Takin’ the day off. Wish I could take the Plunge.

Be back tonightski for the game.

[Image by Josep Moncada vis Alexandra 1]

“I like to act in films, I like to shoot ’em, I like to direct ’em, I like to be around ’em. I like the feel of it and it’s something I respect. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a crappy film or a good film. Anyone who can make a film, I already love. But I feel sorry if they don’t put any thought in it because then they missed the boat.”

-John Cassavetes

So far, summer 2013 seems like a dud of a movie-going season. Luckily, BAM is coming to the rescue with a retrospective of the films of iconoclastic filmmaker and actor John Cassavetes. It’s often said that Cassavetes’ films are not for everyone, which is true, but it should be taken as a compliment. The series, which runs through July 31^st, mixes Cassavetes’ work as a writer and director with some of his more memorable roles acting for other directors, like Robert Aldrich’s THE DIRTY DOZEN (which won him an Oscar nomination), Don Siegel’s THE KILLERS, Elaine May’s MIKEY AND NICKEY (co-starring Falk) and Roman Polanski’s ROSEMARY’S BABY.

Cassavetes’ self-financed 1968 film FACES (screening on July 17) was nominated for three Academy Awards, and had a major impact on the industry itself and also on filmmakers like his friend and protégé Martin Scorsese, and contemporaries like Woody Allen, Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich. In addition to paving the way for the independent film movement in the United States, Cassavetes’ movies present human emotion and behavior in stark, jarring, occasionally hilarious and sometimes harrowing ways. Simply put – there’s nothing else quite like them. Cassavetes created a stock company of fantastic and idiosyncratic performers, including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel and perhaps most famously and importantly, his wife and muse, the great Gena Rowlands. Rowlands’ performance in Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE was widely lauded, Oscar-nominated and has become justly legendary, but her work her husband’s other films, like the criminally under-seen OPENING NIGHT, which kicks off the series on Saturday, is equally stunning.    It’s enough to cure you of superhero movies.

Schedule and Details

Happy 4th of July!

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

Well, so I’ve been waiting to use this photograph the entire series figuring the Yanks would lose and lose again to the Twins. But they didn’t, they didn’t blow the game yesterday and they didn’t waste a 9-1 lead today, although it got a little sweaty in the 8th inning before Shawn Kelly got them out of trouble.

So it turns out the Yankees are Sy Ableman after all. Okay, works for me.

Final Score: Yanks 9, Twins 5.

Time for cake:

David Phelps looks to recover from his Baltimore Beatdown last Saturday as the Yanks go for the sweep this afternoon in Minnesota.

Ichiro Suzuki CF
Zoilo Almonte LF
Robinson Cano 2B
Travis Hafner DH
Vernon Wells RF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Luis Cruz SS
Alberto Gonzalez 3B
Austin Romine C

Never mind the barbecue:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Hope everyone has a safe, satiating and satisfying time of it today.

[Photo Credit: Andrew Snyder]

It looked like another hard-luck outing for C.C. tonight. The Yanks trailed 2-0 but in the 6th, Brett Gardner led off with a walk, moved to third on a double by Ichiro and they both came home on a double by Robbie Cano, who has caught fire in the Heartland. Cano came round to score the go-ahead run on a sacrifice fly by Lyle Overbay.

C.C. threw 120 pitches, the last of which was dribbled slowly toward first base by Justin Morneau in the 7th with a runner in scoring position. C.C. fielded it and underhanded the ball to Overbay for the third out, protecting the lead.

David Robertson retired the Twins in order in the 8th and Mariano worked around a 1-out broken-bat bloop single in the 9th, retiring Joe Mauer on a pop-up to short to end the game. We have a few months left to savor Mo. And most of us around these parts do just that every time he takes the mound.

Final Score: Yanks 3, Twins 2.

A series win for the Yanks and a stirring performance by Sabathia. It’s one he’ll be extra proud of because tonight he earned the 200th win of his career.

The Yanks have won the first two games against the Twins with two left. A series win is in order. If they leave town with a split it’ll be a bummer.

The good news is that C.C. is on the hill.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Travis Hafner DH
Zoilo Almonte LF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C
Luis Cruz SS
David Adams 3B

Luis Cruz is the new face.

Never mind the fireworks:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Yasiel Puig is the reason we have the All-Star Game writes our old chum Ted Berg.

[Photo Credit: Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press / June 3, 2013]

Phil Hughes pitched well, people, and the Yankee offense is still eating meat, scrapping together a few runs–thank you Alberto “3 RBI” Gonzalez–before Robbie Cano pelted a three-run home run to put the game away.

Sure, Mariano Rivera had to come in to get a cheap-one out save in the 9th, but otherwise, not much to complain about.

Final Score: Yanks 7, Twins 3.

Hiroki Kuroda returned to New York for an MRI on his hip flexor but appears to be okay. Phew.

It’s Phil Hughes and say your prayers.

Brett Gardner CF
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Robinson Cano 2B
Travis Hafner DH
Zoilo Almonte LF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C
David Adams 3B
Alberto Gonzalez SS

Never mind the pessimism:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

Charlie Pierce on NBA free agency:

Is there any good reason for anyone to believe anything Dwight Howard says at this point?

He’s on the market again. On Monday, as the bell announcing the opening of the free-agency market was still pealing, he was being romanced by Houston and it was said that the Rockets were attractive to him at least in part because Texas has no state income tax. (This is a nice perk if you’re Dwight Howard the ballplayer, who will be making a gazillion dollars and can afford your own private police force. It’s a bit of a drag if you’re Dwight Howard from the Third Ward who’s trying to get him some public services.) Yao Ming Skyped in to pitch the team, and Howard’s also met with Hall of Famers Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, as well as with James Harden, who likely will not be joining them in Springfield. He’s going to take the grand tour. Howard will be meeting with Golden State and Dallas, too, before deciding whether he wants to pick up the great burden of being a celebrity athlete in L.A. again.

Is there a bigger fake in this league? Seriously, the guy came into the NBA with a smile on his face and Bible verses on his shoes, and there hasn’t been a player in my memory who’s dived for every nickel with the enthusiasm this guy has demonstrated. (Dwight? Rich man. Camel. Needle’s eye. Google these terms along with “New Testament” and get back to me.) He can’t help being injured. He can help being miserable, though, and this guy is simply never happy. He wasn’t happy in Orlando. He wasn’t happy in L.A., and he’s not going to be happy wherever he ends up next. This would be tolerable if he brought championship ball with him. (Shaquille O’Neal wasn’t always a field of buttercups, either.) But the guy doesn’t necessarily help you win. He looks great — not good. Great — in the uniform. At the baggage carousel, there’s nobody more formidable. On the court? Not so much. He couldn’t really mesh with Kobe Bryant and he never really got along with Mike D’Antoni, and now he’s back running the grift again. Please, Houston, sign this guy. Moses Malone will come back from retirement just to kick his ass.

Then there’s Chris Paul, who has condescended to return to Los Angeles now that the Clippers gave him 107 million good reasons to be coached by Doc Rivers. This is another guy with a costume-jewelry résumé whom the league nonetheless slobbers over. You have your analytics and I have mine, but if you’re a big-money point guard, the basic metric is whether you can get your team to win anything and, right now, Paul’s got one division title with L.A. He, however, has fewer rings than Rajon Rondo or Mario Chalmers. But he gets to hold up the Clippers to the point where they raid another team for its coach, throw the league into an uproar, launch a brawl between my favorite person in the NBA and my, uh, boss, and all so that Paul won’t take his stylish, couldn’t-beat-the-Grizzlies-with-a-hand-grenade hindquarters somewhere else in the league. The barstools are full of point guards who guided their teams to a loss in a six-game playoff series.

[Picture by Greg Guillemin]

A treat: Lawrence Block on Charles Willeford:

Charles Willeford took writing very seriously, and applied himself to it wholeheartedly for some 40 years. He started out as a poet; his first book, Proletarian Laughter, was a collection of poems. He began publishing paperback fiction while serving his second hitch in the military, and kept at it, and worked hard at it.

With the Hoke Moseley novels, he got a taste of the commercial success that had for so long eluded him. When I learned of his death, I was struck by the irony of it; he was just beginning to get somewhere, and the Fates took him out of the game.

Found over at Kottke, Bert Haanstra’s Academy Award-winning 1959 documentary short.

Andy Pettitte passed Whitey Ford last night and now has more strikeouts than any other Yankee pitcher.

Yeah, the Yanks were down by a run in the 8th inning and yeah all seemed lost but then came an unexpected shipment of protein power from the rarely-seen Score Truck.

Double take. Spit take. And we’ll take it, thank you very much.

10-4, good buddy.

The gluten-free Yanks limp in to Minnesota to play four against the Twins.

Alex Rodriguez will begin a rehab assignment tomorrow. Tonight, Andy Pettitte tries to halt the Yankees’ losing streak at five.

Brett Gardner CF
Jayson Nix SS
Robinson Cano 2B
Vernon Wells RF
Travis Hafner DH
Zoilo Almonte LF
Lyle Overbay 1B
Chris Stewart C
David Adams 3B

Never mind the Dybbuk:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

This looks terrific.

For a taste of Lenny Shecter’s no-bullshit, take-no-prisoners style, check out this excerpt from “The Flower of America” chapter of his 1969 book of essays, The Jocks.

By Leonard Shecter

There are famous Yankee players whose public images bear little relation to the kind of men they actually are—Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle, to name three.

Suave, sure, husband of Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio holds a unique place in Americana. He is super-hero. Sixteen years after he completed his remarkable feat of hitting in 56 straight games he was immortalized (if a god can obtain new immortalization) by Simon and Garfunkel in “Mrs. Robinson.”

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

In fact, the nation has not turned its lonely eyes to Joe DiMaggio. As Gay Talese showed in a remarkable article in Esquire in 1966, DiMaggio is a vain, lonely man, who is a tyrant to the sycophants who surround him. Wrote Talese. “His friends [know] . . . that should they inadvertently betray a confidence . . . [he] will never speak to them again.” Talese then described a scene in a restaurant called Reno’s in San Francisco which DiMaggio would often drop into.

They may wait for hours sometimes, waiting and knowing he may wish to be alone; but it does not seem to matter, they are endlessly awed by him, moved by the mystique, he is a kind of male Garbo. They know he can be warm and loyal if they are sensitive to his wishes, but they must never be late for an appointment to meet him. One man, unable to find a parking space, arrived a half-hour late once and DiMaggio didn’t talk to him again for three months. They know, too, when dining at night with DiMaggio, that he generally prefers male companions and occasionally one or two young women, but never wives; wives gossip, wives are trouble, and men wishing to remain close to DiMaggio must keep their wives at home.

His friends fawn on him, call him “Clipper” (one must wonder why a grown man would tolerate that), introduce him to mindless young women and pick up his tabs. At her death he turned a marriage to Marilyn Monroe that didn’t work (she complained that all he wanted to do was watch television) into a maudlin lost love. He held a permanent grudge against Robert Kennedy because he once spent a lot of time at a party dancing with Marilyn. This was aftertheir marriage had disintegrated.

And in the end he took a coaching job—not a managing job, a coaching job—with Charles O. Finley, the erratic owner of the Oakland Athletics. It was the act of a lonely, probably bitter man. No one had offered him a job as manager. In the fall of 1968 Joe DiMaggio was in Japan to teach the batters there how to hit. One suspects he had no more difficulty communicating with them than he did with American batters.

Yogi Berra is a particularly glowing example of an image which has outstripped the man. Of course, it is not his fault. It is not his fault that he is not a lovable gnome bubbling over withbon mots. Nor is it his fault that he is a narrow, suspicious man, jealous of the man other people supposed him to be and which he knew he was not. He was supposed to be a humorist because he said things like “Bill Dickey learned me all his experiences,” and “I want to thank you for making this award necessary.” In fact, there is severe doubt that Yogi Berra ever said anything intentionally funny in his life. The late Tom Meany used to tell this possibly apocryphal story about Berra which, at the least, illustrates the breadth of his knowledge. Berra was introduced to Ernest Hemingway at a party in a restaurant. When he returned to his table, he was asked what he thought of him. Said Berra: “He’s quite a character. What does he do?”

Well, he’s a writer.

“Yeah? What paper?”

After a while Berra and his wife, Carmen, came to believe that he was indeed something of a man of the world, raconteur, sophisticate. After all, weren’t they rich? (Berra has had enormous financial luck. He sold his interests in a bowling emporium at a great profit shortly before the bottom dropped out of the bowling business. And he took a block of stock in return for endorsing a little-known chocolate ”drink”-which means no milk and very little chocolate: the stock sky-rocketed.

There was an autobiography called Yogi. It was a typical baseball autobiography, all shiny and bright for the kiddies, naturally written by somebody else, a man who could have done better. But by the time the world was ready for a book about Berra, the Bern1s were not interested in reality. They wanted the book to be about Berra as they would have liked him to be. So it turned out to be a terrible book, cheap and phony and transparent I reviewed it that way.

It was a lovely spring day in St. Petersburg. The palm trees waved shiny green against the high blue sky. Yogi Berra saw me as soon as I arrived.

“You son of a bitch,” Berra said. “You cocksucker.”

He never said that in Yogi.

But that is not what I remember about him most. I remember most that the other ball players always complained that Yogi Berra would stand naked at the clubhouse buffet and scratch his genitals over the cold cuts.

Mickey Mantle is a quite different man. He was never shoe-horned into a role which, like Berra, he was unprepared by nature and intellect to play. Mantle was a country boy, ill-educated, frightened, convinced at an early age by a series of deaths in his family that he was doomed to live only a short life.

He was simple, naive and, at the very first, trusting. It did not take him long to misplace his trust. He soon found that he was trusting the wrong people and, when this cost him money, it made him withdrawn and sullen, as well as poor. Fortified by Yankee tradition—watch out for outsiders-Mantle was soon responding only to his teammates and the glad-handers and celebrity fuckers who flocked around him. (Mantle is almost universally liked by his teammates because he goes out of his way to be outgoing and friendly with them. He vigorously denies that he decided to behave that way after he, as a rookie, was ignored by the aloof, morose DiMaggio, but a young ball player I trust swears Mantle told him this and I have no reason to disbelieve him.) Pretty soon, as his skills blossomed, it became Mantle and his hedonistic enclave against the world.

And obviously the world didn’t count. The world was made up of crowds of sweaty, smelly little kids who demanded autographs and smeared ice cream on your new stantung suit, middle-aged slobs who accosted you in restaurants in ·mid-forkful to simper about getting an autograph for their little kiddies at home, and cloddish newspaper and magazine people who never got anything right and only wanted to hurt you anyway. When he was playing poorly or when he was especially plagued by one of his numerous injuries, Mantle would become particularly withdrawn and sulky, turn his back even on well-wishers. A great deal of this was sheer self-protection. For Mantle always doubted himself and, most of all, his knowledge of the game.

He had reason to. Mantle was never much of a student of baseball. Born with marvelous skills, he played it intuitively, never having to pay much attention to what was going on. More than once I heard him ask a teammate about a rival pitcher, “What’s he throw?” This is not an unusual question around a ball club-except if the pitcher had been in the league five years and pitched against the Yankees maybe 30 times.

It is possible that Mantle was incapable of even the minimum amount of concentration the finer points of baseball require. Certainly he refused to work on his own physical conditioning during the off-season, a refusal which, if it not actually shorten his career, obviously did nothing to prevent the pulled muscles in legs and groin which plagued him during almost every season. Year after year Mantle was told to go home and lift weights with his legs. He was begged to keep in good enough physical condition so that he would at least not disarrange a hamstring, as he did so often, in the opening days of spring training. But Mantle’s idea of keeping fit was to have an active social life and play golf out of an electric cart which was outfitted with a bar. He had fun. He also had pulled muscles.

It has become a cliche to wonder how great Mantle would have been had he been physically healthy during his career. What I wonder is how great he might have been had he even tried to keep physically healthy.

In the early years of his career Mantle was booed by the fans because he refused to live up to his promise. Later on the boos turned to cheers as he became known as a man who made a gallant effort despite enormous physical pain. I’m not sure the fans weren’t right in the first place.

Will Leitch on the Knicks trade and why New York teams fail:

The Knicks, essentially, not only took a contract albatross off Toronto’s hands — new GM Masai Ujiri was desperate to rid himself of the failed first overall pick — they paid the Raptors for the privilege. If the trade were just Camby and Novak for Bargnani, it would be a wash, two teams handing over each other’s soiled linens. But the Knicks threw in three draft picks because … well, because in New York, the future isn’t just something that doesn’t matter, it’s something to be actively avoided.

This has always been a thing in New York. For whatever reason, there is this sense among sports owners in New York City that rebuilding — or, rather to say, the process of compiling and amassing talent and resources that can be used to sustain perpetual success — is something that the fanbase will just not stand for. If your team is not competing for a championship that very year, obviously your franchise is a failure and unworthy to wear the words “New York” on the front of your jersey/uniform/sweater/hot pants.

This mindset leads to lunacy like just about every free agent acquisition the Mets have ever made — with the ironic exception of Carlos Beltran, the one many fans were the most angry about — or the Yankees giving Alex Rodriguez a 10-year contract or the Knicks trading for someone like Andrea freaking Bargnani. The logic behind the Bargnani trade, behind so many New York sports teams’ moves, is that if the move makes the team even slightly better today, it’s worth mortgaging whatever possible future there might be. Is having Bargnani on the team for the 2013-14 season better than having Camby and Novak? I find that an arguable point, but if the Knicks think so, and they do, then why not throw in three draft picks do make sure the deal goes down? We weren’t using them anyway! They’re draft picks!

So should the Yankees trade Robinson Cano, or what? They won’t but it’d be the ballsy move.

[Photo Credit: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images]