They say I’m ugly but it just don’t faze me.
This one was suggested by Diane. I always smile when I hear this record, just never tire of it (from back when Tupac was one of the Underground’s back-up singers).
And dig this, a fun mash-up that a friend of mine did, mixing Lovely Rita with the Humpty Beat.
Powzers.
Was Tim Raines a greater player than Roberto Clemente? Yes, according to Joe Posnanski who makes a case for Raines as a Hall of Famer.
The 1965 Juan Marichal-John Roseboro fight is the jumping point for a new one-man show by Roger Guenveur Smith, who received acclaim for his performance as Huey Newton several years ago. The play is reviewed today in the New York Times:
Mr. Smith does a kind of standup theater. (The show has no formal script.) It’s a high-wire act that frequently feels too free associative.
Mr. Smith can be a charming raconteur, smiling and chatting with the audience about the 1965 Dodgers team that included Maury Wills and Sandy Koufax. He can also have a full-tilt actorly intensity (so many tears!) that sometimes overwhelms the material, especially the personal reminiscences.
The bigger problem, though, is that Mr. Smith, who also directed, hasn’t been a ruthless enough editor. He mixes the resonant and the germane (Watts, his father’s business, being black in the ’60s) with bits that don’t quite fit (his recent personal history), and can overreach when trying to connect things. (The projections, by Marc Anthony Thompson, at times suffer from the same problem.)
But when Mr. Smith returns to Roseboro and Marichal, “Juan and John” picks up. Easily inhabiting each man, Mr. Smith shows what a good actor he can be and reminds us what a good story he has to tell. The two eventually patched things up, and when Marichal, who had been kept out of the Hall of Fame because of the incident, calls Roseboro to tell him that he’s finally made it in, Mr. Smith’s tears hit home.
The concept is interesting enough, but this sounds just like the kind of theater experience that reminds me why I generally don’t cotton to one-man performances–just too much self-indulgence for me. I could be wrong, who knows? If anyone sees the show, drop me an e-mail and let me know what you think.
From A.O. Scott’s review of the new Jeff Bridges movie:
“Crazy Heart,” written and directed by Scott Cooper, is a small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center. It offers some picturesque views of out-of-the-way parts of the American West, but the dominant feature of its landscape is Bad Blake, a wayward, aging country singer played by Jeff Bridges.
Those last four words should be sufficient recommendation. Some of Mr. Bridges’s peers may have burned more intensely in their prime, but very few American actors over the past 35 years have flickered and smoldered with such craft and resilience. Neither blandly likable nor operatically emotional, this actor has a sly kind of charisma and a casual intelligence. You suspect that he may be smarter than some of the characters he plays — the lounge musician in “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” the deadbeat bowler in “The Big Lebowski,” the egotistical author in “The Door in the Floor,” to take just a few examples — but also that he knows every corner and shadow of each one’s mind.
Well said. This one looks worth checking out.
Marty Appel hipped me to this boss collection of Italian-American baseball cards.
Yogi
Bye Bye Balboni
The Barber
Don Mossi
Johnny Damon wants more than the Yanks are willing to offer…
News at eleven.
Meanwhile, dig this Hideki Matsui appreciation from Sweeny “Eisenhower” Murti:
Matsui’s English was limited. He used a translator (the very able Rogelio “Roger” Kahlon) for all seven of his years as a Yankee. Still, Matsui was comfortable enough to have brief, cordial conversations (“Hi, Hideki…how are you? Fine, Sweeny…how are you?) That’s more than I get from some players who speak perfect English.
And even though it wasn’t always easy to break through the language barrier, Matsui had as fine a sense of humor as anyone. I recall the day in 2004 when I asked his opinion of the rookie-hazing costumes. At that moment, Ruben Sierra walked by both of us wearing one of his typically loud suits complete with fedora, which prompted Matsui to turn to me and ask, “Is he rookie?” As I started to howl with laughter Matsui followed up with, “Every day he’s rookie!”
As far as we know the Yanks are waiting it out with Johnny Damon. But could they be sitting on the dock of a Bay too? Or waiting for a boffo Holliday gift?
One never knows…do one?
I said How’d you like the show? She said, I was very amused.
