First lines.

Alex Rodriguez vs. The World.

Sue Who? Sue Everybody.

Oliver Wang on De La’s third album Buloone Mindstate. 

And more De La, here.

Salute Judy Protas.

Happy New Year! Welcome to a new year and new round of Where & When; time to get off on the right foot and move forward.  Let’s see how many more people we can get into our little games here and see how far we can expand our borders; for the coming year we will be traveling around the tri-state area to various points of interest and try to determine where the heck we ended up.  Of course New York City remains the center of attention, but as I’ve said, the challenging pics are hard to come by.  But enough complaints and speculation, check out this interesting point:

Gotta love Olde Bvildings.  Okay, enough horsing around, let’s try to find out where this is.  As far as when, if you study the pic, you’ll notice something (open to the public one year prior) that gives you the proper year.  As a bonus, consider the statue in the picture and tell us who it depicts.

Rewards: The first person with the correct answers gets a fictional snifter of the root beer of his or her choice (New Year’s Special), and the runners-up will get a martini-glass of the ream soda of their choice; you all should you declare your brand of choice.  The bonus will get you an extra cream soda, and you are also welcome to submit additional trivia for a bonus.

Well, have it.  Stay away from the photo credits, I’ll try to get back to you all in the afternoon.  And, as always, new challenge ideas are always welcome, just send me an email with a pic and date and we’ll queue it up.  Enjoy!

[Photo credit: Ephemeral New York and Old NYC Photos]

More playoff football.

Drawing by Barry Windsor Smith.

“If I Didn’t Care”–The Ink Spots

Painting by Pierre Bonnard.

NFL Playoffs this afternoon into tonight. The Seahawks are on their way to a home win, though the Saints are making a game of it. The Pats host the Colts in a bit.

Enjoy.

Painting by Augusto Giacometti (1938).

The Rodriguez decision: 162 games.

[Picture via: Kitty en classe]

“Dancing In The Dark”–Cannonball Adderly

[Photo Credit: kygp]

In this weekend’s book review, Molly Haskel reviews the massive first volume of Victoria Wilson’s new Barbara Stanwyck biography:

Start with the voice, which seems to have been around since the world began: lush, weary, tender, worldly, skeptical, ranging nimbly between hard and soft. It could be metallic, mannish and brittle or gentle as a down pillow, sometimes within the same film, as befits an actress who was at ease in every genre, from woman’s melodrama to the western, with noir and screwball comedy in between. Though film buffs have treasured her for years, Barbara Stanwyck has burned less brightly among general moviegoers for whom a higher voltage is synonymous with stardom.

She was neither a great beauty nor a glamour puss, and the importance of this — her refusal or inability to be simplified into a single image — has to be seen as a major factor in her longevity. More iconoclast than icon, more a character star on the order of Bogie or Cagney, she was often the second or third choice after Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Bette Davis and Irene Dunne. Yet she has worn especially well. And if she was underappreciated in her time, her minimalist gifts — the fluid movement, the stillness in repose, the sense of interiority — have come to seem ultramodern.

If ever there was an actress who was ready for prime time, it is Stanwyck, and this enormously informative tribute — juicy yet dignified, admiring yet detached — is the book to bring her to center stage. Or books, I should say, for this full-dress treatment is not for the fainthearted: “A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940,” at 860 pages of text (notes, index and appendices bring it to 1,044), is only the first volume, beginning with Stanwyck’s birth and ending with the films preceding World War II. Wilson stays resolutely and sometimes frustratingly within this time frame, resisting even an anticipatory peek at those glorious ’40s films. I confess to having felt a certain alarm when I heard that Wilson, a vice president and longtime editor at Knopf whose first book this is, was writing two volumes on Stanwyck. In general, only someone of global consequence merits such exhaustive and demanding length. It seemed — and still seems — especially disproportionate in the case of Stanwyck, whose talent for passing under the radar was one of her charms. But Wilson’s aims are far more ambitious than documenting the minutiae of a movie star’s life.

What she does is provide context of ­extraordinary breadth, taking in not only Stanwyck’s life, her beginnings in poverty and tragedy and her emergence as an emblem of self-sufficiency, but also the world through which she moved: the cultural and political forces that shaped her years in show business as she went from burlesque and theater in New York to the turbulent Hollywood of the 1930s. Each film from this period is recounted in detail — indeed not just the films she made, but the ones she almost made and the parts she didn’t get. These descriptions are interspersed with mini-biographies of the various participants, forays into Stan­wyck’s social life (or antisocial life, as the case often was), along with politics, both local and national.

