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PBS has been airing re-runs of the great Jacques Pepin and Julia Child show, Jacques and Julia. Last night, Em and I watched their beef episode. Emily watched in horror while I was greatly amused–both at Jacques and Julia as well as Emily’s reaction.

It’s incredible how much filming food has changed in recent times (it looks so much better now). Anyhow, you can’t ask for more than these two, who genuinely liked each other. They just got together, drank wine, and cooked. They let the editors piece it together into a show. Some poor writer had to watch each episode and piece together the recipes because J & J made them up on the spot.

In his seminal essay Comedy’s Greatest Era, written for Life magazine, the critic James Agee wrote of Buster Keaton:

Very early in his movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t he realzie he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occured to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Agee went on to describe Keaton as having a “mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances.” Remind you of anyone we know? How about our man Rivera. In his latest column for SI.com, Joe Posnanski writes:

His career almost ended before it began, and he was almost traded (twice) before the Yankee pinstripes looked right on him. On the field, he has triumphed under the most intense glare in American sports. Off the field, he has been quiet to the sound of invisible. And all the while, he has looked calm, stunningly calm, the sort of superhuman calm that Hollywood gives its heroes.

Yes, if there is an expression that conveys the Yankee myth, it would be the countenance of Mariano Rivera in the ninth inning.

This picture was drawn by an illustrator named Larry Roibal who keeps the most fantastic blog of his drawings.

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I watched Sunday’s Yankee game out of the corner of one eye. It was a turgid, ugly game that thankfully ended with the Yanks on top, 10-8. Alex Rodriguez was given the day off but Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui provided the thunder. Joba Chamberlain, on the other hand, pitched a dog of a game (even if just three of the eight runs scored on his watch were earned), and didn’t make it out of the fourth inning. The Yanks led 4-0, trailed 8-4, and then came back, thanks to dingers by Matsui and Jeter. Alfredo Aceves gets props over here for his four excellent innings of work. Mariano Rivera, Phil Hughes and Phil Coke were not available, so Aceves finished the game and earned the save.

The win keeps the Yanks just a game behind the Red Sox. New York has the second best record in the league, third best in baseball.

I couldn’t properly concentrate on the game because I was still trying to calm down after watching the entire Wimbledon final. My nerves were shot. Last year’s five-set match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal was epic. Yesterday’s match, which saw Federer out-last Andy Roddick in the longest fifth set in Wimbledon history–a freakish 16 games to 14!–has to be in the discussion of the best matches in the tournaments long history.

As it stands, Roddick played the game of his life…and lost. I thought he’d pull it out. I thought Federer, who had a career-high 50 aces, would fold. Instead, Federer won his 15th major in style. Simply put, it was greatness defined, an absolutely exquisite sporting experience.

Yanks look to stay hot this afternoon against the Jays. It is a blazing summer day here in New York.  Joba is on the hill for the New Yorkers. He will look to be more efficient this time around.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if Venus and Serena Williams were men, they’d be a whole lot more popular than they are, right? Is that what it is? That they are women? Is it tennis? Or is it that they are black? Or perhaps because they are not cutie-pies, known to be ungracious in defeat, or because their old man is as unappealing as they come? Are they just not likable? Or maybe it’s because their personal rivalry is without much drama. The sisters love each other and while they have different personalities–Venus is elegant yet removed, Serena, effusive, with a wide, beautiful smile–they don’t have much visibile angst or tension toward each other. Or if they do, it’s private. So watching them play each other feels drained of drama–they won’t let us in.

They aren’t the girls next door, or pin-up blondes. They are physical marvels in the tennis world–Venus is long and strong, and Serena is a tank, with the thighs of a fullback. Serena is also pretty in a conventional way, with a winning smile, and an ample bossom. She’s a bombshell trapped inside a weighlifters body. Certainly a long way from Tracy Austin. But what makes the Williams sisters great is their staying power. 

 Why aren’t they more popular? It’s a combination of many things, but there it is–the Williams sisters are holding up women’s tennis and somehow they are not huge celebrities here in the States.

The Williams girls played each other in the Wimbledon final on Saturday morning and Serena dispatched her older sister in straight sets giving her an 11-10 edge over Venus in head-to-head play. It was Serena’s third Wimbledon title, the first since 2002. She has the career Grand Slam–the Austrailian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open–winning 11 majors in all. Venus has won Wimbledon and the US Open, but hasn’t won a French or Austrialian Open. I got to wondering how Serena, the better of the two, stacks up against the greatest women tennis players of all-time.

She’s got a ways to go. Billie Jean King won 12 majors, Martina won 18 and Steffi Graf won 22.

Still, where would women’s tennis be today with out Serena and Venus?