Over at SI.com, Cliff takes a look at the Lackey signing:
The Red Sox rotation behind Jon Lester and Josh Beckett struggled mightily in 2009. In the 98 games not started by Lester or Beckett this past season, Red Sox starters went 36-36 with a 5.40 ERA, and 1.57 WHIP. With Clay Buchholz having emerged as a legitimate mid-rotation starter in August and Daisuke Matsuzaka having made a strong comeback in mid-September, the Red Sox already had hope for improvement in their rotation heading into 2010, but the addition of Lackey, easily the best starting pitcher in a weak free agent market, ramps that improvement up from modest to drastic. That Lackey might be only the third-best starter in the Red Sox’s rotation is a testament to the depth and strength his signing gives Boston’s staff. Indeed, the Red Sox’s rotation suddenly looks like the best in baseball’s best division, at least for the moment.
Having posted a good-but-not great 3.79 ERA (118 ERA+) in just 339 2/3 innings over the past two seasons, the latter figure due to his starting both seasons on the disabled list with arm aches, including elbow inflammation this past spring, Lackey is more of a No. 2 starter than a proper ace, but that makes him particularly well cast as the No. 3 in Boston. Concerns about those DL stays linger, but Lackey returned in mid-May in both 2008 and 2009 and pitched into the playoffs without reoccurrence of his discomfort both years, throwing a cumulative 196 innings in 30 starts between the regular and postseasons in ’09. In the five seasons prior to 2008, he averaged 210 2/3 innings a year in the regular season alone, establishing a reputation as a horse that his early-season aches have yet to fully undermine. He also arrives in Boston as a strong postseason performer, having famously pitched and won Game 7 of the World Series as a rookie in 2002 and having bettered his career regular season ERA in his 12 postseason starts.
If I were writing copy for the Yankees, I would probably be contractually obligated to refer to the “Yankee legacy” of Chien-Ming Wang and Hideki Matsui, and even Brian Bruney. But I’m not, so instead, like Alex earlier, I’ll just wonder aloud about if, how, and for how long the various exiting Yanks will be remembered.
Wang and Matsui obviously won’t be forgotten anytime soon – both made huge contributions to the Bombers, and had fascinating cultural implications as well (I think each, in their way, helped affirm every New Yorker’s belief that the world does in fact revolve around us). It seems that technically Matsui didn’t quite earn his salary – but in a metaphoric sense, he definitely did. And Alex already touched on the fabled porn collection and the excellent at-bat music, but I also think of the time Matsui broke his wrist on a freakish sliding-catch-gone-wrong, back in 2006. He managed to throw the ball in before collapsing in pain with his wrist held at a gruesome angle, but no sooner was he back from the hospital than he apologized, profusely, to his teammates, the Yankees, and his fans. For having a broken wrist. Try to imagine any American player ever doing that. Hell, try to imagine Ichiro doing that. Yes, I will miss Matsui… and to a slightly lesser extent I will miss his translator, Roger Kahlon, who (now it can be said) is one good-looking dude.
I’m not sure how much to eulogize Chien-Ming Wang’s New York career – because, who knows? He may yet be back, if not next season then somewhere down the road. He’s still young enough that if his shoulder actually heals properly, he could pitch for years and years. That’s the optimistic view of course, but even if he’s never again a top-flight starter, Wang’s isn’t a truly sad story: he threw two-plus excellent Major League seasons, which is a lot more than most people get to do, and became a truly massive and beloved celebrity in his home country, which ditto. But still.
Anyway, it seems pretty clear to me that in ten, twenty, or thirty years Yankee blogs (or whatever has replaced them) will still mention Matsui and Wang from time to time, but I wonder about another suddenly ex-Yank, Brian Bruney. I wrote enough game summaries featuring the guy that I’m certain I’ll remember the name, barring any degenerative brain diseases, plus I spoke to him a few times during my brief tenure in the clubhouse. How often will I think about him, though, as the years go by? And what about the average fan? The Yankees were able to snatch Bruney from the Diamondbacks because Arizona felt he had some attitude problems, was the word on the street back in ’06, and whether or not he ever really overcame those I couldn’t say; he had a bit of a meathead look about him, but a sensitive streak too.
