“Nobody’s Fault But Mine”–Sister Rosetta Tharpe

[Picture Credit: Hasui Kawase: Rock Waterfall]

“Welcome”–John Coltrane

[Photo Credit: Farbod Green]

This is neat.

Yeah, I don’t expect Hiroki to return either. His time with the Yanks will be short whether he comes back or not but he’s been a pleasure to root for.

[Photo Credit: Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters]

Photographs by Mario Cravo Neto

at Everyday I Show. 

I started Bronx Banter on this date in 2002. And we’re still served fresh daily.

Much love to everyone who falls through and hangs out.

Thanks, guys.

Peter Schjeldahl has a kind word for Norman Rockwell:

Rockwell’s populous American mythos is ever more to be valued as the shared beliefs that used to gird it devolve into hellish divisions. His lodestar was Charles Dickens, naturalized to New England towns and to suburbs anywhere. And he drew and painted angelically, with subtle technical ingenuity, involving layered colors, that is still underappreciated. I took instruction on this point from de Kooning, who opened a book to a reproduction, handed me a magnifying glass, and made me peruse Rockwell’s minuscule but almost fiercely animated painterly touch. “See?” said de Kooning. “Abstract Expressionism!” Solomon reports that de Kooning remarked of Rockwell’s astonishing imitation of a Pollock drip painting, being viewed by a fancy gent in “The Connoisseur” (1962), “Square inch by square inch, it’s better than Jackson!” I agree, though the pastiche is unpersuasive overall. Rockwell had labored mightily to get the Pollock look right, not as a parody but in homage. He said, “If I were young, I would paint that way myself.” Never anti-modernist, he was always in awe of Picasso.

But—or really and—Rockwell was an obsessive-compulsive, anxiety-riddled, miserable hypochondriac, as at least two of his three schoolteacher wives and his three emotionally stunted children could testify. He didn’t behave badly so much as he hardly behaved at all, outside his studios in, successively, New Rochelle, New York; Arlington, Vermont; and Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His psychoanalyst—no less than the renowned developmental psychologist and pioneer of psychobiography Erik Erikson—is said to have remarked that Rockwell funneled all his happiness into his art. Solomon plumbs a suspicion (almost de rigueur in biography-writing lately) of homosexuality. Her verdict: temperamentally so, but moot in one who was puritanically shy of intimacy. I can almost imagine Edmund Wilson, whose “The Wound and the Bow” (1941) theorized a link between psychic trauma and creative genius, adding a chapter for Rockwell. (Wilson’s leadoff essay is about Dickens.) Certainly, there can be few more extreme endorsements of W.B. Yeats’s chilly dictum, “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.”

Hey, welcome back to Where & When; where you are not alone in your struggle to find the truth when you have the proof… yeah, I know, but it’s late so…

Work is getting tougher by the day, not to mention colder, so I warn you now of inconsistencies in publishing the game, but if you are really interested in hosting an episode, drop me a line along with a challenge you would like to present and we’ll hook you up with a guest spot.  These are a lot of fun and the conversation is pretty clever among our regulars, plus there’s (fictional) root beer and cream sodas, which is a plus for any endorphins!

Welp, here is the newest challenge, and I think you’ll like the drama involved in this one:

I really wish I could present a larger picture that also contained a full snap of this building.  There’s quite a bit of significance attached to it, starting with the fact that the Yankees were involved at some point.  How’s that, you ask?  You’ll have to tell me and the rest of the readers, and while you’re at it, tell us the name of the building, the address and when it was built.  Bonus if you happen to know some other significant events or nouns involved with this building.  There’s a lot to tell, so I hope you have enough time to find out and spill.  A snifter of Zuberfizz for the first with the correct answers, and a tankard of Baumeister fr the subsequent entries.  Post your answers in the comments and I will be checking in throughout the day.  Have at it! And no peeking at the photo credit; it’s okay if you come across it during your independent research, but don’t click on the link below.  >;)

[Photo Credit: Ephemeral New York]

Back for another edition. And we’re talking about the noun here…

What’s the difference between a jerk off and a jag off?

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” –Teller

I forgot to mention this last month but check out this post: Chris Jones talks about storytelling and magic.

Great stuff.

And enjoy Glenn Stout’s 15 ways to survive as a freelance writer.  

[Photo Credit: Carlos Serrao; Peter Yang]

Bounce, make ’em bounce, make ’em bounce…

Patti remembers Lou. 

On Short Cuts. 

McCann: yea or nay?

Dig this interview with my pal Kate Joyce. 

Should the Yankees imitate what the Red Sox did last winter?

Over at River Ave. Blues, Joe Pawlikowski doesn’t think it’d work. 

That said, I’d enjoy watching Shin-Soo Choo play for the Yanks.

[Photo Via: Getty Images]

Over at the New York Review of Books, Adam Shatz reviews the first volume of Stanley Crouch’s long-anticipated Charlie Parker biography:

That Parker was a child of Kansas City swing should be obvious, but it has been obscured. The temptation to hear Parker’s music as a complete rupture with swing has been fed not only by his beatnik admirers, who saw him as a kind of natural wonder, but by Parker himself, who insisted that bebop was “no love-child of jazz” but rather “something entirely separate and apart.” Indeed, Parker’s work sounds utterly different from the music that preceded it, particularly in its unusual phrasing, and in its splitting of the four beats in a bar into eight. When Parker launches into his improvisation in “Ko-Ko,” his exhilarating reworking of Ray Noble’s “Cherokee,” he seems to be taking flight and bidding farewell forever to the Swing Era.2 To listen to the recordings Parker made for Savoy and Dial in the mid-1940s is to feel you’re witnessing the birth of modern jazz, with its eighth notes, flatted fifths, and breathless velocity.

No artistic movement, however, is born of immaculate conception. Thanks to the work of Albert Murray, Gary Giddins, and Scott DeVeaux, we now know that the music of Parker and Gillespie evolved from the big-band swing against which it rebelled. Murray, in his 1976 book Stomping the Blues, described Parker as “the most workshop-oriented of all Kansas City apprentices,” rather than a highbrow modernist “dead set on turning dance music into concert music.”

Crouch has praised Stomping the Blues as “the most eloquent book ever written about African-American music,” and there is a lot of Murray in Kansas City Lightning: the celebration of the battle-of-the-bands milieu of Depression-era Kansas City; the insistence that jazz is a proud dance music, rather than an aspiring art music pleading for admission to the concert hall; and above all, the evocation of what Crouch has called “the rich mulatto textures” of American culture. These Murray-esque riffs will be familiar to anyone who has read Crouch’s cultural criticism. But Crouch understands that Bird was more than a gifted exponent of the Kansas City style, and that his inspiration arose from a hidden place that cannot be located on any map. Kansas City Lightning is about what Parker owed to his native city, but also about why he had to make his mark elsewhere.

The glories of Kansas City big-band jazz, which Crouch describes in lush detail, are well known. The formidable leaders of the “territory bands”—Count Basie, Bennie Moten, Walter Page, and others—all plied their trade there. They clashed with one another in fierce, joyful “cutting contests,” and sometimes raided one another’s bands for members. The more than fifty cabarets between 12th and 18th Streets provided an education for young black musicians barred from attending the city’s musical academies. The pianist Mary Lou Williams, who later took part in the bop revolution at Minton’s, remembered Kansas City as a “heavenly” place. It was also a sinner’s paradise, where sex was easily purchased and clubs were supplied with Pendergast’s own brand of whiskey. (When the temperance advocate Carrie Nation came to Kansas City, she was shown the door and told never to return.)

Goodbye Marcia Wallace. 

Cinephilia and Beyond gives a great post on David Lean.

Big story in the Times today detailing the sordid case against Alex Rodriguez:

In the nine months since Mr. Rodriguez and more than a dozen other players were linked to a South Florida anti-aging clinic that is believed to have distributed banned substances to professional athletes, baseball officials and the Yankee third baseman have engaged in a cloak-and-dagger struggle surpassing anything the sport has seen. The extraordinary investigative tactics, playing out in multiple locations, reflect Major League Baseball’s resolve to prove one of its stars cheated, and that player’s determination to discredit baseball officials.

Witnesses for both sides in the pending arbitration proceedings claim to have been harassed and threatened. Some were paid tens of thousands of dollars for their cooperation. One said she became intimately involved with an investigator on the case. And some witness accounts have shifted, leaving each side scrambling to defend the sometimes inconsistent stories provided by former employees and associates of the now-defunct clinic, Biogenesis of America.

The dispute — which involves lawsuits in Florida and in New York, and a battle over grand jury transcripts in Buffalo — has become so extensive that Major League Baseball has once again turned to its go-to consultant for complicated problems, the former senator George J. Mitchell, whose law firm is assisting with the growing caseload.

These details have been gleaned from dozens of interviews conducted by The New York Times over several months with witnesses, current and former law enforcement officials and lawyers involved in all sides of the dispute, and from documents obtained by The Times relating to M.L.B.’s case against Mr. Rodriguez, as well as police reports and lawsuits. Several witnesses and lawyers insisted on anonymity when discussing any aspect of the case because they have been ordered not to speak about the matter by the independent arbitrator who is hearing Mr. Rodriguez’s appeal of his 211-game doping suspension stemming from the Florida clinic investigation.

[Photo Credit: Umar Abbasi]