[Picture by Patricio Suarez]

Let’s get the Led out, shall we?

Ham and cheese, made to order for the wife. That’s three slices of black forest ham and six slices of jarlsberg cheese, red leaf lettuce (dressed with olive oil, champagne vinegar and maldon salt), dijon mustard and thinly-sliced cornichons on rye. That’s how she likes it, that’s how she gets it.

Hey…it’s good to be the queen.

Check out this great new site, Sportsfeat.com where vintage sports writing is celebrated. Dig this piece from Sport Magazine on Earl Monroe by the Wood Man:

I didn’t follow basketball until 1967. Baseball, boxing, and the theater provided most of my entertainment. The theater has since become boring and there are no plays approaching the pleasure given by a good sporting event. Even a game against a last-place team holds the possibility of thrills, whereas in the theater all seems relatively predictable. Baseball remains a joy for me, but basketball has emerged as the most beautiful of sports. In basketball, more than in virtually any other sport, personal style shines brightest. It allows for eccentric, individual play.

Give the basketball to such diverse talents as Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Walt Frazier, Rick Barry, George McGinnis, Dave Bing, or Bob McAdoo, to name a tiny fraction, and you get dramatically distinctive styles of dribbling, passing, shooting, and defensive play. There is great room in basketball for demonstrable physical artistry that often can be compared to serious dance.

So there I was in 1967 leafing through the sports section of a newspaper one day (I still read that section first) when I came across the name Earl Monroe. I had never heard of Monroe, knew nothing of his daily rookie brilliance nor ever heard of his astounding feats at Winston-Salem. I just liked the name, free-floating, three syllables, and euphonious to me. Earl Monroe. The name worked. (Years later, when I did a film called Sleeper, I named myself Miles Monroe. On me it was kind of a funny name.) I came across Monroe’s name again every few days as I glanced over the basketball box scores in a casual, disinterested way and noticed that he invariably led the scoring column.

The Good Reverend Welcomes Us to May…

Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep…Yeah!

Mmmmmornin’!

…like that rally that wasn’t there?

At least not on Friday night at the Stadium. Down 3-2 the Yanks had the bases loaded in the fifth–on a gift, really, as a near triple play for the Jays turned into bases juiced nobody out–Mark Teixeira popped out to short and then Alex Rodriguez grounded into a 6-4-3 double play. In the eighth, Yanks down 5-3, they had the bases full again, but Derek Jeter whiffed–on a pitch out of the strike zone–and Nick Swisher tapped a harmless ground ball to first.

Freddy Garcia labored through five and David Robertson had a tough inning in the sixth; he gave up two runs and made a critical error. Robinson Cano hit two line drive home runs, absolute seeds, like pow!

But the Yanks couldn’t get a rally going and lost 5-3.

Nertz.

Great Comic Book Covers Week, brought to you by 1979 Semi-Finalist concludes with…

Dig Jim Carrey and J Lo in the background…

Is it summer yet?

[Picture by Hugues Erre]

[Photo Credit: Jhalal Drut]

On the subway this morning…A shirty voice on the loud speaker. “Attention passengers. Please do not leave…Your Arm…Your Leg…or…Your Bag…in the door. Step all-the-way into the car so we don’t delay the train behind us.”

And then, as cold as ice: “Thank You and Have a Nice Day.”

Ah, some good, old fashioned New York irritation to greet the day.

[Picture by Edi Weitz]

Great Comic Covers Week continues…

Word to 1979 Semi-Finalist.

I love to talk but when it comes to writing I have learned that you can talk too much. You can talk a story out before you’ve finished–or started–writing. Some talking is good because it helps formulate your thinking but I’ve discovered that it can go too far.

Talking comes naturally. When I was younger I talked because I was anxious, talked because silence was terrifying. But talking also runs in the family. My twin sister loves to talk. My old man was a champion talker. He loved the sound of his own voice. He talked instead of working. (Maybe that is why I am attracted to but mostly repulsed by Fran Lebovitz.) On the other hand, my mother walked the walk; she was pragmatic, a worker, not a dreamer.

I got to thinking about talking when I read this piece on James Agee by John Updike, a review of “Letters of James Agee to Father Flye”:

Alcohol—which appears in the first Harvard letters (“On the whole, an occasional alcoholic bender satisfies me fairly well”) and figures in almost every letter thereafter—was Agee’s faithful ally in his “enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction.” But I think his real vice, as a writer, was talk. “I seem, and regret it and hate myself for it, to be able to say many more things I want to in talking than in writing.” He describes his life at Harvard as “an average of 3.5 hours sleep per night; 2 or 3 meals per day. Rest of the time: work, or time spent with friends. About 3 nights a week I’ve talked all night. . . .” And near the end of his life, in Hollywood: “I’ve spent probably 30 or 50 evenings talking alone most of the night with Chaplin, and he has talked very openly and intimately.” And what are these letters but a flow of talk that nothing but total fatigue could staunch? “The trouble is, of course, that I’d like to write you a pretty indefinitely long letter, and talk about everything under the sun we would talk about, if we could see each other. And we’d probably talk five or six hundred pages…”

He simply preferred conversation to composition. The private game of translating life into language, or fitting words to things, did not sufficiently fascinate him. His eloquence naturally dispersed itself in spurts of interest and jets of opinion. In these letters, the extended, “serious” projects he wishes he could get to—narrative poems in an “amphibious style,” “impressionistic” histories of the United States, an intricately parodic life of Jesus, a symphony of interchangeable slang, a novel on the atom bomb—have about them the grandiose, gassy quality of talk. They are the kind of books, rife with Great Ideas, that a Time reviewer would judge “important.” The poignant fact about Agee is that he was not badly suited to working for Henry Luce.

Anyone ever try comeback sauce? I have not. Looks like thousand island dressing to me but hear that it’s special. What gives?

Yes, please.

[Photo Credit: Photocurious]

The PBS documentary “An American Family” is the subject of a new HBO movie.

Here is the original series (thanks to Matt B for the link).

I’ve always found it fascinating that women–who examine each other from head-to-toe without mercy–are also comfortable saying, “Oh, she’s gorgeous.” They can appreciate their beauty without shame. But it’s rare to hear men say, “Damn, that guy is a stud, what beautiful lips.” Unless of course it’s done with a wink and a nudge and one-liner. It’s not that you’ll never hear men appreciating each other, but it’s not common and you certainly don’t see many straight men at ease with it. We’ll say, “That dude is ripped,” admiringly about an athlete but that’s usually as close as most guys get to overt appreciation of male beauty.

Which is funny because we spend a disproportionate amount of time oogling men’s bodies. There is an undercurrent of homoeroticism at play in our sports lust, which doesn’t necessarily mean that straight men are privately Gay. But let’s face it, athletes are sex symbols, or at least sex objects (which is why “Bull Durham” was so good; it wasn’t just a decent baseball movie, it was a funny sex comedy). And if our attraction to them isn’t literal in a sexual way, we are drawn to their confidence, to the beauty of their physical abilities.

So at the risk of making you dudes uncomfortable, here is some male eye candy for the ladies, and some men, to dig. From Bruce Weber, whose favorite subject was, of course: men.