My father came from a bookish family. Everyone had a substantial library. And though he was well-versed in the classics, I never considered the Old Man an intellectual in the Ivory Tower sense. More than anything, he was a voracious reader of detective stories and mysteries. I recall shelves of paperbacks, stocked with names like Dick Francis, Ed McBain, Ruth Rendell and John McDonald. One of his favorites was the Spencer series by Robert B. Parker.

I’ve never read any of these books but I feel a second-hand affinity for them–and I always appreciated their pulpy, sometimes racy covers. Reason I mention it is because Parker passed away a few days ago. He was 77.

According to the Times obit:

Mr. Parker wrote the Spenser novels in the first person, employing the blunt, masculine prose style that is often described as Hemingwayesque. But his writing also seems self-aware, even tongue-in-cheek, as though he recognized how well worn such a path was. And his dialogue was especially arch, giving Spenser an air of someone who takes very few things seriously and raises an eyebrow at everything else. Mr. Parker’s regular readers became familiar with the things that provoke Spenser’s suspicion: showy glamour, ostentatious wealth, self-aggrandizement, fern bars, fancy sports clubs and any kind of haughtiness or presumption.

Spenser is, in other words, what Marlowe might have been in a more modern world (and living in Boston rather than Los Angeles). Unsurprisingly, Mr. Parker considered Chandler one of the great American writers of the 20th century. (He audaciously finished an incomplete Chandler manuscript, “Poodle Springs”). And he has been often cited by critics and other mystery writers as the guy who sprung the Chandleresque detective free from the age of noir.

“I read Parker’s Spenser series in college,” the best-selling writer Harlan Coben said in a 2007 interview with The Atlantic Monthly. “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”

Ed Alstrom, who plays the organ at Yankee Stadium, has a new cd out: Gettin’ Organ*ized.

Check it out.

So, why not make this a musical week of originals and covers?

Cover:

When I was in college, black kids used to wear t-shirts that read, “It’s a Black Thing. You Wouldn’t Understand.” My twin sister Sam and I wanted to get our own shirts made, “It’s a Twin Thing. You Wouldn’t Understand.”

It’s hard to figure a Twin unless you are one. Just ask Ron Gardenhire, manager of the Minnesota Twins, who, according to this piece by Landon Evanson in the Winona Daily News, thinks his team is not far behind the big, bad New York Yankees:

Some would suggest that the Yankees “own” the Twins, but the manager doesn’t buy into that.

“They don’t own me,” Gardenhire said. “Every game that we’ve played against them has just been nip-and-tuck.”

…”We’ve had our chances,” Gardenhire said. “We could have beat them as is, but next year we’re not taking any more off them. And if it takes fighting them, we’re fighting them.”

I sure would like to see the Twins sign Joe Mauer to a long-term deal. That’d be a good start, no?

When I was growing up and one of my mother’s relatives from Belgium came to visit, I would go to the room they were staying in and smell their luggage. The contents of their bags–their clothes and toiletries, perfumes and chocolates–reeked of Belgium and jumped-started a rush of memories. I payed less attention to the smells of my grandparent’s apartment in Manhattan because I was there so often.

As a kid, I visited Belgium a half-a-dozen times and since I only spoke broken French and my relatives spoke broken English, language became less important than communicating–which we did, in part, through exaggerating body language. The rest of my senses were heightened, especially my sense of taste and smell.

I got to thinking about this while reading an interesting piece in this week’s New Yorker (which is not available on-line), about smell-memory. It is called “The Dime Store Floor,” by David Owen: 

A few years ago, an online store I’d been using ran out of my regular brand of deodorant, and, because I was unable to think of anything else, I switched to Old Spice, the kind my father used. The container had changed, from the sturdy ivory tube I’d often seen in his medicine cabinet to a bright-red elliptical cylinder, but the name and, to a smaller extent, the smell imparted a mild hum of remembrance, and I never switched back. Just recently, while travelling, I found that I’d left all my toiletries at home, and went to a local drug store to buy replacements. There I saw that Old Spice deodorant comes in more strengths, forumlations, and scents that I had thought, and realized the one I’d been using–High Endurance Pure Sport–couldn’t have been my father’s. I bought, this time, Classic Original Scent (the container of which was imprinted with a small picture of the old ivory tube and the promise “Original Round Stick Formula”). And when I sued it for the first time, in my hotel room, I was almost knocked over by what I can only describe as a physical memory of my father. It was the smell of him driving me to school, and of him bending over to pull tight and tied the cord in the hood of my snow jacket, and of him fixing himself a drink in the pantry while he and my mother were waiting for dinner guests to arrive. So now the question is whether to stay with Classic Original Scent, thereby causing my brain to gradually overwrite my collection of father-related fragrance files, eventually making them irretrievable, or to set it aside and use it only on special occasions.

