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It was on this day in 1948 that J.D. Salinger’s first story was published in the New Yorker. A Perfect Day for Bananafish remains Salinger’s most famous single story, and the introduction to the Glass Family.

If you’ve never read it, here it is.

My old man used to drink with Roger Grimsby; I remember seeing Chuck Scarborough, taller and more athletic than I had imagined, waiting for the elevator at Lennox Hill hospital when I went to visit my grandfather. Anchormen and women are ubiquitous–they may change networks but they rarely go away–visual comfort food, local heroes.

There is a nice, long profile on Ernie Anastos in the Times today:

Someone walked by and said, “Hi, Ernie! It’s nice to see you in person,” to which he shouted back, “It’s nice to see you in person!”

The city will see plenty more of Mr. Anastos, who has been delivering New York’s news — on four different stations — since 1978. Last month, he signed a new three-year contract with WNYW, the Fox station in New York, to anchor the two nightly newscasts and develop shows for the station, for more than $1 million a year. The extension followed the spectacular gaffe, on Sept. 16, that added Mr. Anastos to that motley assortment known as YouTube sensations. While bantering with the weatherman during the 10 o’clock news, Mr. Anastos said, “Keep plucking that chicken,” except the verb sounded an awful lot like an obscenity. He apologized on the air the next night, but a catchphrase was born. Jon Stewart replayed the clip; David Letterman got a laugh.

…There are other anchormen who read the news in their “I’m reading the news” voice. That is Mr. Anastos’s voice. When he tells his viewers about the suspect in the Fort Hood shootings in Texas, and when he reads his book to a gymnasium full of children, and when he dials the tavern across from the studio to order a plate of cheeseburger sliders, and when he calls his wife of 41 years, Kelly, and thanks her for packing him a muffin — it is all the same voice. It is deep and clear and practically devoid of slang, and not known to traffic in vulgarity, which made his on-air flub all the more noticed. It is easy to believe that Mr. Anastos has never, ever thought about doing anything of the sort to a chicken.

In an industry that has morphed from “And that’s the way it is” to something more like “Oh no he didn’t!,” Mr. Anastos retains a gray formality behind the ever-sleeker anchor desks, a tone of gravity laced with warmth and aw-shucks one-liners.

The first time I ever saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show was at the old New Yorker movie theater, which was on 88th street and Broadway. Before the show started, here was my introduction to Lenny Bruce:

 Chang?

It’s another brick cold day in the Rotten Apple. Time to start daydreaming about Florida and Arizona and the warmth of spring training. Cabin Fever is setting in, although the Mrs and I are troopin’ downtown this morning to do a couple few things.

Good day for some tasty eats and Netlix, eh?

The City Never Sleeps that’s What Sinatra Sang…

[Photo Credit: Boris Miller]

A few weeks before I began my junior year of high school I was in Belgium visiting my grandparents. I stayed in the attic room where I daydreamed about the girl who lived across the street and all the other Belgian women who customarily sunbathed without a bikini top. 

I listened to BBC serials on the radio and read French comic books and sometimes opened the door to the storage room that occupied the other half of the attic and went inside and poked around the dusty old furniture and suitcases hunting for treasure. I once found an old copy of Oui magazine (For the Man of the World), an offshoot of Playboy, I think, which led me to believe there was more pornography waiting to be discovered. I was wrong.

I spent mornings there, sleeping late, and afternoons too, after lunch, when my grandparents took their naps. This is where I first read The Catcher in the Rye and I remember the warm sun coming through the skylight onto my bed as I tore through J.D. Salinger’s most famous book. I liked the idea of reading it, though I became impatient at times and skimmed over passages. But it was the right time and place. I got it. When I returned home, I read his three other books and liked Nine Stories best. Franny and Zooey made me feel grown-up (plus, the Glass family lived on the Upper West Side); the last one lost me.

I have not revisited Salinger’s work since, during which time I’ve met as many people who were turned off by him as those who love him. But I got to thinking about him this morning when I read his obit in the Times:

In the fall of 1953 he befriended some local teenagers and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont Daily Eagle. The article appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.

He seldom spoke to the press again, except in 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

And yet the more he sought privacy, the more famous he became, especially after his appearance on the cover of Time in 1961. For years it was a sort of journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters to New Hampshire in hopes of a sighting. As a young man Mr. Salinger had a long, melancholy face and deep soulful eyes, but now, in the few photographs that surfaced, he looked gaunt and gray, like someone in an El Greco painting. He spent more time and energy avoiding the world, it was sometimes said, than most people do in embracing it, and his elusiveness only added to the mythology growing up around him.

Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art. Some believed he was publishing under an assumed name, and for a while in the late 1970s, William Wharton, author of “Birdy,” was rumored to be Mr. Salinger, writing under another name, until it turned out that William Wharton was instead a pen name for the writer Albert du Aime.

