Things that go bump in the night…

Polanski’s “Repulsion.”

Jon Weisman on the sad–okay, infuriating–turn of events for the Dodgers:

I haven’t been at Dodger Stadium in the past week, and I’m also familiar with no-shows dotting Dodger Stadium in the best of times, but there have been too many reports to ignore from longtime Dodger watchers that things had really changed. I’ve been a passionate skeptic of fan boycotts, but even I have to concede that there was a statement being made here. More and more people just didn’t want any part of this.

The thing is, it hasn’t been an organized boycott, not on any widespread level. It’s been people on their own coming to the conclusion that life was too short to waste on a franchise in this condition.

This includes people like my father, who chose during the offseason not to renew my family’s season tickets for a 30th season. It also includes the people who typically would improvise their ticket purchases after the season was underway.

That’s not to say Dodger Stadium was or would be empty. Some still show up because they love the team through thick and decidedly thin. The game’s pull remains strong. I myself have been trying to figure out when to get my kids to their first game of 2011.

But things haven’t been this low at Dodger Stadium before, have they? I think back to 1992, the worst team in Los Angeles Dodger history playing against the backdrop of a city torn by riots, and there was not such bitterness over the state of ownership.

Yanks look to bounce back from a tough loss last night.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Robinson Cano 2B
Andruw Jones LF
Jorge Posada DH
Russell Martin C
Curtis Granderson CF

Alex Rodriguez returns to the line up; we keep rooting…

Let’s Go Score Truck!

[Painting by Heidi Malott]

Apricot tart from Orangette.

[Picture by Nicole Belle]

Just to show that we appreciate more than the female form round these parts, dig this beauty, none other than the great Baryshnikov.

Matt B says, “What if this music started up every time you got in your car?”

I was All-Schoolyard, tell her, Max.

“Sports to me is like music…It’s completely, aesthetically satisfying. There were times I would sit at a game with the old Knicks and think to myself in the fourth quarter, This is everything the theatre should be an isn’t. There’s an outcome that’s unpredictable. The audience is not ahead of the dramatist. The drama is ahead of the audience, and you don’t know exatly where it’s going. You’re personally involved with the players–they had herioc demensions, some of those players. It’s a pleasurable experience, though not intellectual–much like music. It enters you through a diferent opening, sort of…

You see, life consists of giving yourself these problems that can be dealt with, so you don’t have to face the problems that can’t be dealt with. It’s very meaningful to me, for instance, to see if the Knicks are going to get over some problem or another. These are matters you can get involved with, safely, and pleasurably, and the outcome doesn’t hurt you.”

Woody Allen to David Remnick, 1994

Well said, though I’m sure some fans would argue about not being hurt. Last night’s loss was a tough one, doesn’t matter that the Celtics should have mopped the floor with them. Carmelo Anthony was brilliant but Jared Jeffries will be the memory that doesn’t go away from this one. And that hurts, man.

R.I.P. Michael Sarrazin.

With Jane Fonda in Sydney Pollack’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

Alex Rodriguez is not in the line up tonight but we’ll still be cheering.

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Image from Winter Leaf.com]

Ah, Natalie…

Hipster Spidey…

[Drawing by Allison Smith as found via This Isn’t Happiness]

…as one of the best Jersey blogs (and beyond), our man Larry Roibal.

The Grilled Cheese Invitational? Are you kidding me? Bred-Butter-Cheese-Victory!

Saveur has the skinny–or the chubby, as it were. Oh, and some nifty recipes for grilled cheese.

Richard Sandomir talks to Clyde about…style.

It’s been an entire year since Guru died.

Salute.

Chris Jones on Jeff Bridges in the new issue of Esquire:

“If some crazy idea stays in my head for long enough, then there’s no fighting it,” he says. “I just say, Okay, let’s go. Let’s do this.”

Bridges was sixteen or seventeen years old when he learned to stop fighting it. He had acted a few times — his first tearful lines onscreen were spoken to his black-and-white father, Lloyd, on an episode of Sea Hunt — but he wasn’t sure that acting was what he wanted to do. He liked music better, experimenting with his brother Beau’s guitar, along with other objects and instruments. His family had a beach house back then, down in Malibu, and one night, as he and some friends were leaving, he saw that they had left a light on deep inside the house. He went back to turn it off and click: He was in blackness.

“Normally, we push away the things we’re scared of,” Bridges says. “But for some reason, that night, I decided to let that fear in. I decided that it was okay for me to be afraid of the dark.”

He imagined all those things that aren’t there in the light. And by the time his friends came back inside and snapped on the lights — he had remained inside the darkened house for so long — they found him curled up in a ball on the floor, trembling and bathed in tears and sweat. He had opened the door to fear, and fear had rushed in.

“And then there was a rose,” he says now, looking clear through the fog. A single rose, in a tiny vase, on a table. And he imagined that the rose hid the same things that the dark kept hidden, and he felt his heart start racing again. He was terrified of the rose, and that’s the exact moment when Jeff Bridges learned the secret that would unlock the rest of his life. That night, he learned that there was no such thing as acting. There was only imagination, and that long succession of dreams and nightmares we all harbor. And if only he continued to let everything in — if all of us decided to let everything in — those things would join our imaginations and carry us wherever we might want to go.

Anthony McCarron has a piece in the News today about the Yankees’ offense. Here’s a quote from general manager, Brian Cashman:

“Jeter is not hitting up to his ability, (Curtis) Granderson is not hitting for average and Gardner is struggling mightily. Those guys are our foot soldiers and since they are not firing, it makes us look one-dimensional. No biggie. We’re capable of running you down, hitting, hitting the ball over the fence.

“We have full capabilities. We just haven’t shown it yet.”

An innocuous quote. But what strikes  me is the term “foot soldiers.” We hear this kind of thing all the time in sports–so I don’t mean to pick on Cashman–where professional jocks are described as “warriors” who “do battle,” ready to “go to war.” Guys who play sports for a living, often guys who are paid handsomely and are in fact celebrities. These statements are made in an unthinking, self-absorbed manner and should not be taken literally. But still, they are words and words have power and at a time when our country is at war these military metaphors are gross and foolish.

Over at SI.com, here’s Will Carroll on Alex Rodriguez’s recent injury:

More speculation? Yes, the chatter got pretty loud when Rodriguez came out of Saturday’s game with what was described after the game as stiffness in his oblique/back. Was this a situation related to his history of hip issues? Simply put — no. This kind of vagueness is a result of the precision we normally see from MRIs not being available on manual testing. Rodriguez’s injury is in that overlap zone where it’s difficult to tell without more advanced tests exactly where the problem is. So why not do it? It’s unnecessary cost and time. The Yankees knew at that point that it was a day-to-day situation, using the experience of their long-time Athletic Trainers. The weather was a factor, I’m told, as the cold day in the Bronx contributed to the tightness. Rodriguez was held out of Sunday’s game, but feels he caught it before it got more serious. The Yankees will watch him closely, but I think knowing there was an off-day Monday tipped the decision to rest him.

[Photo Credit: Herve Bertrand]

Pauline Kael on Woody’s first trip into heaviosity, Interiors:

The people in Woody Allen’s Interiors are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman.

Interiors looks so much like a masterpiece, and has such a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life) that it’s easy to see why many regard it as a masterpiece: it’s deep on the surface. Interiors has moviemaking fever, all right, but in a screwed-up form — which is possibly what the movie is all about.

The movie is so unfunny it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s so unfunny that it’s funny, which is funny because the last thing it wants to be is funny.