Bruney had good games and bad, but it’s hard for me to think of any really iconic moments – there’s not really a Bruney equivalent of Chien-Ming Wang’s virtuoso performance against the Mets at the Stadium, or Matsui’s playoff heroics and walk-off homers. Such is the nature of middle relief, I suppose. I can’t pretend to have any strong feelings about the guy, but I spent so many cumulative hours watching him pitch that maybe I should. Is there anything bittersweet about the fact that he will likely be greeted among baseball fans, upon reemerging from the swamps of memory, mostly with indifference?
What do you guys think – in 2039 or so, will there be any spring days when your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of Brian Bruney?
The New York Times reports that Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui has agreed to a one-year deal with the Angels. It was clear that Matsui was not in the plans for the Yankees moving forward and I understand the logic behind their thinking. Still, I will miss him. Which is why I’m pleased that I’m a fan and not an executive. I can appreciate them not re-signing him as a baseball move and still feel sad that “one of ours” has left town. (Matsui joins two other former Yanks, Bobby Abreu and Juan Rivera in the Angels line-up.)
Matsui wasn’t a great Yankee but he was better than good (a new age ‘Ol Reliable) who enjoyed some terrific big-game moments, none bigger than Game 6 of the Serious last month. The Red Sox surely won’t be sorry to see him go. I will miss his calm demeanor (has he ever argued with an umpire since he’s been in States?) and his slashing line-drives. Who’ll soon forget his batting stance? Matsui stood erect and still, his shoulders twitching slightly like a horse swatting away flies with its tail. He was not a physical giant like Alex Rodriguez, but he was a massive guy, the widest player, across the chest, I’ve ever seen.
I’ll even miss his failures, when he rolled over pitches and hit weak dribblers to second, prompting the nickname Groundzilla. I’ll miss his giant head and enormous ears, his sketchy wife and talk of his extensive porn collection. I’ll miss his smile, his joking with teammates, and the feeling that he has a sly sense of humor, not to mention his taste in warm-up songs–from Day Tripper to The Immigrant Song.
Matsui is an icon in Japan (just like Chien-Ming Wang is a national hero in Taiwan) who will be fondly remembered in New York where he became a hero. He’s not as big as Jeter or Rivera or Rodriguez, but a hero all the same–and he’s a far bigger star back home than any baseball player is here. Perhaps he’ll be even more appreciated in New York once he’s gone.
But most of us appreciated him just fine while he was here. In the coming days, I’m sure we’ll read the usual cliches about Matsui being a “classy, professional Yankee.” You know, the kind with “dignity” and “grit.” They might be cliches but if the shoe fits…
Here’s wishing him good luck and success in California.
Sniff.
According to Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, John Lackey took a physical in Boston today. Looks like Sox are about to announce their first big deal of the off-season.
Beckett, Lester, Lackey, oh my. That’s an onions top three. Never mind Wake, Clay and Dice K.
Update: Plus, a boffo Roy Halladay rumor.
And ESPN has Hideki Matsui in serious talks with the Angels.
Update: Never mind the Bollocks, Halladay may be a Phillie, according to Jon Heyman. But they lose Lee in the process.
Suddenly, things just got a lot more interesting…
The original version (1968) of “Suspicious Minds” by Mark James:
There is a nice piece on Johan Santana in the Times today.
I mentioned John Lahr yesterday. Bright guy and an interesting writer.
His first book was a biography of his father, Bert Lahr, Notes on a Cowardly Lion, which is excellent, one of the very best showbiz biographies.
His next book was a bio of the British playwright, Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears, another stellar book. Not a bad start, eh?
I read both books when I was in high school and have occasionally read Lahr’s criticism since, mostly on the theater. Can’t say he’s a favorite but I admire his work and will always stop to see what he’s got to say.
And he’s got a website.
Dig this 2005 Steve Buscemi profile:
Nothing about Buscemi’s physical presence suggests the poetic lineaments of masculine film glamour. He is pale, almost pallid-as if he’d been reared in a mushroom cellar. In a certain light, he can look cadaverous. His eyes are large and bulgy, with a hint of melancholy. When he smiles, his mouth displays a shantytown of uneven, uncapped teeth. And yet that unprepossessing ordinariness is what makes Buscemi captivating as a performer. It gives him the unmistakable stamp of the authentic, and it helps to explain his emergence over the past two decades as an icon of independent films. (Buscemi himself understands the value of his rumpled looks. When his dentist suggested fixing his teeth, he told her, “You’re going to kill my livelihood if you do that.”) “Steve is the little guy,” says the director Jim Jarmusch, who cast Buscemi in his 1989 film “Mystery Train.” “In the characters he plays and in his own life, he’s representing that part of us all that’s not on top of the world.”