He was an odd bird, no doubt. Gifted writer though.

The Times also has a piece about why The Catcher in the Rye was never made into a movie.

Brought to you by Matt B:

Our old pal Jon Weisman, that one-man blogging machine, is packing up Dodger Thoughts and going from the L.A. Times to ESPN.COM/L.A.

Huzzah for Jon, who in my opinion is peerless as a blogger.

It snowed this morning in New York and the temperature is dropping…

Randy Winn is headed to the Bronx, according to Joel Sherman.

Has there been a more complete American actor in the past forty years than Gene Hackman? He may not be the most sexy or daring movie star but I think he’s got more range than DeNiro, Pacino, Beatty, Hoffman or even Duvall. Which is not to put those guys down. I’m not knocking Nicholson either. And you know how much I adore Bridges, who is almost twenty years younger than Hackman.

But to me, Gene Hackman is the Spency Tracy of his generation. He’s Everyman, and I’m hard-pressed to recall too many performances where he wasn’t believable. (I was talking recently with a friend about actors who are only as good as their directors or their material and this doesn’t apply to Hackman, who made a career of being better than his material.)

Did you know that Hackman turns 80 in three days? And that he’s effectively retired as an actor? I didn’t until I read this nice appreciation of Hackman by Jeremy McCarter in the current issue of Newsweek:

One reason why we haven’t valued Hackman properly is a slur that’s been flung at him since the ’60s: character actor. But Gene Hackman is not a “character actor.” He’s a great actor, full stop. (He’s only a “character actor” in the way that Jackson Pollock is a “painting painter.”) Hollywood’s habitual bias toward pretty leading men slights the actors who have the range to play all sorts of roles. This, surely, is Hackman’s greatest distinction. Good ol’ boy Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. Comically diabolical Lex Luthor in Superman. The blind hermit in Young Frankenstein. The coach in Hoosiers. Saintly cowboys, panicky astronauts, philandering steelworkers, several kinds of president … Like every actor, he had some misfires, and there’s no denying that he signed on for some seriously regrettable films. But this side of Meryl Streep—which is to say, here among the mortals—it’s hard to think of a contemporary American actor who could convince you he was born to play so many far-flung roles.

Every year, the Oscars teach us to rate performances like these by how deftly an actor incorporates funny voices and prostheses. Hackman, to his credit, rarely went there. If you put his many characters side by side, their real marvel is how limited a set of tools he used to play them: save for a couple of Southern accents and the occasional porkpie hat, he relied on only the raw material of his voice and body. As Popeye Doyle, the volcanic, superextroverted cop in The French Connection, he pulled out all the stops, ranting and shouting and raising hell. Three years later, he did the opposite, pulling himself inward to play Harry Caul, the meticulous, introspective eavesdropper in The Conversation. When you’ve seen one transformation, the other looks doubly impressive.

Hackman played the romantic lead in All Night Long, an odd movie that is like a goofier, and less-self-aware version of American Beauty, and he was winning in Twice in a Lifetime too. His light comic touch was wonderful in The Birdcage. And one of my favorite Hackman leading roles was in Arthur Penn’s ’70s drama Night Moves.

He may be overlooked in some quarters. But not here.

[Photo Credit: Joran van der Sloot]

The new production of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” was enthusiastically reviewed by Ben Brantley in the New York Times earlier this week:

Even more than with “Death of a Salesman,” Miller used “Bridge” to sell his theory that true tragic heroes may well emerge from the common run of contemporary lives. So eager was he to make the point that he even included a one-man Greek chorus, an Italian-born lawyer named Alfieri (here played by Michael Cristofer), who speaks loftily about the grandeur of the story’s “bloody course” of incestuous longings and fatal consequences.

Perhaps Miller felt that plays, like classical heroes, required tragic flaws, and thus provided one for “Bridge” in the form of the long-winded Alfieri. This drama needs no annotator or apologist if it’s acted with the naturalistic refinement — and accumulation of revelatory detail — found in this interpretation.

I had wondered if “Bridge” really needed another revival. New York saw a first-rate production only a dozen years ago, directed by Michael Mayer, with Anthony LaPaglia, Allison Janney and the young Brittany Murphy (who died at 32 last year). But this latest incarnation makes the case that certain plays, like certain operas, are rich enough to be revisited as often and as long as there are performers with strong, original voices and fresh insights.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Nathan Ward, whose book, “Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront,” will be published later this year, has an interesting column about the play’s orgins:

About a year after Miller’s death in February 2005, and a few months before Longhi passed away, I happened to interview the lawyer about the old waterfront. Unlike his “portly” stage likeness Alfieri, Longhi was, at 90, a tall, trim and elegant man. Sitting in his Manhattan law office on lower Broadway, he recalled how his friend Miller, who lived in picturesque Brooklyn Heights in the late ’40s, “often thought about that mysterious world of the Brooklyn Italian waterfront. . . . But he being an intellectual, who’s gonna talk to him? Nobody.” In his autobiography, “Timebends,” Miller remembered wondering, on his daily walks, about “the sinister waterfront world of gangster-ridden unions, assassinations, beatings, bodies thrown into the lovely bay at night.” But, he was forced to admit, “I could never penetrate the permanent reign of quiet terror on the waterfront hardly three blocks from my peaceful apartment.”

…Miller first heard the story that became “A View From the Bridge” while on a trip with Longhi to Sicily in 1948. “Longhi mentioned a story . . . of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers,” Miller wrote, “his own relatives, illegal immigrants who were living in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece.” Longhi told me, “it happened to my client . . . who turned to me and said, ‘I’m going to kill so-and-so,’ and then it turned out that I figured he must be in love with the kid. And I told this story to Miller and he said, ‘What an opera!'”

No one would mistake Red Hook or Columbia Street today for the place whose tough waterfront culture so shocked Miller in the late ’40s. But the last time I was down there, I saw a throwback to Eddie’s world, an aspect of New York dock life that never completely dies: Up on the Waterfront Commission building there was a new banner advertising a special crime-tips number that read: “HAD ENOUGH? Theft, corruption, and organized crime cost the port millions of dollars and thousands of jobs.” One side of the street may sell New Zealand meat pies and feature a French backyard bistro, but the ragged side of his old neighborhood Eddie Carbone would know at a glance.

Blues week continues…

Here are a couple of news items via Chad Jennings:

Yanks trade for OF Greg Golson, and Ben Sheets signs with the A’s while Xavier Nady heads to the Cubbies.

…The Master…

Want a good look at the original Yankee Stadium? Well, check out this scene from Buster Keaton’s first MGM picture–and arguably his last great one–The Cameraman (1928).

I walked down to Broadway Saturday evening to do the weekly shopping. The Uptown Sports Complex is across the street from the market so I stopped in to say hello. I wrote a piece about summer sports in New York last year for SI.com and featured a segment on the Complex which is owned by a couple of guys who went to high school with longtime Banterite, Dimelo. The owners and Dimelo (which is a moniker, Dominican slang for “What’s up?”) are part of a group of eight or nine guys who’ve known each other since they were kids. They call themselves “The Usual Suspects.”  

The place was jumping. Sixty, seventy people were crammed inside–most of them young men in and around the batting cages. This is peak season for the cages, when high school teams come to work out and prepare for the spring. I was pleased to see that business was booming.

I saw Ernies, one of the owners, and went to say hello. He had a mop in his hand and looked distracted. He was setting up for a memorial service. One of Ernies’ high school friends, guy named Manny, died earlier this month near his home in South Florida. He was 35. Manny played football with Ernies at JFK and had some talent. He went to Wisconsin, was the starting tackle for Ron Dayne and won the Rose Bowl withthe Badgers. He never made it as a pro and shortly after graduating, he moved to Miami, and had a child with one of Ernies’ great friends.

“We went down to see him every once in a while,” Ernies told me. “He was part of the extended crew. But we talked all the time. He wanted to open up a cage down there too.” Ernies finished mopping up a spill near the restroom and put the mop in a storage closet.  

“My man had South Beach locked down,” he said.  “Every place we went to down there, all we had to do is mention his name and we drank for free. He had it on lock.”

Manny worked twelve-hour shifts as a security guard and he’d been working a lot around New Year’s Eve. After one shift, he fell asleep at the wheel. The car crashed and caught fire. He was trapped inside and burned to death. He left behind four children and a wife.

The service began at six o’clock. I waited around for Dimelo to pay my respects but felt out-of-place–I looked like a scrub, not fit for a memorial–so I gave my condolences to Ernies and his partner Andy and went to the market. The service was conducted, attended by family and friends. Dimelo called me later and reported that only one cage still operated as the service began–Manny’s mother wanted it that way. The sound of the bat hitting the ball could be heard as they cried and hugged and remembered a man who died too soon.

I was across the street picking through the string beans when I saw Ralphie, the eldest member of “The Usual Suspects.” I watched five or six playoff and World Serious games with the crew last fall and met him on a few occasions. He is a dapper man. I held out my fist and we exchanged a pound as he moved past. He was talking on his phone, “Yeah, I’m just picking up some juice for the memorial,” he said as he turned the corner.

I thought about my wife and my friends. Then I went back to picking through the beans. Carefully.

I took a blues break and I broke it.

Diamond D

Dig this, from author and historian Glenn Stout:

Let’s try to do some good here. I don’t have to tell you what is happening in Haiti and how they are in need of everything, but I was looking around my office the other day and came up with an idea that might give a small measure of help.

Here’s the deal – I have extra copies of some of my books (see list below). In exchange for a donation to the reputable charity of your choice, I’ll send you copy of the book signed by me.

J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets (but the pick here is Peyton).