Dig the Difference.

Original (The quality of this recording is weak, but you get the vibe…check out the acapella too.):

Cover:

According to an ESPN report, it looks like Felix Hernandez will be pitching for the Mariners for a minute. Very cool. I hope the Twins sign Joe Mauer to an extension too.

Over at Lo-Hud, the intrepid Pete Abraham has been replaced by the intrepid Chad Jennings.

Here is the latest Yankee tidbit.

I saw my neighbor on the street the other day. He had to shield his eyes to recognize me from up the block. I hadn’t seen him since the holidays. He is a college professor. His teeneage daughter has looked after our cats on occasion when we’re away. And his wife is dying of ALS. She has kept her humor and from what my wife and I have seen, has not displayed any self-pity. Her husband told me she never feels sorry for herself, which is something so remarkable that I can’t exactly get my head around it.

My wife and I have helped them in small ways–cooking a meal, navigating medical insurance claims. But I remember seeing the husband last fall and he looked ready to come undone the stress was so great.

The other day, I asked about his wife and he said that she only has three or four months left to live. “You come to peace with it, you know, life doesn’t stop” he said, adding that he just hopes that she is alive long enough for their daughter’s sweet sixteen this spring. The daughter has poise and has been asked to grow up fast. He worries about her.

I hope his wish comes true. They deserve it.

In memory of Martin Luther King…

We’re gunna miss the first game on the count of this:

Back for the Jets.

Happy Sunday.

Eat up.

NFL Football. Grrrrr.

Sunny day in New York. Not too cold. Nice.

Everybody loves the sun in Mr. Bonnard’s world.

Fred Shapiro has a fun piece in the New York Times magazine about movie misquotes:

Why do we so frequently get the lines wrong?

One phenomenon at work, as in the cases above, is compression. Even Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations falls prey to this type of error. It cites “Apocalypse Now”: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.” What Robert Duvall really says is: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ . . . body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like victory.”

If you want to play the dozens well the dozens is a game, but the way I f*** your mother is a goddamned shame.

–George Carlin

We lost Todd Drew on this day one year ago.

Here is his penultimate post.

We miss you Todd, as a Banterer, as a writer and as a good soul.

I find it nearly impossible to believe that 20 years have passed since the Yankees put arguably the worst team in franchise history on the playing field. Unfortunately, I remember that team all too well. The 1990 Yankees won a mere 67 games, finishing 21 games out of first place in the American League East. Not only did they end up dead last in the seven-team division, but they checked in last among all American League teams. And the Yankees deserved every bit of that futile finish. The Yankees’ offensive capacity, with a past-his-prime Jesse Barfield representing the most reliable power threat, was putrid—last in the league in runs scored. Their pitching, led by staff “ace” Tim Leary, his 4.14 ERA and 19 losses, proved almost as impoverished.

Injuries made a bad team more horrid. Free-swinging left-handed power hitters Mel Hall and Matt Nokes, who would have been complementary players on a good team, looked like baseball royalty on the 1990 Yankees, but each spent significant time on the disabled list. With Nokes hurt, the Yankees had to play Bob Geren, a career minor leaguer, the majority of the time behind the plate. Steve “Bye-Bye” Balboni, the regular DH, batted a cool .192. Two-thirds of the triumvirate of Luis Polonia, Eric Plunk, and Greg Cadaret—extracted from the A’s as part of the previous summer’s Rickey Henderson deal—failed to deliver as hoped. Polonia was traded after only 11 games, sent to the Angels for Claudell Washington, 35 years old and over the hill. Only Plunk performed capably, but even that came in the role of middle relief, often a moot point because of the Yankees’ poor starting pitching.

