Over at Retronaut…

…check out this gallery from the set of Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana.”

Guinness, Richardson, Ives, Kovacs, O’Hara, Noel Coward…and directed by Carol Reed. It’s not “The Third Man,” but it ain’t half-bad neither.

“Hotel Room,” By Edward Hopper (1931)

My dad used to make fun of me for mixing cultures in the kitchen like when I had Genoa salami and sliced cornichons with Dijon mustard on a bagel from Zabars. I never saw anything strange about it. That in mind, thanks to the wonderful food blog Three to One, check out this good combination:

There are few things in this world that I love more than quality prosciutto and a good croissant is something to savor.  Yes, please.

Fresh direct from the vault, here’s the original manuscript version of a story that Pat Jordan did for TV Guide in 1988.

The Horse Lovers

By Pat Jordan

Prologue

The movie is “Bluegrass,” a four-hour, CBS-TV mini-series. The actors are Cheryl Ladd, Brian Kerwin, Anthony Andrews, Mickey Rooney, and Wayne Rodgers. The setting is Lexington, Kentucky, Bluegrass Country, where thoroughbred racehorses are bred and trained on rolling pastureland that is zoned strictly for horse farms. The time is late fall. The grassland is turning brown. The leaves on the trees have faded from bright orange to the color of mud. The horses graze quietly in the pasture until another horse intrudes on their meal. They twitch, rear up, and gallop after the intruder, snorting out their hot breath into the damp, cold air. They curl back their lips, baring teeth, and nip the intruder on the flanks before slowing finally and then stopping to graze again.

The fictional plot concerns the efforts of Maude Sage Breen (Ladd) to fulfill her dream of breeding a Triple-Crown thoroughbred. She is thwarted at every turn by her ruthless neighbor, Lowell Shipleigh (Rodgers) and aided by her recovering alcoholic trainer, Dancy Cutler (Kerwin). It is Dancy who wins Maude’s love in a romantic joust with the mysterious Anglo-Irishman, Michael Fitzgerald (Andrews). What unites them all, however, hero, heroine, and villains alike, is that they are all horse lovers.

Scene One

A cold, blustery day at Crestwood Farms outside of Lexington, Ky. Brian Kerwin and Charles Cooper, a black actor from Cincinnati, are huddled in the equipment barn trying to keep warm while waiting for their cue from the Broodmare Barn up the hill where, today, history will be made. The birth of a foal will be filmed for national television. Kerwin and Cooper sip coffee from Styrofoam cups while speaking in hushed reverential tones as if they were expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room.

“Oh, shucks, Miss Scarlett,” says Kerwin, smiling, “I don’t know nuthin’ bout birthn’ horses.” Kerwin, with a veterinarian’s help off camera, is expected to aid in the birth of the foal. “They told me that if it’s a breech birth I have to reach up my hand into the mare and turn the foal’s head around,” he says. He shakes his head at the mystery of what he is about to partake in. Cooper tries to reassure him.

“I aided at my wife’s delivery of our son,” Cooper says. “It was a Caesarian birth. All I could do was stroke her forehead.” He flutters his long eyelashes. “It was a beautiful experience.”

Kerwin nods with admiration. Both men look down at the dirt floor, shuffle their feet. Kerwin begins to talk about the breeding sequence he was involved in filming a few days ago. He had to help a stallion insert his penis in a mare while the crew filmed the scene. “It was all very tastefully done,” He says. Cooper nods in perfect understanding.

Just then, a woman enters the barn. “It’s time,” she says to Kerwin. He crumples up his coffee cup and discards it in a trash barrel. Then he smoothes the sides of his reddish hair. His lean face is bruised and cut. Make-up applied today, after last night’s flight sequence staged at a roadside tavern.

Scene Two

Flashback to midnight of the night before. “Little Jim’s Tavern” out on Georgetown Road next to “The Slumber Inn Motel.” The dirt parking lot, which is usually crowded with rusted Chevys and battered pick-up trucks, is dominated this night by the huge vans of the film crew. Two police cars, their lights blinking, guard the road as if for intruders.

Inside, the small, cave-like, drinking man’s bar is strangely lighted by colorful neon signs that the crew has placed on the bar’s usually blank, concrete walls. The middle of the small room is dominated by three cameras and their crews and bright spotlights aimed toward a corner of the bar where the fight sequence will be staged. The actors are settling into their places for last minute instructions.

At the other end of the bar, in darkness, the bar’s regulars, farm hands, construction workers, and long-haul truck drivers, are loitering around, drinking beer and bourbon, smoking cigarettes, and shooting a few games of pool with Jimalou, the bar’s regular, plump, blonde waitress. “My father owns this place,” she says, as she leans over the pool table and sights the eight ball. “He always wanted a boy.”

Bonnie, the regular barmaid, is pouring drinks for the regulars as she is expected to do for the actors when the scene begins. Bonnie has short, dark hair, lots of blue eye-make-up, and she talks out of the side of her mouth, just as one would expect a barmaid in a roadside tavern to talk. Bonnie is a barmaid. Tough, funny, caustic.

“What’s the difference between being a barmaid and playing a barmaid?” she says. “Simple. I get it right the first time.”

“Bonnie’s the reason we come her,” says Marshall, a regular. “She makes us feel at home.”

“Sure does,” says D.B., tilting back his cowboy hat. “Abuses us just like our wives.” Everyone laughs out loud. One of the film crew looks back at the laughing regulars as if they were misbehaving third graders. He is a very short, bald, finicky-looking man with a red beard. He puts his hands on his hips.

“Quiet, puhleeeze!” he says. Then he turns toward a man who is smoking a cigar. “An no cigar smoke in here,” he adds.

“You’re kidding?” says the man. “In a bar?”

“No cigar smoke in this bar!” says the red-bearded man. Just then one of the crew turns on the smoke machine. Smoke billows into the bar until visibility is zero. Bonnie fakes a few coughs and flaps her hands at the smoke.

“It’s never been this smoky in here,” she says.

“And we never had a fight in here·, either,” adds Jimalou.

The second assistant director, a woman, begins to wave her clipboard wildly in the smoke to get the extras’ attention. “Everyone, everyone, to their places, please!” she calls out. “Have we had everyone?”

(more…)

Gettin’ busy.

This man was so cool.

Jam it on the one.

[Painting by Clare Kuo]

It’s winter cold today for a change. Nothing would hit the spot better than a bowl of chicken soup.

[Photo Credit: Taste with the Eyes]

The Yankees made two low-profile roster moves last week, but both were good transactions. First, they signed ex-Red Sock Hideki Okajima to a non-guaranteed contract, giving him a chance to make the team with a good spring training performance. Then the Yankees re-signed Andruw Jones, their most effective bench player in 2011.

At one time, Okajima was one of the American League’s most effective left-handed pitchers. He was also one of the most fun to watch, given the way that his head bobbed toward third base, a particularly distracting trait for many hitters. Okajima spent most of last year at Triple-A Pawtucket, but is only two years removed from being a key member of the Red Sox’ bullpen. For his career, he has held left-handed batters to a .217 batting average and a .277 on-base percentage. He also has no fear of American League East pennant races, having done regular battles against the Yankees and the Rays over the span of three summers.

With a good spring, Okajima could beat out Boone Logan, who was wildly inconsistent against lefty batters in 2011. Or there’s a possibility that the Yankees could carry Okajima as a second southpaw reliever. As it is, the Yankee staff is far too right-handed, with CC Sabathia providing the only certainty from the left side. Another left-hander, provided that he is effective, would be a nice bonus for Girardi to call on in sixth and seventh inning situations.

Now on to Jones, a familiar face from 2011. He did quietly good work in a supporting role last season. After a so-so first half, Jones finished up the season on a strong note, establishing himself as a right-handed hammer. In 146 plate appearances against left-handers, Jones reached base 38 per cent of the time and slugged to the tune of .540. Those are Marcus Thames numbers. Jones is an ideal fourth outfielder who can handle either corner position, and can also play center field in the event that both Curtis Granderson and Brett Gardner go down. If anything, I’d like to see Jones play more in 2012. Whenever the Yankees see a left-hander, Joe Girardi should find a place for Jones in the lineup, whether it’s in left field, right field, or as the DH…

***

We are one week away from the Hall of Fame vote being conducted by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. The ballot contains five names that I personally regard as Hall of Famers, but only one man is likely to emerge with the 75 per cent vote needed for election.

Here are the four players likely to receive the most support in next week’s election:

Barry Larkin:

Of all the players, he has the best chance to win election from the Baseball Writers. He received 62 per cent of the vote last year and would need a jump of 13 per cent, which is not without precedent. Like George Brett, Larkin’s frequent injuries were a factor against him, but not enough to dethrone him as the best all-round shortstop of the 1990s. His power (198 home runs) and his basestealing numbers (379 steals, only 77 caught stealing) really jump out, especially coming from a shortstop. I remember him as a very good player, but the numbers show him to be a great one. Prediction: He’ll receive 78 per cent of the vote and join Ron Santo in the Class of 2012.

Jack Morris:

After Larkin, he has the most favorable odds of earning the required 75 per cent. He received 51 per cent last year, so he will need a huge jump in the balloting. His supporters point to him as the best starting pitcher of the 1980s and cite his standout work in the 1991 postseason. His detractors emphasize his 3.90 career ERA, which would rank the highest of any pitcher in the Hall of Fame. Prediction: He’ll receive about 64 per cent support, well short of election.

Jeff Bagwell:

His lack of voting support in 2011 (41 per cent) was astounding. Rumors of steroid use may have been a factor, but Bagwell never failed a drug test and was not mentioned in the Mitchell Report. MLB Network analyst Peter Gammons, whose opinion I respect greatly, recently rated Bagwell as the fourth best first basemen in history, behind only Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, and Albert Pujols. That’s good enough for me, but it doesn’t appear that it will be good enough for the voters. Prediction: He’ll receive just over 50 per cent support.

Tim Raines:

Like Bagwell, his lack of support from the writers has been astonishing. He’s the second best leadoff man of all-time, behind only Rickey Henderson, a supposition that should indicate his worth for the Hall of Fame. And as a bonus, he earned a couple of World Series rings as a part-time player with the Yankees, where he filled in as a left fielder, DH, and clubhouse leader. Prediction: He’ll jump from 37 to 41 per cent, leaving him alarmingly short of election. The lack of support makes little sense to me; he’s a far stronger candidate than Jack Morris, among others.

***

There are celebrities among baseball writers, people like Bill James and Rob Neyer and Bill Madden. And then there are footsoldiers, people who do the research and leave the glory of the written word to other people. Greg Spira was one of those people.

Greg was regarded as one of the best researchers and editors in the baseball world. He wrote occasionally, but it was research and large research projects that really drove him. He did a lot of work related to the Mets, frequently collaborating with a friend of mine, Matt Silverman. They worked on many projects together, trying to come up with stories and statistics that people would be interested in reading and hearing. Greg also served as the editor of ESPN’s Baseball Encyclopedia, a book that was a particular source of pride for him.

There was pride, but little ego. Some of Greg’s friends tried to get him to write more often, but I don’t think he had the ego for that. He just wanted to do the research, and make it available for other people to study, and enjoy.

Greg Spira died last week at the age of 44. He had a difficult history of health problems, dating all the way back to the 1990s. His kidneys and his heart finally gave out on him, even though his mind had plenty of baseball left in it.

I don’t know why we keep losing these writers and researchers at young ages. There was Doug Pappas of Baseball Prospectus, John Brattain of The Hardball Times, and, of course, the beloved Todd Drew of Bronx Banter. I guess that all I can make of it is this: we must do what we can each day, not knowing exactly what might happen next.

Keep researching. Keep writing. Keep loving the game. Do it every day until it’s time to stop.

2012, Day One gives big NFL action. Gives hanging with the one(s) you love, perhaps nursing a hangover. Gives the need for good food and just coolin’ out. And, of course, gives good tunes.

1-10 Happy New Year To You

Happy New Year.

[Photo Credit: Rona Keller]

It was a fine year, 2011. Here’s wishing you and yours a Happy New Year.

See you on the other side. You know how we do.

Groove.

[Photo Credit: Eye of the Beholder]

[Picture by Tatsuro Kiuchi]

From the Serious Eats 10 Best Bites in NYC, 2011 gallery, comes this incredible-looking fat fuckness: Cookies and Cream Sundae at Dessert Club Chakalicious.

Matt Blankman sent over the following excerpt from Greil Marcus’s new book on the Doors:

“In the mid-sixties, when the Doors began, when ‘Mystery Train’ first entered their repertoire, Elvis Presley was a joke. The shocking black leather blues he conjured on national television for his 1968 Christmas special was unimaginable after years of movie travelogues, of hula hoops and shrimp, of a world where a racetrack was just another beach–where, as Elvis himself once put it, he had to beat up guys before he sang to them. But in 1968, when Elvis sang ‘One Night’ — after climbing mountains and fording rivers all across the frontiers of ‘Tryin’ To Get To You,’ going back again and again to Jimmy Reed’s ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’ as if it were a talisman of a treasure he couldn’t name, each time deepening it, dropping words in search of a rhythm the song didn’t even know it wanted and now couldn’t live without — what returned was the sense of awe, of disbelief, that greeted him when he first made himself known.”

[Illustration by Larry Roibal]

I have not watched “Portlandia” and am not familiar with the music of Sleater-Kinney but I thought this profile of Carrie Brownstein by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker was excellent:

Brownstein doesn’t see the contradictions in her work that other people do. Her sexy, roiling presence onstage is one side of her, her wry social portraits on “Portlandia” represent another side, and neither has much in common with her modest, cerebral, nonperforming self. Brownstein said that when playing rock music she’s always conscious that she’s performing; she remains fully in control, no matter how chaotic it looks. “Onstage, I can stop on a dime,” she said. Lately, the “Portlandia” characters had “been seeming more akin to who I really am,” she added. “Or maybe it’s just a safer place for me to go. With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I’m able to go with ‘Portlandia’ has a wider range, but also a brighter range.” Ideally, she’d like to keep her music side and her comedy side separate; she doesn’t really want people to be thinking about her onscreen goofiness when she’s tearing it up with Wild Flag.

Touring with the band kept her away from Portland for most of October and November. But she went home for Thanksgiving, to see her dogs, to take long walks in the mossy, gray-green woods, and to see [Fred] Armisen, who flew in from New York, where he’d been filming “Saturday Night Live.” I e-mailed Brownstein to ask how her holiday had gone. She recalled stopping at a dog park with Armisen. Because it was the real Portland, “the weather was horrible—rainy, windy, cold.” She wrote, “I told Fred he could stay in the car. But he insisted on joining me out on the wet, muddy grass, tolerating not only the elements but a typical dog-park lady who overshared about her pair of jacket-clad whippets. When I saw Fred bundled up in his parka, wearing his brand-new R.E.I. hiking boots, I felt so happy and lucky; there are very few people for whom Fred—a classic New Yorker, not a nature guy at all—would brave the outdoors.

“The dinner itself was spent with the Goldfarbs, a family I’ve sort of adopted as my own; I spend all my holidays at their house. In the decade that I’ve known them, even when I’ve been dating someone, I never bring anyone over. I prefer to keep things separate; perhaps I’m bad at sharing the scant amount of family that I do have, or fearful of giving someone a glimpse of the few people who really know me. But Fred is someone whom I deeply trust, he’s already an extension of what I’d call family.

“We drove home late and I dropped him off at his hotel. Sometimes I get confused and think, Are we supposed to kiss goodnight? But, the truth is, I don’t want us to kiss, I want us to teach each other how good it can be to stick around.”

[Photo Credit:  Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times ]

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life (1951 and 1953)

I sure do love me some cucumbers.

[Photo Credit: frOzenpizza]

Here is a column that our friend John Schulian wrote about Joseph Mitchell for MSNBC back in 2001. Enjoy.

By John Schulian

Not a holiday season arrives that I don’t think of a gray, clammy day long ago on Baltimore’s waterfront and a lost soul who told me about the woman who had given him his only gift in years: a Christmas card. It was just the sort of story I was looking for when I was making my bones as a newspaper reporter, and now that I have a better understanding of the forces that drove me, I imagine it was a story that Joseph Mitchell would have gravitated to himself. If you don’t know who Mitchell is, or even if you do, the following is my gift to you.

In a perfect world, of course, I’d put fancy paper, ribbon and a bow on “My Ears Are Bent,” a collection of his newspaper features from the 1930s that came back into print this year after a criminally long time as a used-book store treasure. Devotees spent years searching for it in the past because, frankly, Mitchell was worth the trouble -– one of the 20th Century’s most remarkable journalists without being a scandal-breaking Washington muckraker or a dashing, trench-coated foreign correspondent. His specialty was chronicling New York’s human exotica: pickpockets and wrestling impresarios, tinhorn evangelists and burlesque queens, counterfeit royalty and watermen who bragged of sitting down with a friend to eat a barrel of oysters on the half-shell after dinner. And hold the sauce.

Every once in a while, Mitchell would slip and interview a celebrity–the lusty Jimmy Durante, for example, or the memorably rude George Bernard Shaw. But he seems to have always atoned by finding a character like the hooker who explained her calling thus: “I just wanted to be accommodating.”

Mitchell’s greatest affection may have been reserved for saloonkeepers and their well-oiled customers, which leads me to believe he would have liked the characters I chanced upon shortly before Christmas 1973. I never learned the most important one’s name; to me, he was simply The Flier because he claimed to have flown jet fighters in the Korean War. If The Flier had anything resembling a benefactor, it was Uncle Pete Drymala, who ran a bar called Pete’s Hotel. And then there was the girl who had given The Flier his Christmas card the year before. He had to pull the card out of his pocket so he could tell me her name. Francesca–that was it.

The Flier, Uncle Pete and Francesca dwelled by the docks in an area called Fells Point, which had been spared from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 and from being plowed under when I-95 was built. Its reward for surviving, if a reward is what it is, now includes gentrified rowhouses and dives turned into bistros where, according to one review, the cell-phone generation can enjoy “honey-colored beer, steamed shrimp and sushi.” But all that has come to pass since The Flier wandered its cobblestone streets.

Back then, Fells Point was blissfully down at the heels, crawling with merchant seamen who figured no night was complete unless they got drunk, got in a fight, and got lucky with a local sweetheart. The Flier fit in perfectly, drinking white port wine that he bought for $1.25 a fifth, tax included, and pausing only to sleep in boarded-up buildings or to warm himself by the radiator in Pete’s Hotel. He drank at Pete’s, too, and when he got out of hand, Uncle Pete would 86 him, even at Christmastime.

There was an Edward Hopper quality about The Flier’s existence, and I see the same thing when I read Joseph Mitchell. The bleak, the stark and the unforgiving become somehow beautiful because they are in the right hands.

Story after story in “My Ears Are Bent” vibrates with Mitchell’s sense of wonder, for he was a young man out of North Carolina when he wrote them for two New York dailies, the Herald Tribune and the World Telegram. Soon after his anthology was originally published in 1938, he hired on at The New Yorker, where he remained until he died 58 years later, by then a seminal figure in literary journalism. The mature Mitchell’s grandest achievements can be found in a collection called “Up in the Old Hotel,” but as artful and profound as those pieces are, they can’t match the urgency and delight of his newspaper reportage.

At the dawn of his career, I imagine he felt the same way I did when I was breaking in at the Baltimore Evening Sun. My reporter’s notebook was a ticket to the kind of adventures most people with college degrees don’t have. I got tear-gassed by state troopers breaking up an anti-war protest. I heard a mother’s anguished cries after a shantytown fire at five in the morning. I latched onto pool hustlers who spun yarns about fleecing bus drivers and tobacco farmers. And I went looking for Francesca after The Flier showed me that Christmas card.

My search led me to Pete’s Hotel, and to Uncle Pete, who cashed the meager check the government sent The Flier every month, then watched out the front window as the inevitable happened. Sometimes The Flier drank up his money, other times his fellow stew bums stole it. Uncle Pete told him not to put all the money in the same pocket, but The Flier never listened.

It was hardly a scenario to generate Christmas spirit. Uncle Pete, however, wasn’t opposed to proving one of Mitchell’s pet theories: “…the saloonkeeper is apt to know the address or hangout of any citizen dopey enough or unlucky enough to be of interest to a great metropolitan newspaper.” He pointed at a woman sitting at the bar with three beer glasses in front of her, one full, one half-empty, one dead. It was Francesca.

She had made 30 the hard way, living on unemployment when she wasn’t stripping, but there was still a soft spot in her heart, and it was The Flier who found it. “I get mad at him when he sits out there and drinks all that lousy wine,” she told me. “But that don’t keep him from being a good person. He’s always been a good person, and he don’t bother nobody. That’s why I gave him the card. I gave it to him out of my heart.”

The sentiment was perfect for the season, and there was no diminishing it even when Francesca killed her second beer with a deep swallow and a belch. My head spun with the possibility of reuniting her with The Flier. The idea was so melodramatic it would have sent Mitchell running, but I clung to it until I realized The Flier had wandered off to a place that defied finding. It was just as well. He and Francesca had connected long before I stumbled into their lives, and the memory would get them both through another Christmas.

You can buy “My Ears are Bent” here. And here is an excerpt. Finally, here’s a review of “Up at the Old Hotel” by Schulian for the L.A. Times.

[Illustration by Nick Sung]

[Photo Credit: Vivian Maier]