Roger Federer is shooting for his record 15th major title this morning against Andy Roddick…

Roy Halladay will face the Yanks today (George Steinbrenner’s birthday) and looks to put a damper on the holiday festivities in the Bronx. It will be a tall task to beat him but stranger things have happened. It’s sunny and beauty-ful in New York.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

It wasn’t spectacular, it wasn’t especially memorable, but the Yankees 4-2 win over the Blue Jays on Friday afternoon at Yankee Stadium was satisfying, a fine way to follow-up Thursday’s clunker. Roy Halladay will pitch the Yankee Doodle Dandy affair tomorrow, so today’s “w” was a good start to this four-game series.

AJ Burnett had good control and threw seven strong innings, allowing just two runs on six hits and a couple of walks.  His record is now 7-4 with a 3.83 ERA. The two Phils–Coke and Hughes, teamed-up to get three outs in the eighth and That Man Rivera, the old gunslinger, pitched a one-two-three ninth, striking out two batters. Robinson Cano and Alex Rodriguez hit solo homers to bookend the Yankee scoring–they got two more on a bases loaded walk and a wild pitch.

Just before Rodriguez homered into the right center field seats, I ate a couple of sour cherries that I bought last week. They were plump and juicy, like a fat grape, but the taste was pure cherry–tart and sour. It was almost carnal and I savored them as I watched the dinger. How sweet it is, I thought. It got even sweeter watching Rivera, the most graceful, elegant and efficient player I’ve had the pleasure to watch.

It doesn’t get old. In fact, Rivera is like a fine wine–each outing seems even sweeter now more than ever before. To think, he suffered blowing a save in Game 7 of the 2001 World Serious. That game could have finished a guy, buried his career, even a player of Rivera’s stature. Instead, he got better after that. He’s older, he’s given up some runs this year but he’s whiffed 42 batters in 33.2 innings. Oh yeah, he’s walked three guys.

Has any player ever given us Yankee fans the same feeling that Rivera has? I think not. He’s “the one.” We all know enough to be grateful. We’ll never see the likes of him again.

I’ve spoken with a few people recently who are jazzed-up to see Michael Mann’s new movie, Public Enemies. I admire Mann as a director though I find his movies humorless and grim. He makes serious-minded pulp. Public Enemies? Why not? I like a good genre movie as much as the next guy. Then I read a few reviews that were not impressed with the movie and figured, eh, I can skip it.

Writing in today’s New York Times, Manohla Dargis, who like the great Pauline Kael is prone to writing effusive, adoring reviews when she falls for a movie, has a different take:

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.

…When not in pirate drag, Mr. Depp can be a recessive, even inscrutable screen presence, which is crucial to his strengths and performative limits. He’s a cool cat, to be sure: veiled and often most memorable when he’s staring into space while the camera soaks in his subdued but potent physical charms. He might have made a great silent star, as earlier roles suggest. Part of his initial appeal was that he seemed almost Garboesque in a movie world that increasingly makes no room for sacred idols.

Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of “Public Enemies,” which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty. Mr. Mann’s digital manipulations, in particular, which encompass almost pure abstraction and interludes of hyper-realism, is worthy of longer exegesis, one that explores how this still-unfamiliar format is changing the movies: it allows, among other things, filmmakers to capture the eerie brightness of nighttime as never before.

I’m particularly curious about how the film looks. Richard Corliss thinks it comes off as cheap:

Shot and projected digitally instead of on film, the picture gains in gradations of night shades but loses in visual clarity. Some shots look like iPhone photos enlarged to 50 feet; any sharp camera movement results in a blur.

Is it ground-breaking or cheesy? Hmmm.

I watched last night’s game from the Todd Drew Memorial box high above home plate. It was a warm, muggy night. There was lightning and thunder before the game, which was delayed for thirty minutes, but just a few drops of rain. The Yanks were poised for a sweep but CC Sabathia offered up a stinker and the Yanks lost to the M’s 8-4. Sabathia just couldn’t put hitters away. He got to two strikes then then faltered. Franklyn Gutierrez, Kenji Johjima and Ryan Langerhans (5-6-7 in the order) hit the ball squarely against Sabathia each time up. Heck, even the lowly #8 hitter Chris Woodward had a couple of hits and a couple of RBI last night.

The Yanks scored four runs against Seattle’s starter, the slop-throwing Jason Vargas, who lasted all of four innings. But then Miguel Batista, Mark Lowe, and David Aardsma held them scoreless the rest of the way. Mark Teixeira made a throwing error and narrowly missed a line drive in the first inning off the bat of Ichiro, that wasn’t called an error, but from where we were sitting was a play he normally makes. Teix has been brilliant in the field this year but has made a few mistakes this week.

