Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, dig this piece on Pauline Kael by Ricard Kramer:

Pauline Kael herself opened the door to her apartment and it was the first of many doors she would open for me, over many years. Standing there in the hallway, I had yet to reach my full height, but she still had to look up to see me. I was amazed. She was tiny? How could that be? She was huge on the page, an empress!

“Oh shit,” she said. “You’re just a baby. Come on in.”

She laughed. The first time I would hear that laugh — musical, rangy, a broad’s laugh, a laugh that welcomed you even as it warned you that once you stepped through that door, you were expected to join her in her merry fuck-you to all bullshit, bluster, and begging-for-Oscars “worthiness.”

I followed her through her rooms. They were white, and the floors looked like someone had polished them with honey. The ceilings were high, and in every room books climbed from the floorboards all the way to the top. She led me to a table, and as she got me a soda, a large man emerged from the bathroom, tucking in his shirt. He nodded to me, didn’t offer a hand.

“Oh, fuck you, Bob,” she said. “You can shake hands with him. He’s not going to take a job from you.” “Bob” obeyed. “This man,” she told me then, “is our Next Great American Director, honey. And so far, I’m the only one who knows it. But that’ll change.” Next Great, etc. (yes, Robert Altman) left us and she told me about the movie he’d just finished, a comedy about the Korean War that was so good and so fresh the studio was talking about not releasing it — that before I arrived, he had been in tears.

“Peckinpah is a crybaby, too,” she said. “The tough guys always are. I don’t know about John Ford, but I’m not sure I want to know about John Ford.” (Thirty-five years later I sat across the aisle from Altman on a plane. He slept the whole way, so it wasn’t until we were both at baggage claim that I got up the nerve to introduce myself and share the scene of that long-ago afternoon. He thought for a moment, mumbled something, and then, adjusting his expensive suede cowboy hat, said, “Pauline Kael … Pauline Kael … Oh. Right. That’s the cunt who destroyed me.” And that is why one should never approach one’s idols at baggage claim. I’m convinced that Pauline would have laughed at that, though. She did love her bad boys.)

Matt McGough’s first day on the job as a Yankee bat boy.

Listen.

Last year, Texas Monthly ran a terrific oral history on the outlaw country music scene in Austin during the 1970s. John Spong did the work. And it’s well-worth your time for sure:

Halfway between the coasts sat Texas, where hundreds of honky-tonks functioned as Nashville’s farm system. But that music belonged to the old guard. Texas kids were more interested in the state’s thriving folkie circuit. The hub was a Dallas listening room called the Rubaiyat, from which young singer-songwriters like Steve Fromholz and B. W. Stevenson sallied forth to coffeehouses around the state. The music they played was distinct from the protest songs of Greenwich Village. Texas folk was rooted in cowboy, Tejano, and Cajun songs, in Czech dance halls and East Texas blues joints. It was dance music. And when the Texas folkies started gigging with their rock-minded peers, they found a truer sound than the L.A. country rockers. There was nothing ironic about the fiddle on Fromholz’s epic “Texas Trilogy.”

It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when that sound and scene coalesced into something cohesive enough to merit a name, but then again none of the labels people came up with—cosmic cowboy, progressive country, redneck rock, and, ultimately, outlaw country—made everyone happy. Still, the pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin. Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song “Mr. Bojangles.” In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.

[Drawing Via: Chillwalker]

Monday morning. Let’s get to it.

“I Got The Feelin'”–James Brown

[Photo Via: Jungle Indie Rock]

“Feelin’ Alright” — The Jungle Brothers

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

Painting by Malcolm Liepke.

Clementine. A cherce winter snack.

[Photo Via: The Brunette]

Ed Koch, the former mayor of our city, and a bona fide character–among other things–passed away this morning. He was 88.

Food 52 gives peanut butter cookies.

Walker Evans. Self-portrait.

It’s a little late for “Best Of 2012” lists but heck, this Garden & Gun photo gallery is fun.

Over at Salon, here’s the most gifted Jennifer Egan:

One of my strengths as a writer is that I’m a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.

I want all the flights of fancy, and I can only get them in a thoughtless way. So I allow myself that. Which means that my next step has to be all about problem-solving. My attitude cannot be, Gee, I wrote it, it’s good. I’d never get anywhere. It’s all about seeing what’s wrong from a very analytical place. It’s a dialectic.

Once I have a draft I make the plans, edit on hard copy, and make an extensive outline for the revision. The revision notes I wrote for “Look at Me” were 80 pages long.

This essay appears in a new book: Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and WhyThey Do What They Do.

My grandma and your grandma…

I mean…

No, I mean:

Wait, I’m sayin’…

[Drawing by Daniel Stolle]

The name of this song is…

February 8-21, a reason to troop to Brooklyn: A Pryor Engagement.

Check out Michael Weinreb’s appreciation of Donald Westlake over at Grantland:

Westlake admired Hammett’s laconic ability to tell a story without delving into sentimentality; he never liked Chandler and some of the others much at all, and while he published some private-eye novels under a pseudonym, he also recognized the shortcomings of the form. In 1960, he wrote his first novel under his own name, The Mercenaries. He was young and voracious, and he produced so much that he required multiple pen names to keep up with his output: In 1961 alone, he published nine books under three different names.10 And then one day around that time, Westlake went to visit a friend in New Jersey and took the wrong bus home and wound up on the wrong side of the George Washington Bridge. He trudged across the bridge, and the wind and the tension of the bridge inspired in him the idea of a character whose “speed and solidity and tension matched that of the bridge” itself. He thought of a man who looked a little like Jack Palance, a man seething with anger, a man who, when offered a ride by a Samaritan while walking across the bridge, tells him — “for reasons none of us have been able to figure out,” Block says — to go to hell. This was the catalyst, and this became the opening scene of the first Parker novel, The Hunter.

One evening Block traveled to Westlake’s apartment in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn and read the first chapter. Block asked if he knew where it was going; Westlake assured him he’d figure it out. It was how he worked on most everything: He called it the “narrative-push” method, in which one chapter leads to the inspiration for the next, and nothing is outlined. In his first draft of The Hunter, Westlake landed Parker in prison at the end, because, in the early 1960s, that seemed the natural denouement for such a remorseless persona; his paperback editor at Pocket Books, Bucklin Moon, found it compelling enough that he asked Westlake if he could devise a way to more easily position Parker for a follow-up. Westlake obliged. The Hunter was published in 1962, and the following year, Westlake published three more Parker books. In the sequel, The Man With the Getaway Face, Parker visits a plastic surgeon who alters his appearance, and then he robs an armored car; in The Outfit, Parker schemes against the mafia; in The Mourner, Parker attempts to abscond with a 15th-century statue and slugs an asthmatic hoodlum in the process; in The Score, Parker and a band of professionals manage to rob an entire small town over the course of an evening.11

More than anything, Westlake once said, these are books about a man at work. Parker is strangely puritanical, in that he does not permit himself to even think about sex until a job is complete. During a holdup, he learns the first names of the people he’s holding at gunpoint, in order to soothe their egos. Parker and his catalogue of partners carry their twisted Protestant work ethic from job to job: It is fascinating how much of the text focuses on the process of criminality, on scenes of men sitting around a table in front of blueprints, on the notion of preparing for the worst and then accepting that things might go off in unexpected directions regardless of how much you plan for them. There are double-crosses and betrayals and outright failures, and the world is indifferent to all of this suffering, but Parker soldiers onward. And I imagine all of this has at least a little to do with the way the author felt when he sat down at his typewriter every morning.

Lunch! Yes, please.

Drawing by Richard Diebenkorn.

Trouble in Mind.