…Onscreen or off, Buscemi is never ostentatious. Still, with his simplicity and restraint-an emotional as well as a physical minimalism-he manufactures a truthfulness that always surprises. At lunch, as he tentatively told the story of his working-class upbringing (his father was a sanitation worker, his mother a hostess at Howard Johnson’s), he cast an unexpected light on his own edgy inhibition. We were talking about the terror he’d felt at nineteen, when he first thought of moving from Long Island to Manhattan to try to be an actor. What held him back, he said, was “this feeling that you don’t deserve to be heard, that you don’t really have anything to say or a point of view that’s interesting, because you haven’t been properly educated. I was very intimidated, basically feeling culturally inferior.”
When Buscemi acts, his thinness and his slouch-which seem a product of that original shame-only heighten his odd presence, which is a topic of conversation in many of the seventy-eight movies he’s made since his first major role, in “Parting Glances,” in 1986. In Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Fargo” (1996), the other characters repeatedly make fun of Buscemi’s Carl Showalter, a dopey kidnapper turned killer. When Frances McDormand’s beady-eyed, homespun policewoman presses a hooker for a detailed description of Showalter, whom she has recently bedded, all the girl can say is “The little guy was kinda funny-lookin’ … He wasn’t circumcised…Funny-lookin’ more than most people, even.”
Who you callin’ funny-lookin’?
It is official. Chien-Ming Wang is a free agent.
Never did see this version, have you? Meanwhile, here is more on Cate Blanchett’s performance as Blanche DuBois from The New Yorker’s theater critic, John Lahr:
Blanche is the Everest of modern American drama, a peak of psychological complexity and emotional range, which many stars have attempted and few have conquered. Of the performances I’ve seen in recent years, Jessica Lange’s lacked theatrical amperage, Natasha Richardson’s was too buff, and Rachel Weisz’s, in this year’s overpraised Donmar Warehouse production in London, was too callow. The challenge for the actress taking on Blanche lies in fathoming her spiritual exhaustion, her paradoxical combination of backbone and collapse. Blanche has worn herself out, bearing her burden of guilt and grief, and facing down the world with a masquerade of Southern gaiety and grace. She is looking—as Williams himself was when he wrote the play—for “a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in.”
Blanchett, with her alert mind, her informed heart, and her lithe, patrician silhouette, gets it right from the first beat. “I’ve got to keep hold of myself,” Blanche says, her spirits sinking with disappointment at the threadbare squalor of the one-room apartment her sister shares with her working-class husband. “Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!—could do it justice! Out here I suppose is the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!” she drawls to Stella, flapping her long birdlike fingers in the direction of the window and the railroad tracks beyond. Blanchett doesn’t make the usual mistake of foreshadowing Blanche’s end at the play’s beginning; she allows Blanche a slow, fascinating decline. And she is compelling both as a brazen flirt and as an amusing bitch. When Stella explains that Stanley is Polish, for instance, Blanche replies, “They’re something like the Irish, aren’t they? Only not so—highbrow.” It’s part of Blanchett’s great accomplishment that she makes Blanche’s self-loathing as transparent and dramatic as her self-regard. She hits every rueful note of humor and regret in Williams’s dialogue. In one desperate scene, in which Blanche explains her sordid past to Stanley’s friend Mitch (Tim Richards), who has been disabused of his romantic interest in her, she takes a slug of Southern Comfort. “Southern Comfort!” she exclaims. “What is that, I wonder?” Dishevelled, sitting on the floor by the front door, she fesses up to Mitch. “Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers,” she says, in a voice fatigued by heartbreak. I don’t expect to see a better performance of this role in my lifetime.
Lahr is less enthralled with the rest of the production. Still, sounds like an experience, don’t it?
It appears as if Chien-Ming Wang’s Yankee career is over. Man, it just goes to show how fragile a career can be–a few years ago, Wang was the ace of the staff. Now, who knows what will become of him?
If he’s a goner, here’s wishing him the best of luck. He was an easy guy to root for.