Amidst the wreckage of a lost summer, Yankee fans found some hope in the middle of the season. It arrived in late June with the call-up of Kevin Maas, a young left-handed slugger that few fans had known much about at the start of the season. Almost from the start, Maas showed himself to be a cut above pseudo-prospects like Jim “The King” Leyritz and Oscar Azocar, who were falsely hyped as part of the Yankees’ new wave youth movement. (Leyritz became a good bench player, but hardly a building block for a team in need of mass renovation.) Although Maas had little defensive value as a lumbering first baseman-outfielder, it was plainly evident that he could hit. Unlike Leyritz and Azocar, Maas possessed a keen and discernible eye at the plate; he rarely ventured out of the strike zone to swing at stray pitches. He also possessed a picturesque swing, which seemed to be cut out of the pages of a hitter’s manual. With a little bit of an uppercut and a tendency to pull pitches to right, Maas looked like he was sent directly from heaven to Yankee Stadium.

Maas also looked chiseled in appearance, with his lantern jaw and muscular but lean physique. Maas became all the rage at Yankee Stadium, prompting some women fans to remove their “Maas tops” and wave them after he hit another home run into the right field stands. (The ladies were eventually barred from entering the Stadium.) Statistically, Maas’ numbers supported the superficialities of his appearance and swing. In 254 at-bats with the Yankees, Maas hit 21 home runs, slugged .535, and reached base 36 per cent of the time. Only his batting average of .252 carried any kind of blemish, but that became far more tolerable in light of his wholly impressive slugging and on-base numbers.

Given his second-half rookie performance, I felt the Yankees had found a keeper in Maas. It looked like he would perennially top 30 home runs and 80 walks in a season, making him a legitimate left-handed slugger, a younger model of Ken Phelps. Perhaps he wouldn’t be good enough to bat cleanup, but his hitting talents had him pegged to bat fifth or sixth, at the least, with ample production to justify such an important place in the lineup.

(more…)

I went to see Avatar last night in 3-D IMAX because, well, when in Rome, right? It is a spectacle, a true epic in the tradition of Griffith and DeMille. The story is forgettable, the dialogue and acting border on camp it is so leaden (I laughed a lot at the corny lines), but who cares when you are witness to such a gluttony of wonderment? The movie feels fully-realized, as if James Cameron got exactly what he was looking for, and it is some accomplishment, in many ways remarkable. But I have to admit, after an hour, I got bored, and found the assault on the senses, tedious. There is so much to absorb, I became numb. Avatar is something to see, but I’m glad I don’t have to see it again.

The 3-D didn’t make me motion-sick, but it still took me a while to get used to the glasses. When it was over, I felt woozy, even ten minutes later when I got on the uptown IRT. Reading will settle me down, I thought, so I pulled out a splashy GQ story on former Colts wide reciever, Marvin Harrison. At first, the words hurt to look at, but I adjusted quickly enough.  The story comes out guns-ablazing. It is so full of adreneline that it picked-up where Avatar left off.

The writer, Jason Fagone, has done some crack reporting but he’s so infatuated with his angle that he muscles-up the prose and steamrolls the reader. It is like an Oliver Stone production, pounding away with self-importance:

Robert Nixon’s jeans are scuffed. His hands are folded in his lap. His glasses give him a sort of professorial, beatnik vibe—a pudgier version of Cornel West. He calls me “sir.” In fact, Nixon is deferential to the point of meekness until the moment I ask him about Pop’s murder. Does he think it was meant to send a message to any other potential witnesses? “Are you kidding?” Nixon says, startled. “Do you think it was a message?” Nixon shoots a look to his attorney, Wadud Ahmad, a powerfully built black man who is sitting in on our interview, and the two of them explode into howls of laughter, as if I just asked the dumbest question in the history of white people.

…Say this for Marvin Harrison: He tried to be his own person. He succeeded on a level that most of us can only dream of reaching. But he either never realized or flat-out denied the destabilizing effect of his presence in a poor and desperate part of the city. Much as he insisted that he was a normal working person like any other, he was never going to be seen that way. He was always going to be a target for the hopes, resentments, and ambitions of other people, a reality that rippled and swirled around him in unpredictable ways. And the proof is still there, scattered across the city, for anyone who cares enough to look.

The writer is aiming beyond The Best American Sports Writing–he’s writing for the Ages. Which is too bad because Fagone is talented, his reporting is crisp and he knows how to tell a story. But he undermines the narrative with his ambition and lack of restraint. It is as if he couldn’t help himself.

Hey, more is more, right?

This one is for the Old Man: