know, because Mets fans live amongst Yankees fans and deal with them constantly, and the depth of anger against the Yankees is really pretty serious—obviously with the understanding that it’s just a game and most Mets fans have at least one Yankees fan in the family, but still there’s a serious anger there.

Untitled (Albuquerque), By Richard Diebenkorn, 1952. Oil on canvas, 68 x 60 inches (174.6 x 152.4 cm).

It’s no secret that I’m a big P. Kael fan. Imagine how stoaked I was when I found one of her most famous pieces, on-line–an appreciation of Cary Grant, The Man From Dream City:

“You can be had,” Mae Wet said to Cary Grant in “She Done Him Wrong,” which opened in January, 1933, and that was what the women stars of most of his greatest hits were saying to him for thirty years, as he backed away – but not too far. One after another, the great ladies courted him – Irene Dunne in “The Awful Truth” and “My Favorite Wife,” Katherine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby” and “Holiday,” Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth in “Only Angels Have Wings,” Ingrid Bergman in “Notorious,” Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief,” Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest,” Audrey Hepburn in “Charade.” Willing but not forward, Cary Grant must be the most publicly seduced male the world has known, yet he has never become a public joke – not even when Tony Curtis parodied him in “Some Like It Hot,” encouraging Marilyn Monroe to rape. The little bit of shyness and reserve in Grant is pure box-office gold, and being the pursued doesn’t make him seem weak or passively soft. It makes him glamorous – and, since he is not as available as other men, far more desirable.

Cary Grant is the male love object. Men want to be as lucky and enviable as he is – they want to be like him. And women imagine landing him. Like Robert Redford, he’s sexiest in pictures in which the woman is the aggressor and all the film’s erotic energy is concentrated on him, as it was in “Notorious”: Ingrid Bergman practically ravished him while he was trying to conduct a phone conversation.

…Everyone likes the idea of Cary Grant. Everyone thinks of him affectionately, because he embodies what seems a happier time – a time when we had a simpler relationship to a performer. We could admire him for his timing and nonchalance; we didn’t expect emotional revelations from Cary Grant. We were used to his keeping his distance – which, if we cared to, we could close in idle fantasy. He appeared before us in radiantly shallow perfection, and that was all we wanted of him. He was the dufy of acting – shallow, but in a good way, shallow without trying to be deep. We didn’t want depth from him; we asked only that he be handsome and silky and make us laugh.

Cary Grant’s bravado – his wonderful sense of pleasure in performance, which we respond to and share in – is a pride in craft. His confident timing is linked to a sense of movies as a popular entertainment: he wants to please the public. He became a “polished,” “finished” performer in a tradition that has long since atrophied.

He was the illest.

Some words (and recipes) from the master, Jacques Pepin, in a long interview at Powells.com:

We had to go to school at that time until age fourteen to finish primary school. Certificate étude. I was doing fine in school. I’m saying that only in that I didn’t have to leave school. My brother didn’t, and he became an engineer. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to go into the kitchen and cook.

I liked the hustle, bustle, excitement, the sweating and yelling of the kitchen. I liked it very much; my brother didn’t. The other choice I would have had maybe was to become a cabinetmaker because my father was a cabinetmaker, doing fancy furniture, which we call ébéniste in France. And I still like to work wood. I was in Claudine’s house yesterday, looking at a table I did a few years ago. Pretty rough, but it’s still there.

I like to work with my hands, and I feel that anyone involved in food has to become a craftsman first. A technician. That doesn’t mean you have talent. It just means that you are able to move very fast and do things properly in an orderly manner, in a miserly manner. Certainly if you’re a jeweler or a carpenter or a surgeon, you first and foremost have to become a technician, to have the manual dexterity to dominate that trade. If you happen to have talent, now you have the know-how in your hand; you have the means to express this and bring it to a higher level.

If you look at the reverse: I know young chefs who have a lot of talent, but they’re technically very bad. The food doesn’t come out the way it should. I can do an analogy with my painting. I’ve been painting for thirty years. I do illustrations in my books. But I have never spent, like a professional painter, five hours every day in a studio, working, working, working, so I don’t really have much technique. I start a painting and sometimes it comes out halfway good, and I’m the first one astonished. Often I get disgusted because whatever I have in my head, my hand is not able to express it the way I want. I’m not good enough technically.

Still Life (Natural Morta), By Giorgio Morandi, 1953

‘Cause that’s how they roll in Texas…

Brucha, baby.

My favorite part of the Passover seder is when you get to eat the bitter herbs—horseradish on a piece on Matzoh. Sure to clear any congestion, if you do it right. Here’s two of my cousins and me last night, loading up:

And paying the price (notice me pouding the table):

Whoa, boy.

In case you missed it, Jonathan Mahler had a good, long profile in the Sunday Magazine on the return of Tiger Woods and what it means for the PGA:

As far as professional golf is concerned, Woods cannot come back fast enough. The PGA Tour is at a critical juncture. Next year it will begin negotiating new TV contracts with CBS and NBC. In the meantime, the tour is trying to secure sponsors for 10 events in 2011 while economic conditions are not exactly favorable. Two of the hardest-hit industries, financial services and car manufacturing, are responsible for underwriting a third of the PGA Tour’s sponsored events. More to the point, the entire economic model of a golf tournament is looking a bit suspect. At the moment, the value of a company’s flying clients and employees to a sunny locale to drink Grey Goose cocktails and get tips on their short games from professional golfers is most likely to be lost on many of its shareholders. In other words, drumming up new sponsors and increasing — or just maintaining, really — the worth of its TV deals would have been hard enough for the tour even if the world’s greatest golfer and most recognizable athlete had not become enmeshed in the biggest tabloid story in years.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but in the last couple of years the tour has been aware of the fact that the negotiations of TV contracts and sponsorships are coming up, and in advising us on what to do, the one thing they’ve said is that we need the superstars to play more and no scandals, no controversies,” Harrison Frazar, a veteran of the PGA Tour, told me a couple months ago. “Well, it’s unfortunate that what’s happened right now is the ultimate scandal in the history of professional golf, and it’s happened to the absolute wrong person.”

I don’t play golf and I never watched it before Woods came along. If he’s in it come the final day at the Masters, or any of the Majors this year, and I’m around, yeah, I’ll tune in, and yeah, I’ll be pulling for him to win.

The King:

It’s always surreal when it is this dark in the morning, the bright lights of the city reflecting off the slick concrete.

Green Landscape, By Marc Chagall (1945)

Roots:

Those in the know understand that I’m talking about gefilte fish. And no, I’m not even going to post an image of the brownish grey lump of mashed whatever, cause I’ve got a heart. What I love is how gefilte fish  is traditionally served with a piece of carrot on top, as if that would salvage it–never mind the gelatin (shudder).

As kids, my brother, sister and I were expected to eat what was on our plate. Jewish side of the family, Catholic side of the family: same rules. At home, but especially when we were guests. I became a master at putting a spoonful of creamed spinach, or in Belgium, steak tartare, in my mouth and then gulping it down with a big swig of water. Fun, it was not.

There were two things that we were spared, however: lobster and gefilte fish. The former because it was too expensive and too good to be wasted on the likes of us who didn’t care for it, and the latter because, well, I guess because our elders had compassion.

But hey, that’s just me. I know some perfectly reasonable people who love gefilte fish. As for me, bring on the matzoh ball soup.

Pat Borzi has a post over at Bats about Joba Chamberlain’s Yankee future…as a reliever.

Man, it’s nippy in New York today.

Kicking off a week of countrified beats, let’s go back to the old school:

Dude, what happened to the spring? The sun is out but man, it’s winter cold again.

Might as well warm up with some of this: