Dig this story about Jason Barnes a student of one of our own–thelarmis.

[Photo Credit: Rob Felt]

Over at Sports on Earth, Jorge Arangure Jr. has a story about Brian Roberts:

I walked into the Yankees spring training clubhouse on Monday and saw Roberts in pinstripes and the image just didn’t fit. I told Roberts how bizarre it was to see him in that uniform.

“It’s weird for me too,” he admitted.

Roberts was surrounded by reporters prior to Tuesday’s game because he was about to face his old team. It seemed a perfect time to catch up on his spring. Roberts, who missed most of least season and has sparingly played in the last four seasons because of injuries, spoke of the massive differences this spring training has been from previous ones.

“It is just different to be the guy in the back that no one knows about or cares about,” said Roberts. “I think that does help guys at times when you are trying to get back on your feet.”

[Photo Credit: AP]

Here’s a cool 2008 Museum of the Moving Image interview with Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris about Howard Hawks.

Howard Hawks is a great example of a director who was rescued by film critics.

SARRIS: Well, by the French!

Could you talk about how that happened? Hawks was successful as a director in Hollywood, but not really known.

SARRIS: He was successful, but he wasn’t prestigious.

HASKELL: Wasn’t taken seriously.

SARRIS: I think he was only nominated for one Oscar, for Sergeant York. And he never won an Oscar, of course. The first time I heard about him was when my friend Eugene Archer, went to Paris in the 1950s on a Fulbright. He wrote me a letter and said, “Who the hell is Howard Hawks?” He had signed a contract for a book that he was going to do about six directors: Elia Kazan, John Ford, George Stevens, and so on. The Cahiers people said, “Ugh! What about Howard Hawks and Hitchcock?”

And so he wrote me this letter; it’s the first time I heard anybody being so high on Hawks. I had seen a lot of Hawks’s movies in revival houses, so I was really up on him. But I couldn’t quite get him, because he had so many different genres. And that’s what the French loved about him, precisely. Because for instance, Hitchcock would never do a western or a musical. And then Dan Talbot ran a Hawks festival at the New Yorker Theater, and I wrote something about it. And I was writing for little publications.

And you were reading the French critics on Hawks?

SARRIS: Yeah, in Cahiers. Truffaut and Godard were just crazy about Hawks. And especially at that time, Rio Bravo had just come out, and that was, to them, huge. And here, people just thought it was another western.

And another thing, it was sort of an accident of film history. Robert Warshow wrote “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” and he wrote about Little Caesar and The Public Enemy but he didn’t write about Scarface, because Scarface was not in general circulation for many years. It was a Howard Hawks picture, and the French had been on Scarface’s trail since ’32. So it was not just the Cahiers people. Even before Cahiers, Hawks was admired for Scarface. And all the other 1930s adventure films. But here in America, even Warshow didn’t know about Scarface. In fact, I hadn’t seen it when I was writing all these Hawks articles; it still wasn’t available. I only saw it very much later.

Tonight gives the Yanks and Orioles on TV. 

Smile.

[Photo Credit: Don Dell via It’s a Long Season]

The greatest hoodie ever made?

Head on over to Victory Journal and dig into Brin-Jonathan Butler’s story on our man El Duque (lavishly illustrated by Mickey Duzjj).

Charlie Pierce on the Sox:

The Red Sox of my youth [early 1960s] were losers, and not particularly lovable ones, either. They were shamefully late to integrate, and they lost enthusiasm for their work reliably around Memorial Day. They were not losers because they would reach the apex of the sport and then fail. They were losers because they lost, a lot. This is where I learned the basic lesson of being a Red Sox fan, a lesson that was lost for many years beneath an avalanche of mystical hoohah: It Could Always Be Worse.

So last season’s team was almost perfect. The local sports punditocracy spent almost the entire summer waiting for it to fail. This was partly because sports-talk radio is a job neither for grown-ups nor for advanced primates. But it also seemed for a long time to be grounded in empirical fact; sooner or later, the league would catch up to Koji Uehara, or Mike Napoli would strike out 111 times in a row, or Jonny Gomes would take a wrong step and send his kneecap spinning off into centerfield. I was waiting for it all to happen, and it never did. I waited for Tampa’s young talent to usher the Red Sox out of the playoffs. That didn’t happen. I waited for the Detroit pitching staff to melt their bats into a puddle. That didn’t happen. I waited for St. Louis’s obvious superior talent at most of the positions to assert itself. It could always be worse. But it never was.

This was the first Red Sox championship of the Post-Nonsense Era. It was achieved through the careful, and very wonk-based, construction of a roster that had precisely the right strengths at precisely the right times. And now, they are going about the business of defending that championship in much the same way. Winning is the newest normal. There are no curses to worry about anymore. Sometimes, a fishing knife is only a fishing knife.

Not for nothing but: there will be no repeat.

[Photo Credit: Pete Abe]

Here’s Cameron Crowe’s 1973 Rolling Stone cover story on the Allman Brothers.

This is the story that inspired Crowe’s movie, Almost Famous.

The entire movie.

Flavorpill collects 15 writers reading their own work. 

[Photo Via: Stipha]

What’s to become of Michael Pineda? That’s a big question, right? Well, he threw yesterday. Chad Jennings has it covered. 

[Photo Credit: Ron Antonelli]

I don’t remember. I fell asleep before it was over.

Here’s the results. 

“My God Is Real”–Al Green

[Photo Credit: Phil Greitzer]

“Copa (Cabanga)”–De La Soul

[Photo Credit: Peter Pan 61]

Jeanine Basinger in the New York Review of Books:

Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck were separated by fifteen years in age, and arrived in Hollywood more than a decade apart. Although both were famous stars, neither ever won a competitive Academy Award. (Gardner was nominated once for Mogambo and Stanwyck four times, for Stella Dallas, Ball of Fire, Double Indemnity, and Sorry, Wrong Number. She received an honorary Oscar in 1982 for her “unique contribution to the art of screen acting.”) Both were at the top during the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, but one difference between them is fundamental: Ava Gardner was a product of the “star machine” and Barbara Stanwyck was not.

Gardner, from a not very well off but stable North Carolina family, arrived in town with a minimum of security and no acting experience, but was fed into a system that might be expected to take care of her if she behaved. Stanwyck, coming from a hardscrabble background in New York, arrived from Broadway with the security of a contract and solid experience, but took up her career independently and never let anyone own her.

Gardner’s security came with a price. Unable to pick and choose, she was assigned pedestrian films she had to carry (The Great Sinner in 1949, My Forbidden Past in 1951). She wasn’t given many opportunities to grow as an actress. The studio didn’t need that from her, and because of her spectacular looks, she presented something of a casting problem. Who would believe Ava Gardner as a nun, or a rocket scientist, or a neglected working girl in a tuna cannery? She was born to grab the spotlight, and having shaped her image as “a magnificent animal” (her billing for The Barefoot Contessa, 1954), Hollywood was content to present her that way.

Gardner became resentful and restless, and began to carouse, have affairs, and create problems. She didn’t care if she caused a scandal, particularly when she took up with the married Frank Sinatra and became the most famous “other woman” of her time. Ironically, it was easy for her studio to fuse this off-screen behavior to her on-screen persona, and the role of “Ava Gardner,” bad-girl-good-time-gal-sex-symbol, became an unbreakable image.

Stanwyck’s independence meant that she could negotiate her films and salaries, but she had to accept that she had no priority in any studio’s plans for casting. She lost significant roles as a result, such as the lead in Dark Victory (1939), which went to Bette Davis. Wilson points out that a studio “would have steadily built her up picture after picture,” as MGM did with Gardner, but Stanwyck didn’t want that: “She found it a constraint.” Stanwyck had to fight to get good films, but she had her own supporters, including her first husband, Frank Fay (an established born-in-a-trunk performer), a shrewd agent, Zeppo Marx (the fifth Marx brother), and particularly director Frank Capra, who saw what she was capable of and who guided her in four of her earliest films. As curator of the Frank Capra Archives, I spent many hours talking to Capra about his career, and Stanwyck was a subject he loved. A great admirer of her talent, discipline, and professionalism, he always stressed that since Stanwyck was never owned by a single studio for any length of time, no specific image was created for her. She had to create her own.

A way down south, they’s playing ball.

Chad Jennings, as always, has the latest.

[Drawing by Robert Weaver]

Rock n Roll.

Pictures by Denis O’Regan…

…over at the ever-excellent site: Everyday I Show.

I think Emily Nussbaum makes a lot of sense in her critique of HBO’s True Detective series but I still find the show engaging. It is portentous at times but the atmosphere is also unnerving. The entire show is beautifully crafted and Woody Harrelson is terrific. His partner, Matthew McConaughey’s has a  tough, demanding role and he’s often compelling but he does enough melodramatic inhaling each time he takes a drag from a cigarette to take me out of the scene. Still, his self consciousness isn’t enough to spoil things.

I like that it’s an 8 episode season. Next year, the show will have different actors and characters.

Over at the Daily Beast check out this interview with True Detective‘s director, Cary Kukunaga.

An oral history. 

The new rules and how the Yanks will adjust to them.