Margaret Talbot picks some of Stanwyck’s finest work over at the New Yorker.

Neil Young is performing at Carnegie Hall this week (our pal Matt B caught one of shows). The Times had a piece about the first performance.

Then this morning on the subway I read “Loss Prevention” a short story in Richard Lange’s impressive collection Dead Boys.  Here’s how it begins:

Every junkie I’ve ever known has had a thing for Neil Young. Be he a punk, a metalhead, or just your garden-variety handlebar-mustachioed dirtbag, if he hauls around a monkey, he’s going to have Decade in his collection, and he’s bound to ruin more than a few parties by insisting that you play at least some of it, no matter that the prettiest girl in the room is begging for something she can dance to. Even if he gets off dope, he sticks with Neil, because by then Neil’s become the soundtrack to his outlaw past. Let him hear “Old Man” or “Sugar Mountain” years after the fact, and everything in him will hum like a just-struck tuning fork as mind and body and blood harmonize in mutual longing for a time when desire was an easy itch to scratch.

So this is why, when the deejay announces that a rock block of Neil is coming up next, three classic cuts in a row, I know there’s no hope of Jim budging until the last song ends.

First up this season: the Rodriguez suspension. Then, Tanaka. Here’s the latest on Rodriguez, as reported by Wallace Matthews at ESPN. 

Picture by Pawel Kuczynski. 

Over at Buzzfeed, check out this terrific interview with George Saunders talking about Arthur Miller’s memoir, Timebends:

CW: What drew you into this book, initially? What kept you reading, and what inspired the recommendation today?

GS: At first I was just loving the descriptions of his childhood and being reminded of the fact that the only thing that will evoke the world as we actually experience it is great sentences – the difference between a boring, banal account of childhood and one that feels properly rich and mysterious (i.e., like one’s own actual childhood), is the phrase-by-phrase quality of the prose. Perceptions truthfully remembered make great sentences and great sentences provide the way for that truthful remembering to happen – something like that. I guess I’m just saying it was a pleasure to read such intelligent writing.

But also – lately I find myself interested in anything historical that can open up my mind afresh and get me really seeing the past, with the purpose of adding that data to my evolving moral-ethical view of the world. (We only live in one time but can read in many, etc., etc.) To have a witness as intelligent and articulate as Miler is almost (almost!) like having been there oneself. So here, wow, the stories and details – New York before the war, all his crazy relatives and their various ends; stories about Odets, Kazan, et al, Miller’s deep periods of artistic immersion, life with Monroe, trips to Russia, walking around with Frank Lloyd Wright (and finding him unlikeable), the moral-spiritual breakdown of Untermeyer, the way Lee J. Cobb first “got” Willy Loman, and on and on – I just came away thinking, “Jeez, what a life. Good for you, Arthur Miller. We should all live so fully.”

I also found myself really excited by Miller’s basic assumptions about art: it’s important, it is supposed to change us, it’s not supposed to be trivial or merely clever, it’s one human being trying to urgently communicate with another. But it was also exciting to see his uncertainty around this stance – the way he couldn’t always execute, and sometimes doubted those ideas, and found himself fighting against the prevailing spirit of the time – like in the 1960s, when everything felt, to him, ironic and faux-cynical. I found myself inspired by the way he went through his life, always holding out a high vision of what art is supposed to do – he strikes me as having been a real fighter.

I read the book when it came out. Sounds like it’s time to dive back in.
[Photo Credit: Elliot Erwitt]

Over at Deadspin I found two posts–with related links–of interest: one on Greg Maddux, the other on Jerry Coleman.  Dig in.

Via the always nourishing Kottke, check out Studs Terkel’s 1963 interview with Dylan. 

Funny people.

Ray Ratto delivers the best–and least self-important–Hall of Fame column of the season.

The vote comes this afternoon and word around the web says that Maddux, Glavine, Biggio and the Big Hurt all make it.

Jay Jaffe’s got the scoop. 

I was hipped to Belgian and French comics as a kid. Tintin and Asterix, of course, but Gaston LaGaffe was my favorite. I couldn’t read french but I loved Gaston’s slapstick comedy and Andre Franquin’s drawing style. Gaston is a goofball, a guy forever trying to find ways to avoid work.

This here image is one that struck me as the ultimate escape. It’s Gaston’s cave, underneath a mountain of paperwork. Cozy and serene. Yeah.

Photographs by Leslie Jones over at Everyday I Show.