Hugo Pratt

My cousin Juliette, in town from Belgium for a few months, and the Wife made marshmallow cloud cookies yesterday.

My, is sure am sweet.

It’s mostly the voice…

Root Down over at Food 52.

I got an e-mail from my pal John Ed Bradley the other day with an attached image of this painting:

I bought the picture at auction in Florida last week. It’s by an artist I collect named Reeves Brace. She died in 1932 at age 34. Her name at birth was Virginia Reeves. She used her last name as her first name when she became an artist and married Ernest Brace–an eccentric but nice touch. Most people just called her “Reeves.” Her husband was a fine writer named Ernest Brace; his brother helped start the publishing firm Harcourt Brace.

Reeves was a member of the art colony up in Woodstock, and she often worked in NYC. She might’ve painted this scene as a magazine illustration. I’ve been collecting her work for years although it is difficult to find and rarely comes up for sale. Her obscurity is largely a result of her early demise. Distraught as a result of a failed marriage and the stress of surviving as an artist during the Depression, she hanged herself by her silk stockings from the bathroom door of a hotel room in New York City.

She was quite the beauty, too. She still had a steady hand when she painted this canvas. I find her fascinating and have long hoped to dig deeper into her life and write about her. For now, I content myself with her oil paintings that hang in my writing studio.

The auction house didn’t identify the location but I think this is Yankee Stadium circa 1930. I think some of the artist’s details tell the story and might help us determine the year it was painted. The ads along the outfield wall (Mrs. Wagner’s Pies, Singing Shaves), the buildings in the background…all should provide clues.

Did deep outfield really have a hump like that where warning track now would be? The artist also gives us the depth of the fence in right and shows how the lime stripe tracked up what looks like a board pole.

I love how the figures with their backs turned to us are dressed. Everyone has his or head covered. The men in fedoras, one with a flower or a card or something in the band. They appear to be wearing jackets.

I asked Glenn Stout–winner of the 2012 Seymour Medal for “Fenway 1912”— when the picture could have been painted and he pegged it somewhere between 1932-34. The “Mrs. Wagner’s Pies” sign was up from ’32-’35, he told me. “Google tells me that a sign that read ‘Ever Ready Blades for Singing Shades’ graced the fence in 1932 (see listing at bottom of page).”

It was either the spring or the fall because the fans were dressed for the cold weather but since there is no bunting it wasn’t a World Series game. And:

There is no warning track, but there always was at Yankee Stadium – an actual running track, and the feature was later adopted elsewhere one they realized it was useful. There was , actually, a short, mild rise in CF and Right Center – past the warning track and the stands – the track didn’t skirt the edge of the stands precisely , but was an oval, so it was in front of the stands in CF and fight center, to stay even. So the painting is not accurate, but merely representative.

Of course, I was able to identify the batter.

What a find by John Ed. I thank him for sharing it with us.

Reeves Brace, third from left: New Paltz, N.Y., 1930

Anton’s books and Corredor Verde by Andrew Moore. Part of his beautiful Cuba series.

Happy Friday.

Nifty sample flip by Puba:

For more on The Kid, check out tributes by Greg Prince and Jason Fry at Faith and Fear in Flushing, Ted Berg over at Ted Quarters, and Jay Jaffe at Baseball Prospectus.

I love books. Love them as objects. I want to hold them, sometimes mark them up with a pen, dog-ear the pages. I like to look at them on my shelves at home. I don’t own a Kindle or a Nook but I don’t have any beef with them either. For some people they make all the sense in the world. I think you can like both formats. But this piece by Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books gave me a new appreciation for E-books:

Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that type-face on any material, with any impagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.

Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself. Memorized, a poem is as surely a piece of literature in our minds as it is on the page. If we say the words in sequence, even silently without opening our mouths, then we have had a literary experience—perhaps even a more intense one than a reading from the page. It’s true that our owning the object—War and Peace or Moby Dick—and organizing these and other classics according to chronology and nation of origin will give us an illusion of control: as if we had now “acquired” and “digested” and “placed” a piece of culture. Perhaps that is what people are attached to. But in fact we all know that once the sequence of words is over and the book closed what actually remains in our possession is very difficult, wonderfully difficult to pin down, a richness (or sometimes irritation) that has nothing to do with the heavy block of paper on our shelves.

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

[Photo Credit: Digital Journal]

Bangin’.

Grandmaster:

Check out this gallery of Kim Cogan’s New York City paintings over at If It’s Hip, It’s Here.

Rest in Peace, Adam Adamowicz.

For more, click here and here.

Jay Z, Kanye West meet the Wood Man. Ya hoid?

[Photo Credit: Four Eyes]

David Lebovitz gives marshmallow cream fudge. And I says, “Sure, why not?”

On a rainy winter Wednesday in New York.

[Photo Credit: Terrance Chan]

Dig this scene from the 1928 Harold Lloyd feature, “Speedy” featuring Babe Ruth.

And check out this post that our man William did on the movie not long ago.

Detail of “Woman with a Necklace” by Amedeo Modigliani (1917)

Lena…

Or Juliette?

An unbearable decision. In the meantime, here’s a Valentine’s Day love scene for the ages (I’ve posted it before but it’s worth watching again):

Sweet love from the dopealicious site Waffleizer.