Blog Archives

Momofuku’s famous pork buns:

Yeah, they are worth the trip. And if you are on the go, pop into the Milk Bar for ’em. You won’t be sorry.

[photo credit: Amuses Bouche]

When I was in fifth grade a classmate sold me his used Intellivision system. I’m sure he ripped me off–I’ve never been much of a haggler–but it was worth it even if the machine was half-busted. Those sports games were so much better than the ones for Atari.

Hey, even George Plimpton said so:

MLB Rumors posts the latest from Ed Price…the scoop? The Yanks have placed Chad Gaudin on waivers.

Broadway Boogie Woogie, By Piet Mondrian (1942-3) 

I always hear this song in my head when I look at this picture.

Chad Jennings has the skinny on today’s exhibition game; Joe Posnanski has the latest on Joe Mauer, the Twinkie Kid.

I really dig this lady (and her cookbook too).

Jules Feiffer

From David Carr’s review in the Sunday Book Review:

Truth in the matter of memoir has always seemed evanescent and, more often lately, either elusive or absent. Memories of the self are often in service of other agendas, including the settling of scores and the creation of a hero where a mere man once stood.

Those questions, and the recent travails of the genre, seem at great remove to the reader of “Backing Into Forward,” by Jules Feiffer. Reading Feiffer, you know where the truth lies because it is there on every page — resonant, self-­lacerating and frequently hilarious. How else to explain Feif­fer’s frank admissions that he could not stand his mother, even dead; that he coveted the success of peers; that he reflexively courted fame and the famous; and that the mysterious Woody Allen was not really so mysterious to him?

Ostensibly the memoir of an acclaimed cartoonist, “Backing Into Forward” is a portrait of a certain kind of New York during a specific era: the cultural and political foment of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Last week, also in the Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote:

“Backing into Forward” provides the reader with a sharply evocative portrait of the author’s youth in the Bronx, where he says he grew up a terrified, cowardly child, who “sidestepped arguments, fled confrontations, pedaled away from fistfights.” And the book proves just as nimble at limning the literary world of Manhattan, where this “wry, self-effacing, hard-hitting lefty” soon made himself at home, and realized he could “hold my own with Alfred Kazin, Dwight MacDonald, Lillian Hellman, Kenneth Tynan, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Rahv,” to drop just a few household intellectual names.

Perhaps funniest of all is Mr. Feiffer’s self-deprecating, self-pitying account of his Catch-22-like stint in the Army during the Korean war: after faking a breakdown, he says, he managed to get himself appointed to the Signal Corps Publications Agency, where he spent all of his free time working on “Munro,” a long cartoon narrative about a 4-year-old boy who is drafted — a project, he now recalls, that “was to determine the direction of my work and my life over the next 50 years.”

To what does Mr. Feiffer, 81, attribute his long and varied career? His success, he writes in these pages, came from “lucking into the zeitgeist,” from the happy coincidence that the personal subjects of his Voice cartoons — anxiety, confusion, anger — resonated perfectly with the concerns of his audience: young urban hipsters, alienated by the repressive mores of the cold war years and unmoored by the tumult of the counterculture decades.

I’ve admired Feiffer’s work all my life without being a huge fan. But this book looks like a fun read.

R. Crumb

Sunday is here, another fine day in New York and still number…

I’m ready for Opening Day already, but I’ll take s’more upsets at March Madness today while we wait.

Here’s a lovely spring beat for you…One time:

Sure would be a perfect day to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

It’s a stunner out there. Boids is chirpin’ here in the Bronx. Our windows are wide open, it smells fresh. I’m taking the wife out to stroll around downtown Manhattan.

Good to be alive.

Frank King.

R.I.P. Alex Chilton.

Don Mattingly Don. Featured at Go Japanese, down on St. Marks. 

Topping: Slices of tuna, strips of squid and a plethora of okra sauce are arranged as a baseball field on a bed of sushi rice mixed in with pieces of eel and avocado.

Highlights: The menu includes traditional donburi like Oyako Don ($8.50), Katsu Don ($9) and Ten Don ($9.50), and they are offered at discounted prices during lunch hour.

Peace to Iyasu for pointing this out.

Part One…

Mike Vacc on Mark Teix:

“Look,” Mark Teixeira says. “It’s really kind of simple. If you don’t want to play in front of 50,000 people every single game, if you don’t want the energy of the best city in the world behind you every day, good or bad, and if you don’t want to be in a position where you can win a championship … well, then you probably shouldn’t play in New York.”

My head turned on my way to work this morning. A skirt, a switch, bare legs. I’m just glad I didn’t walk into anything. The next few days are supposed to be lovely.

Man, how I love this city.

[photo credit: Life magazine]

Walt Kelly.