A game to forget for the Yankees. But at least I had the honor of watching them from Todd’s seats. This time I kept score and everything.

CC and the Yanks look to make it eight straight tonight. Rain could be a factor. Let’s hope it doesn’t mess with a nice winning streak.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

What’s the rumpus?

Over at the Baseball Analysts, Rich Lederer has a great post on the 50th anniversary of Vin Scully’s Greatest Call Ever.

Just go already. And enjoy.

A young woman sat next to me on the subway this morning. I asked her how the death of Michael Jackson has hit her.

“Does it make you feel nostalgic?”

“I don’t have time to be nostalgic.”

This is morbid but Jackson’s death spells big TV ratings and special commerative issues of magazines like Time and People. What other icons would generate this kind of reaction? Madonna? Paul McCartney? Tom Hanks? I suppose part of it would have to be someone dying young, or in an untimely fashion.

Whadda ya hear, whadda ya say?

Good venue out in Brooklyn tonight:

Gelf’s Varsity Letters sports reading series returns on Thursday, July 2, at 7:30 p.m., with a night dedicated to baseball. At this free monthly event in DUMBO, Brooklyn, hosted by Gelf and Jan Larsen Art, Scott Price, Selena Roberts, and members of the New York Daily News sports investigative team will read from and talk about their work, and take questions. Price has the wrenching tale of the life and death of a minor-leaguer. Roberts will speak about her controversial biography of Alex Rodriguez. And the Daily News team will discuss its exposé of Roger Clemens and steroids in baseball.

I first remember hearing rap records in the summer of 1983. I was 12 and went to summer camp at the YMCA on the upper west side. Buffalo Gals and Sucker MC’s. I also recall spending a lot of time hating Synchronicity, the hit record by the Police (though I did like their four previous records), and rolling my eyes at Thriller, the Michael Jackson album that just would not go away. On every bus trip we took, Thriller dominated.

One of my counselors, a teenage girl from uptown, was bemused when I told her that I didn’t like Michael. It was as if I told her that I didn’t like breathing. I was into the Kinks at the time. It wasn’t until years later that I came to appreciate that record and how great is sounds–that I allowed myself to enjoy it. Oddly enough, I’ve always had more affection for Off the Wall and some of the Jackson 5 stuff, which is far more infused with my early childhood memories.

I have not been swept up in public reaction to Jackson’s death but I have reflected on his career, and just how monumental a figure he was for my generation. His influence was massive and he was a terrific entertainer. I get a sense of mass relief in the outpouring of affection he’s received this week. It became almost impossible to adore him when he was still alive. Now that he’s gone, it is safe to embrace his music and, at least for the moment, avoid the strange reality that was his life.

Over at his wonderful blog, Soul Sides, writer/dj Oliver Wang has done a tremendous job since Jackson died last week. Head on over and scroll down for all of the posts. Here is one that contains a great M-J-5 mix and these words of wisdom:

Anyone who has every DJed any party, anywhere knows that when everything else fails, you can always put on some MJ and it’s like Insta-Party. As a fellow DJ wrote, “MJ has always been the most “guaranteed go-to” artist for DJs in the history of DJs.” True that.

The thing is…it’s so easy to get the party started with MJ, it’s like an unfair advantage over the audience. It’s so easy that I’ve usually avoided playing anything too obvious by MJ simply because…it’s too easy.

And I was thinking: who else comes close to having that kind of power? The only artist even in the conversation is Prince but even then, we’re talking about Purple Rain-era Prince mostly whereas with MJ, you can drop everything from “I Want You Back” (1970) to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” (1979) to “Billie Jean” (1982) to “Smooth Criminal” (1987) and it’s on like Donkey Kong.

Some records are just sure-shots–Tell Me Something Good and Use Me come to mind–and Michael had more than his fair share, didn’t he?

In the latest issue of Playboy, Pat Jordan profiles Billy Mays, the famous TV pitchman who died just a few days ago. It’s a snapshot of a profile but a fun, quick read.

Mays is the most famous pitchman in the world. His pitches are seen on TV in 57 foreign countries and dubbed in Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, German, whatever. The media call him ubiq-uitous, with his swept-back black hair and full black beard he touches up “by drinking only dark whiskey”—da-dum! You’ve seen him on TV, leaping out of the screen at three A.M., just before you doze off, snap- ping you awake with his screeching voice. “Hi, I’m Billy Mays, here for OxiClean!” or KaBOOM!, Mighty Putty, Hercules Hook, Awesome Auger, Zorbeez, whatever. Mays sells them all: gadgets that stick harder than any glue, dig up weeds, hold up a 50-pound gilt-framed mirror (assuming you have a 50-pound gilt-framed mirror)—so many gadgets you never thought you needed, never even thought existed until Mays went into his pitch. A 30-second pitch, never more than two minutes—a short con—screaming at you, “Watch this! I get so excited! I gotta tell you something! Buy it right now!” So you call the toll-free number, give a strange voice your credit-card information and then get a package in the mail, stare at its con tents—a gadget, a product—and wonder, Why did I buy this? But what the hell, it was only $19.95. It’s always $19.95. That’s Mays’s secret.

“It’s gotta be under $20,” Mays says. He shrugs. “I don’t know. That’s the magic number.” It also has to be an unknown item that can’t be purchased in a store, that can be seen and purchased only on TV and that appeals to a mass audience of do-it-yourselfers. Mays gets his satisfaction from sheer quantity. “I want to sell billions of things,” he says. And he has, which has made him rich (three Bentleys, million-dollar homes) and famous. There are websites devoted to either loving or hating Billy Mays. He shrugs again and says, “There’s a fine line between love and hate.” One website is dedicated to fans who want to have his baby, though most of those fans are gay men who like so-called hairy bears. They call him “one of the hottest bears on the market” and beg to be able to “boff that bear.” His haters refer to him as “an asinine piece of shit,” “a public nuisance” and an asshole. One fan says Billy Mays is his idol because he’s “so obnoxious that he’s cool” and can sell “dick to a dyke,” tap water from your own sink. A $5 bill for four easy payments of $19.95, plus shipping and handling.

“It’s all about trust,” says Mays. “I stay true to the pitch. I’m not a salesman. A salesman sells a product; a pitchman sells himself. I make people believe they have to own it.” He smiles and says, “Life’s a pitch, then you buy.”

The noise I make the most often when watching the Yankees is “T’uccch.” It is a sound of disgust. Last night in the second inning, with men on first and second and nobody out, Hideki Matsui hit a soft ground ball to third. I was on the couch watching the game; the wife was in the kitchen.

“Uch, double play,” I said when I first saw the ground ball.  “No, single play, wait, error, dude, run scores…

Pause.

Deadpan voice from the kitchen: “Is that your final answer?”

M’ooooh, yer a good one.

Got Flava?

There was a terrific little piece by Sam Sifton in the Times magazine last weekend on rice and beans, Boricua style:

A restaurant kitchen can be a kind of mother, too. This is particularly true in New York, where so many eat out so often. Indeed, for many of those born in New York — and there are more than 2.4 million of these natives in the state, according to census data run through the computers of Andrew A. Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College — Puerto Rican rice and beans have little to do with blood relationships. Rice and beans are instead a shared and familiar experience, offered to all alongside dishes of roast pork or baked chicken (sweet beneath its crispy skin), dense and hearty mofongo, buttered toast, fried plantains and yuca.

Of course, rice and beans are served across Latin America, in different variations, with different beans, for different reasons. You will find superior platters of them in Brazil, in the Dominican Republic, across Mexico. The best of New York’s are literally Nuyorican, a word that arose to describe the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, the almost 10 percent of the city that has its familial roots in the commonwealth but sees its children bloom on the concrete of the South Bronx, East Harlem, along Columbia Street in Brooklyn.

Nuyorican restaurant rice and beans are food for flame-haired detectives coming off the day shift and chalk-hued art kids jittery and lost amid the salsa beats, for tired high-school teachers, for back-office fellows off the clock. They are the taste of comic-opera hangovers, honest hunger, game-day excess, hard work. They are an authentic taste of a New York that real-estate developers and change can never diminish.

Here is the recipe. I’m all over this. Once again, I don’t know the scientific explanation but bacon makes it better.

Okay, let’s indulge in some fantasy. It’s an off-day, good time to play Walter Mitty.

If you could perform one single feat on a baseball field, what would it be? Would you hit a home run, steal home, leg out a triple, break-up a double-play, strike a hitter out (swinging or looking), nail a runner trying to score, or would you leap over the outfield fence to rob a hitter of a home run?

Which one of these?  Or perhaps you’ve got something else in mind.  Do tell.

Saturday in the Park.

Inwood, that is.

Farmer’s Market.

Cherries, n everything.

And baseball.

There’s always baseball in Inwood.

And everybody loves baseball, right?

Chien-Ming Wang is 0-6. He’s improving but hasn’t pitched well enough to earn a win yet. With the Mets on their heels, it would be nice to end the weekend on a high. Though you never know what that wily-old Livan Hernandez has in store. Saw dude throw a 3-2 curveball, a 65 mph curveball, to Prince Albert Pujols last week and strike the great man out swinging. He doesn’t lack for courage.

Nevermind the announcers, Let’s Go Yan-Kees!