Blog Archives

Alexandra gives roasted acorn squash with maple butter.

One of the most dramatic changes in this blog over the past 5 years has been visual. I use far more images–drawings, paintings, photographs–than I did 10 years ago. I write less here at the Banter and show more pictures. Heck, I look at hundreds of images every day and post more than a handful regularly at my tumblr site (warning, it’s not generally safe for work). Through tumblr I’ve been hipped to hundreds of artists I wouldn’t otherwise know about. Thousands and thousands of pictures, man. It’s overwhelming but also beautiful.

Figure it’ll be fun to share some of the images, beyond the Art of the Day posts, with you. So: Picture this.

Photograph by Krisanne Johnson via MPD.

Pear by Caroline Dorcas Murdoch (19th Century) 

I like Bill Murray though I don’t buy into the cult of Murray.

That said, I enjoyed this subdued interview with Howard Stern.

It was a beautiful, crisp fall day in New York. The sun was out, the air was cool. Now, in the evening, it’s cold.

Good day for cooking. Made an apple crumble pie with The Wife this afternoon. We’ll have a slice each tonight, she’ll bring the rest to work tomorrow.

Meantime, after hours of football–and more tonight for the locals (Giants-Eagles, which is never no joke)–we’ve got Game 2 of the NLCS. The Giants cruised last night behind their stud, Bumgardner. Let’s see if the Cards can even the series before they head out to San Francisco.

Never mind nuthin’:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Picture by Bags.

Two games today. First, the AL, and tonight, Game 1 of the NLCS.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

Picture by Bags.

O’s vs. the Royals. It’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I’ll be happy for either team should they win but I’m siding with the O’s to start. Because of Buck, really. Plus, they’ve just got a lot of likable guys. Royals are hilarious, all those fast guys–Hosmer and Alex Gordon, and all those live arms in the bullpen.

Anyhow, hope it goes 7 and ends in extra innings.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

[Photo Via: Just in Weather]

Love him or hate him, Brian Cashman isn’t going anywhere. When he became the GM of the Yankees it was the most volatile position in pro sports. Now, he’s done what was previously unthinkable, and that’s survive.

[Photo Credit: Bruce Gilbert/Newsday]

Food 52 gives coffee-crusted barbecue beef ribs.

Sounds odd, but I’d try ’em. Why the hell not?

Sleep, baby, sleep.

Picture by Zhong Biao.

Diebs. 

Ah, the 2nd Avenue Deli…

[Photo Via: Indy Pendent Thinking]

From my pal Brian Gunn:

I have some friends—Cardinals fans—who went to a game in Yankee Stadium in 2003. During a rain delay a segment of Yanks’ fans in the bleachers began serenading them with the sing-songy chant, “Dar-ryl Kile!… Dar-ryl Kile!” This was about a year after Kile, ace pitcher for the Cardinals, died suddenly in a Chicago hotel room. Now, do I hold this assholery against all Yankees fans, much less all of New York City? Of course not. That’d just be innumerate crap.

But of course we do this all the time: Red Sox fans, you often hear, are loudmouths; Dodgers fans are too distracted to arrive at the game before the fourth inning; Cubs fans are just there for the beer and brats. These are lazy stereotypes, false more often than not; yet places like Deadspin and Grantland and Bloomberg have no problem pushing these clichés as if they were actual think pieces.

The truth is, there are literally millions of Cardinals fans throughout the country—a mix of earnest Midwesterners, shrill dickheads, corny suburban dads, jorts-wearing dudes with rattails, hedge fund managers, soybean farmers, restaurateurs, night-shift nurses, old folks, schoolkids, PhD students, carpool moms, ex-cons, and that one guy who used to live down the street from you. For a sportswriter to think he has a handle on a fan base this big and diverse is so wrong-headed you feel kinda silly pointing it out.

Because  you can’t ever get enough of a good thing here’s more–from the beautiful site, Cinephilia and Beyond–on The Long Goodbye:

I decided that we were going to call him Rip Van Marlowe, as if he’d been asleep for twenty years, had woken up and was wandering through this landscape of the early 1970s, but trying to invoke the morals of a previous era. I put him in that dark suit, white shirt and tie, while everyone else was smelling incense and smoking pot and going topless; everything was health food and exercise and cool. So we just satirized that whole time. And that’s why that line of Elliott’s—‘It’s OK with me’—became his key line throughout the film. —Robert Altman

David Lebowitz gives roasted peppers. 

“The Window” by Henri Matisse (1916)

Over at the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey Dyer writes about John Coletrane:

Offering: Live at Temple University offers further evidence of the catastrophe of the last phase of John Coltrane’s work. “Last” rather than “late” because he became ill and died too suddenly (on July 17, 1967), too early, to have properly entered a late period. He was forty. In any other field of activity that would be a desperately short life. Only in jazz could it be considered broadly in line with actuarial norms. So there’s no late phase in the accepted sense of Beethoven having arrived at a late style, only a sudden ceasing of the unceasing torrent of sound.

The interest of recordings from this final phase—in which Coltrane’s playing became increasingly frenzied and the accompaniment more abstracted—lies partly in what they preserve and partly in any hints they contain as to where Trane might have headed next. Given the composition titles from the last studio duets recorded with drummer Rashied Ali in February 1967—“Mars,” “Venus,” “Jupiter,” “Saturn”—and released posthumously on Interstellar Space, the question might reasonably be asked, where was there left to go?

This latest discovery—more exactly recovery since parts of the concert have circulated as poorly produced bootlegs—in the ongoing archaeological dig of Trane’s work was recorded in Philadelphia, on November 11, 1966. There’s a degree of irony about the date, Armistice Day, with its traditional Minute’s Silence, given the shrieking, screaming, and wildness—the ferocious anti-silence—of the music. Three of the concert’s six songs—“Crescent,” “Leo,” and “My Favorite Things”—are over twenty minutes each. Only the title track, a short and devastated ballad, offers respite from the extended wailing and overblowing.

[Photo Via: Photomusik]

Don’t like either team in the NLCS. Really like both teams in the ALCS. Rooting in the Serious this year will be easy.

But who to root for? The Cards or the Giants? That’s a tough one.

Dodgers up against it in St. Louis today. L.A. is going with their ace on 3 days rest. What cherce do they have?

Later, the Nats look to force a Game 5 themselves as they send Gio Gonzalez to the hill.

We’ll be watching:

Let’s Go Base-ball!

Picture by Bags. 

Nats need to win to stay alive; Dodgers and Cards are tied at 1.

Let’s GO Base-ball!

[Photo Credit: Aleck Venegas]